Despite remaining just an ominous floating object in the sky, the moon has played a large role in human history. One of the few things reliably visible during a cloudless night, the moon was enshrouded in mystery for much of history. For a period, it was revered as a...

As more and more atomic physics organizations go digital, the number of physics websites has increased dramatically. A huge number of institutes and projects find the web a perfect place to post studies, research, reports, groups, and experiments. The following is a collection of some of the best atomic...

For millennia humans have looked up at the night sky and tried to make sense of what they saw. And as tools have become more sophisticated, scientific methods more refined, and systems of knowledge more in line with empirical data, the modern science of astronomy has emerged. In this...

In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo, a formerly docile peak in the Philippine island of Luzon, erupted (see the PBS Nova article described below). The volcano spewed ash 16 kilometers into the air, caused over 500 deaths, and forced the evacuation of over 50,000 residents. Furthermore, the world temperature dropped by...

Nothing captures national attention like a natural disaster, and few disasters have the potential to wreak as much havoc as an earthquake. Although most injuries and fatalities associated with earthquakes don’t come from the actual shaking of the earth itself, side effects are vast and violent. Earthquakes can cause...

According to NASA our solar system has 8 major planets, approximately 150 moons, a handful of "dwarf planets" (Pluto and Eris, for instance), and millions of observable objects like comets and asteroids.  Fathoming how expansive this solar system is can be a tough feat -- Neptune is 3 billion...

How did we go from scratching at the Earth for historical clues about people to the sophisticated geological laboratories of today? Geology describes the Earth and how it has changed over time, but indeed it took many centuries to reach a point where people had the scientific knowledge to...

According to the U.K.’s National Space Centre, there are nearly 8,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), or large bits of debris leftover from the formation of the solar system that pass within 45 million kilometers of the Earth: a hair’s breadth in astronomical scales. NEOs can be either asteroids or...