The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then ...

Mrs Roberts: What do you think you're made of? Mr Spellman: Big question. Grit, determination, hard-working, handsome, charming, funny. Mrs Roberts: Well, I guess. But you're actually made of atoms.

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei—the center part of atoms, which make up all matter—were more stable ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Examining the smallest parts of the universe often takes the biggest kinds of equipment. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a unique piece of equipment the size of a building is ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin ...

Why do some elements decay in minutes, while others last billions of years? Certain "magic numbers" of nuclear particles may ...

If you hit an atom's nucleus hard enough, it will fall apart. But exactly how it falls apart tells us something about the internal structure of the nucleus and perhaps about the interior of neutron ...

Scientists have long wondered whether there is a limit to the number of protons and neutrons that can be clustered together to form the nucleus of an atom. A new study comes closer than ever to ...

Fast-moving protons are much more likely to pair up with fast-moving neutrons than with other protons in the nuclei of atoms, according to a recent experiment. The research confirms a previous ...

The finding could be put to use at a new facility opening in 2020 that might create new elements—that is, nuclei with more than 118 protons—in addition to new isotopes of the known elements Scientists ...