Two microscopic grains collide and produce a tiny spark. This phenomenon may have provided the energy to kick off life on ...

The Alpha Centauri star system is just 4.2465 light-years away – a relative hop, skip, and a jump in a galaxy 100,000 light-years across. Wouldn't it be great to visit? Not just with a fleet of puny ...

The Sun unleashes a torrent of charged particles. Some of them slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering breathtaking auroras in the night sky. But for equipment that’s orbiting our planet in outer ...

I peeked in on the house-sized particle detector known as STAR just after it took its last-ever snapshot of one of the most extreme types of fireball ever created. Inside, the conditions just after ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

Moon dust is sharp, corrosive, and potentially fatal. NASA’s new electric force field shield is designed to blast it away. Amy Fritz, a dust-mitigation researcher at Johnson Space Center, pours ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: It used to be thought that bizarre interactions between subatomic particles known as neutrinos could be explained by another type of neutrino. The ...

Every time two beams of particles collide inside an accelerator, the universe lets us in on a little secret. Sometimes it's a particle no one has ever seen. Other times, it's a fleeting glimpse of ...

As the name suggests, particle accelerators involve accelerating subatomic particles to incredibly high speeds and smashing them into tiny targets. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Dust storms have always swirled through parts of North America, but they are becoming more unexpected and destructive and landing in places unfamiliar with the danger, scientists warn. In May 2023, a ...

Sarah Lynch Baldwin is a deputy managing editor of CBSNews.com. She helps lead national and breaking news coverage and shapes editorial workflows. A massive wall of dust — called a haboob — hit the ...

Skies can turn from clear blue to pitch black as a haboob rolls in. Here’s how this wall of dust forms, and what health experts say is lurking within. A wall of dust, also known as a haboob, ...