After 20 years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years.

Enormous volcanic eruptions build up for a century before finally going off, potentially giving societies decades to prepare

"We made carbon nanotubes that are blacker than anything else." Our material absorbs more than 99 percent of visible and ultraviolet light and 98 percent of infrared light.

A spider-silk cape that took one million spiders to make is a stunning example of nature's beauty, but silk has more to offer than a flashy outfit

When injected into an engine, cryogenic air creates high-pressure gas that drives the pistons.

A nine-nanometer device shows that nanotubes could be a viable alternative to silicon as electronics get even tinier.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Studying the potential health hazards of nanotechnology will require an additional $24 million a year to close the knowledge gap about the tiny particles used in a fast-growing array of consumer products, the National Research Council (NRC) said on Wednesday.

Eighty-five years so far. The pitch-drop experiment—really more of a demonstration—began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid.

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult. But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The leap second lives on — for another three years, at least. Added to official world clocks on 24 occasions since 1972, this skip in time keeps clocks synchronized to the Earth’s rotation. Without it, the apparent time — say, when the sun is at high noon — would drift earlier and earlier, disagreeing with the time shown on official atomic clocks. The ever-so-slight slowing of the Earth’s rotation is to blame.