Scientists have been studying the nucleus of the atom ever since Ernest Rutherford first discovered it in 1909. Twenty-five years later, scientists were already describing the nucleus as a ...

What happens when the smallest building blocks of matter refuse to play by the rules of traditional physics? For decades, atomic nuclei have posed a stubborn puzzle: at low energies, they appear as ...

If you expanded an atom to the size of a baseball, what would it look like? And how would the inside look if you sliced it open? The nucleus is the atom’s central core and contains more than 99.9 ...

Physicists from MIT have announced that they have discovered the answer to a question that has challenged nuclear physicists for 35 years. That mystery was why do quarks move more slowly inside larger ...

This image depicts the radium atom’s pear-shaped nucleus of protons and neutrons in the center, surrounded by a cloud of electrons (yellow), and an electron (yellow ball with arrow) that has a ...

Editor's note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Since the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, ...