Atoms can be more overweight than we thought, a team of scientists in the United States has discovered. They have sent atoms crashing into one another in a particle accelerator to create bloated ...

QUESTION: Is an atom really hard to break? ANSWER: Not really — we can slice them, dice them, or smash them. Let me explain a little about an atom first, and you will know what I mean. The center of ...

Physicists in Japan have blasted out the heaviest calcium nuclei ever seen—each containing the 20 protons needed to make the element, but with a huge number—40—of neutrons. That's twice as many ...

"The magic numbers are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126," said David Jenkins, a nuclear physicist at the University of York in the U.K. "If you take the lightest one — two protons and two neutrons — ...

All the elements in the Periodic Table are made from different atoms, and the structure of these atoms results in a gamut of phenomena from radioactive decay to nuclear power. When you purchase ...

Fundamental physics, as we've seen, finds itself in a difficult situation. Nothing unexpected has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. We have phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that are ...

A new study suggests that the positively charged particles may have an outsize influence on the properties of neutron stars and other neutron-rich objects. Neutron stars are the smallest, densest ...

Among atomic particles, the neutron seems the most aptly named: Unlike the positively charged proton or the negatively charged electron, neutrons have a charge of zero. But new experiments conducted ...