Author : Emma Russell

Inside a cavernous hall at the Swiss-French border, the air hums with high voltage and possibility. From his perch on the wraparound observation deck, physicist Walter Wuensch surveys a multimillion-dollar array of accelerating cavities, klystrons, modulators, and pulse compressors—hardware being readied to drive a new generation of linear particle accelerators.......

Sometimes a visually compelling metaphor is all you need to get an otherwise complicated idea across. In the summer of 2001, a Tulane physics professor named John P. Perdew came up with a banger. He wanted to convey the hierarchy of computational complexity inherent in the behavior of electrons in......

One day soon, a doctor might prescribe a pill that doesn’t just deliver medicine but also reports back on what it finds inside you—and then takes actions based on its findings. Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it......

In 1930, a young physicist named Carl D. Anderson was tasked by his mentor with measuring the energies of cosmic rays—particles arriving at high speed from outer space. Anderson built an improved version of a cloud chamber, a device that visually records the trajectories of particles. In 1932, he saw......

Isolation dictates where we go to see into the far reaches of the universe. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the vast expanse of the Australian Outback—these are where astronomers and engineers have built the great observatories and radio telescopes of modern times. The......

In 2018, Justin Kropp was restoring a fire-damaged transmission circuit in Southern California when disaster struck. Grid operators had earlier shut down the 115-kilovolt circuit, but six high-voltage lines that shared the corridor were still operating, and some of their power snuck onto the deenergized wires he was working on.......

Imagine you’re at a bustling dinner party filled with laughter, music, and clinking silverware. You’re trying to follow a conversation across the table, but every word feels like it’s wrapped in noise. For most people, these types of party scenarios, where it’s difficult to filter out extraneous sounds and focus......

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2026. Brain Chip Helps Blind People See Elon Musk says his company Neuralink is aiming to restore partial sight to fully blind patients in 2026. The company plans to test its newest and most powerful implant, Blindsight, in humans early......

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2026. Brain Chip Helps Blind People See Elon Musk says his company Neuralink is aiming to restore partial sight to fully blind patients in 2026. The company plans to test its newest and most powerful implant, Blindsight, in humans early......