Protons are tiny particles just a femtometer across, but without them, atoms wouldn't exist. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

An international team of researchers recently measured the lifetime of a neutron outside of an atomic nucleus with extraordinary precision. By their measurements, the neutron survived for 14.629 ...

Look around you (or, if you’re sight impaired, touch something). Everything solid, liquid, or gas that you see and feel is made of matter. We sometimes call it “normal” matter, though with dark matter ...

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 ...

The “lead” of a pencil is actually made of a substance called graphite which is made of carbon atoms. The picture shows a close-up of one carbon atom. A hydrogen atom has one proton as the nucleus and ...

The journey of the elements starts in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, when our universe was only a few seconds to a few minutes old. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

Some atoms are stable, while others seem to fall apart. Lead-208 will probably last forever, while the synthetic isotope technetium-99 exists for just hours. The difference lies in the structure of ...

Scientists are holding up a 'mirror' to protons and neutrons to learn more about the particles that build our visible universe. The MARATHON experiment has accessed new details about these particles' ...

Detections of gravitational waves from merging neutron stars tipped off researchers here on Earth that it should be possible to predict how neutrons interact with atomic nuclei. Nuclear power is ...

Researchers may have just spotted the elusive, ephemeral nucleus of nitrogen-9 for the first time. With seven protons and two neutrons, the lopsided atomic nucleus of nitrogen-9 pushes the limits of ...

Researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and CIBER-BBN, in collaboration with teams from the ...