Charlie Wood

Modified gravity theories have never been able to describe the universe’s first light. A new formulation does.

Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Recent measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.

Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.

Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.

Physicists have long searched for hypothesized dark matter particles called WIMPs. Now, focus may be shifting to the axion — an ultra-lightweight particle whose existence would solve two mysteries at once.

New experimental results simultaneously advance and challenge the theory that the brain’s network of neurons balances on the knife-edge between two phases.

Astronomers suspect that there’s a large planet hiding out in the distant fringes of the solar system. At a recent workshop, they brainstormed ways to coax it into view.