In the air people breathe, the water on Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden ...

New method detects magnetic signals in metal that make it possible to predict fractures before they occur and prevent critical failures.

In the beginning, there was no magnetism. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe contained an awesomely hot cloud of electrically charged protons, electrons, helium and lithium nuclei. Each ...

Widespread magnetism dating from our solar system’s earliest beginnings some 4.57 billion years ago likely played a major role in creating orbital order out of chaos. But until now, magnetism’s role ...

Scientists at ETH Zurich have discovered a new type of magnetism. Experiments show that an artificially produced material becomes magnetic through a mechanism that hasn’t been seen before. The most ...

The search is on to discover new states of matter, and possibly new ways of encoding, manipulating, and transporting information. One goal is to harness materials' quantum properties for ...

Individual atoms with an odd number of electrons have a magnetic moment from the spin of the unpaired electron. Materials consisting of elements with an even number of electrons—such as carbon, ...

"Being able to generate magnetism in materials that are not naturally magnetic opens new paths to devices that use abundant and hazardless elements, such as carbon and copper," says postgraduate ...

A scientist has discovered a method for detecting and better defining meteorite impact sites that have long lost their tell-tale craters. The discovery could further the study of not only Earth's ...