The barely detectable wobble of a short-lived particle with the unlikely name of Bs meson could challenge current theories about how the universe is constructed, according to an international team of particle physicists comprising 700 members.

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Almost every day, the great antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network turn to a blank patch of sky in the constellation Ophiuchus. Pointing at nothing, or so it seems, they invariably pick up a signal, faint but full of intelligence. The source is beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, on the verge of the stars themselves.

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Scientists have solved a decade-old puzzle about the enigmatic 'strange quark', one of the fundamental building blocks of matter. Strange quarks are one of 6 different 'flavors' of quark that combine to form protons and neutrons (the others are 'up', 'down', 'charm', 'top' and 'bottom' quarks). The short-lived strange quark is the most mysterious.

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Researchers have developed a quantum electromechanical technique to exploit microscopic quantum effects on a macroscopic scale. The technique involves cooling a resonating beam of atoms by measuring its vibrations and could one day be used to cool nanoscale mechanical devices, say the researchers

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While it is widely accepted that the output of nerve cells carries information between regions of the brain, it's a big mystery how widely separated regions of the cortex involving billions of cells are linked together to coordinate complex activity. A new study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and neurosurgeons and ne

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There are few scientific concepts as intriguing and mysterious as dark energy and dark matter, said to make up as much as 95% of all the energy and matter in the universe. Even though scientists don't know what either is and have little evidence to prove they exist, dark energy and dark matter are two of the biggest research problems in physics.

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Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have devised a potentially groundbreaking theory demonstrating how to control the spin of particles without using superconducting magnets � a development that could advance the field of spintronics and bring scientists a step closer to quantum computing.

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Google has officially opened up its vault web bloggers and marketing research junkies. Google announced that they will be further expanding their online presence with the Google News Archive Search. The archive database will hold over 200 years of digitised newspaper articles and online content.

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Lee Smolin and Brian Greene on Talk of the Nation.

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The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang. lack of evidence of shadows from "nearby" clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

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