top 10 scientific experiments

• The Magazine
• Stay Curious
• The Sciences
• Environment
• Planet Earth

10 Scientific Discoveries That Changed The World

Dna, gravity, and germ theory are a few of the key findings in history that forever shifted the course of human civilization. learn how these scientific discoveries changed the world..

The only constant is change. At least, that’s what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited to have said. And while science and philosophy don’t always go hand in hand, there is some truth to Heraclitus’ notion. Change is inevitable and, in some cases, necessary for our species to evolve . While some change happens automatically, like the tides going in and out, some changes bloomed from scientific discoveries. 

Using fire to cook food and keep warm propelled our ancestors toward the foundations of early settlements and continued the growth of civilization. Using fire to shape metals for weapons and building materials led to more and more discoveries and more and more advancements. While many advances shaped humanity, we’ve focused on ten significant scientific discoveries that changed the world.

The discovery of DNA didn’t so much change the world as it did our understanding of it — more so, our understanding of life. DNA is a term we’ve only started using in the 20th century, though its initial discovery dates back decades into the 19th century.

What Is DNA?

DNA is the molecule that encodes genetic information for all living things. It plays a key role in passing traits from parents to offspring and is the primary component of chromosomes in the cell nuclei of complex organisms.

Who Discovered DNA?

Many people think scientists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA in the 1950s. Nope, not so fast. DNA was actually first discovered in 1869 by Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher . He identified what he referred to as “nuclein” in blood cells. Several other researchers have worked on projects around identifying DNA up until Watson and Crick. 

What Does DNA Stand For?

The term nuclein eventually evolved into what we know as DNA, the shorthand for deoxyribonucleic acid. German biochemist Albrecht Kossel , who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize, is often credited with the name.

Levene’s Polynucleotide Model

Other scientists, such as Phoebus Levene , built on Miescher’s work over the years. Levene didn't know how DNA's nucleotide components were arranged. He proposed the polynucleotide model, correctly suggesting that nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides, each with a base, a sugar, and a phosphate group. 

Watson and Crick's Double-Stranded Helix

Watson and Crick and “their” groundbreaking discovery in the field of genetics accurately identified DNA’s double-stranded helix structure, connected by hydrogen bonds. For their discovery, Watson and Crick won a Nobel Prize in 1962 and worldwide acclaim. 

Though Watson and Crick won a Nobel Prize, years later, we’ve learned that the duo likely took research without permission from chemist Rosalind Franklin . Thanks to her research, the double helix structure was realized, though her Nobel Prize was not. 

In 2014, Watson auctioned off his Nobel Prize medal for over $4 million. The buyer was a Russian billionaire who returned it to Watson a year later. In 2019, Watson was stripped of his honorary titles because of racist comments.

Read More: DNA in Unlikely Places Helps Piece Together Ancient Humans' Family Trees

2. Earth in Motion

While it may be common knowledge that Earth spins on an axis and revolves around the sun, at one point, this idea was extremely outlandish. How could the planet move and we not feel it? Thanks to a few clever scientists, the Earth in Motion theory became more than a wild idea.

What Is Earth in Motion?

Earth in motion refers to the understanding that Earth is not stationary but moves in different ways. Earth rotates on an axis and revolves around a star. 

Earth’s Rotation

Earth rotates on its axis , which is an imaginary line running from the North Pole to the South Pole. This rotation is responsible for the day-night cycle, with one complete rotation taking about 24 hours.

Earth’s Revolution

Earth revolves around the Sun, completing one orbit approximately every 365 days. This revolution, combined with the tilt of the Earth's axis, leads to the changing seasons.

Who Discovered Earth's Motion?

The discovery and acceptance of Earth's motion was a gradual process involving several key figures in the history of science.

Aristarchus Hypothesis of Earth’s Motion

An ancient Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos, was one of the first to suggest that Earth orbits the Sun . This view was not widely accepted in his time as it was believed Earth was the center of the Universe, and stars, planets, and the sun all revolved around our planet.

Copernicus Creates the First Model of Earth’s Motion

Mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus is often credited with proposing the first heliocentric model of the universe. In 1543, he published his great work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres , which explained his theories. 

Among them was that day and night was created by the Earth spinning on its axis. Copernican heliocentrism replaced the conventionally accepted Ptolemaic theory , which asserted that the Earth was stationary. Copernicus’ work was largely unknown during his lifetime but later gained support.

Galileo Galilei’s Telescopic Observations

Galileo Galilei agreed with Copernicus’ theory and proved it through his telescopic observations. In 1610, he observed phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, which were strong evidence against the Earth-centered model of the universe.

Galileo agreed with Copernicus’ theory and proved it by using a telescope to confirm that the different phases Venus went through resulted from orbiting around the sun.

Johannes Kepler’s Planetary Laws

German mathematician Johannes Kepler formulated a series of laws detailing the orbits of planets around the Sun. These laws, which remain relevant today, provided mathematical equations for accurately predicting planetary movements in line with the Copernican theory.

Why Don’t We Feel Earth Spinning? 

According to researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Earth spins smoothly and at a consistent speed. If Earth were to change speeds at any time, we’d feel it. 

Read More: Earth's Rotation Has Slowed Down Over Billions of Years

3. Electricity

Did benjamin franklin discover electricity.

It’s a common misconception that Ben Franklin discovered electricity with his famous kite experiment. But his 1752 experiment, which used a key and kite, instead demonstrated that lightning is a form of electricity . Another myth is that Franklin was struck by lightning. He wasn’t, but the storm did charge the kite. 

Who First Observed Electricity?

Back in 600 B.C.E., it was the ancient Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus who first observed static electricity when fur was rubbed against fossilized tree resin, known as amber. 

Who Invented Electricity?

British scientist and doctor William Gilbert coined the word “electric,” derived from the Greek word for amber. Regarded as the “father of electricity,” Gilbert was also the first person to use the terms magnetic pole, electric force, and electric attraction. In 1600, his six-volume book set, De Magnete , was published. Among other ideas, it included the hypothesis that Earth itself is a magnet.

Read More: Ben Franklin: Founding Father, Citizen Scientist

4. Germ Theory of Disease

What is the germ theory of disease.

Germ theory is a scientific principle in medicine that attributes the cause of many diseases to microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses, that invade and multiply within the human body. This theory was a significant shift from previous beliefs about disease causation.

Who Invented the Germ Theory?

Louis Pasteur discovered germ theory when he demonstrated that living microorganisms caused fermentation , which could make milk and wine turn sour. From there, his experiments revealed that these microbes could be destroyed by heating them — a process we now know as pasteurization. 

This advance was a game changer, saving people from getting sick from the bacteria in unpasteurized foods , such as eggs, milk, and cheeses. Before Pasteur, everyday people and scientists alike believed that disease came from inside the body. 

Pasteur’s work proved that germ theory was true and that disease was the result of microorganisms attacking the body. Because of Pasteur, attitudes changed, and became more accepting of germ theory.

How Did Koch’s Postulates Contribute to Germ Theory?

The German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch played a crucial role in establishing a systematic methodology for proving the causal relationship between microbes and diseases .

He formulated Koch's postulates and applied these principles to identify the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and cholera, among other diseases.

Together, Pasteur and Koch laid the foundation for bacteriology as a science and dramatically shifted the medical community's understanding of infectious diseases. Their work led to improved hygiene, the development of vaccines, and the advancement of public health measures.

Read More: Why Do Some People Get Sick All the Time, While Others Stay in Freakishly Good Health?

Who Discovered Gravity?

Isaac Newton didn’t really get hit on the head with an apple, as far as we know. But seeing an apple fall from a tree did spark an idea that would lead the mathematician and physicist to discover gravity at the age of just 23. 

He pondered about how the force pulls objects straight to the ground, as opposed to following a curved path, like a fired cannonball. Gravity was the answer — a force that pulls objects toward each other. 

How Does Gravity Work?

The greater the mass an object has, the greater the force or gravitational pull. When objects are farther apart, the weaker the force. Newton’s work and his understanding of gravity are used to explain everything from the trajectory of a baseball to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. But Newton’s discoveries didn’t stop there. 

Newton’s Laws of Motion

In 1687, Newton published his book Principia , which expanded on his laws of universal gravitation and his three laws of motion. His work laid the foundation for modern physics. 

Building on the discovery, advancements in the field of electricity continued. 

In 1800, Italian physicist Alessandro Volta created the first voltaic pile , an early form of an electric battery.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

In 1915, Einstein proposed the theory of general relativity . This theory redefined gravity not as a force but as a curvature of spacetime caused by the presence of mass and energy.

According to Einstein, massive objects cause a distortion in the fabric of space and time, similar to how a heavy ball placed on a trampoline causes it to warp. Other objects move along the curves in spacetime created by this distortion.

Both Newton and Einstein significantly advanced our understanding of gravity. Their theories marked critical milestones in the field of physics and have had far-reaching implications in science and technology.

Read More: 5 Eccentric Facts About Isaac Newton

6. Antibiotics

Much like Germ Theory revolutionized modern medicine, so too did the invention of antibiotics. This discovery would go on to save countless lives.  

When Were Antibiotics Invented?

According to the Microbiology Society , humans have been using some form of antibiotics for millennia. It was only in recent history that humans realized that bacteria caused certain infections and that we could now provide readily available treatment. 

In 1909, German physician Paul Ehrlich noticed that certain chemical dyes did not color certain bacteria cells as it did for others. Because of this, he believed that it would be possible to kill certain bacteria without killing the other cells around it. Ehrlich went on to discover the cure for syphilis, which many in the scientific community refer to as the first antibiotic. However, Ehrlich referred to his discovery as chemotherapy because it used chemicals to treat a disease. Ehrlich is referred to as the “Father of Immunology” for his discoveries. 

Ukrainian-American microbiologist Selman Waksman coined the term “antibiotic” about 30 years later, according to the Microbiology Society.

Who Discovered Penicillin? 

One of the most recognizable antibiotics known today is penicillin. Health professionals prescribe millions of patients with this antibiotic each year. However, one of the most well-known antibiotics was discovered by accident. 

In 1928, after some time away from the lab, Alexander Fleming — a Scottish microbiologist — discovered that a fungus Penicillium notatum had contaminated a culture plate with Staph bacteria. Fleming noticed that the fungus had created bacteria-free areas on the plate. After multiple trials, Fleming was able to successfully prove that P. notatum prevented the growth of Staph. Soon the antibiotic was ready for mass production and helped save many lives during World War Two. 

What Is Penicillin Used For? 

Penicillin is used to treat infections caused by bacteria. The medication works by stopping and preventing the growth of bacteria. 

Read More: Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria: What They Are and How Scientists Are Combating Them

7. The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory is one of the most widely accepted theories on the beginning of the universe. The theory claims that about 13.7 billion years ago, all matter of the universe was condensed into one small point. After a massive explosion, the contents of the universe burst forth and expanded and continue to expand today. 

Who Came Up With the Big Bang Theory?

This first mention of the Big Bang came from Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. Initially, in 1927, Lemaître published a paper about General Relativity and solutions to the equations around it. Though it mostly went unnoticed. 

Though many scientists didn’t believe that the universe was expanding, a group of cosmologists was beginning to go against the grain. After Edwin Hubble noticed that galaxies further away from our own seemed to be pulling away faster than those closer to us, the idea of the universe expanding seemed to make more sense. Lemaître’s 1927 paper was recognized, and the term Big Bang appeared in Lemaître’s 1931 paper on the subject. 

What Is the Hubble Space Telescope?

Edwin Hubble’s discovery that galaxies are moving away from our own, dubbed Hubble’s Law, is on a long list of his many discoveries. Though this discovery helped add evidence to the Big Bang Theory, this discovery was hindered by the same thing that had been distributing telescopes since their inception: Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA , Earth’s atmosphere distorts light, limiting how far a telescope can see, even on a clear night. 

Because of this, researchers, specifically Lyman Spitzer , suggested putting a telescope in space, just beyond Earth’s atmosphere and into its orbit. After a few attempts in the 1960s and 70s, NASA, along with contributions from the European Space Agency (ESA), launched a space telescope on April 24, 1990 . The Hubble Space Telescope, named for the pioneering cosmologist, became the strongest telescope known to humankind until the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope . 

What Is The Cosmic Microwave Background?

The Big Bang emitted large amounts of primeval light , according to the ESA. Over time, this light “cooled” and was no longer visible. However, researchers are able to detect what is known as Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is, according to the ESA, the cooled remnant of the first light to travel through the universe. Some researchers even refer to CMB as an echo of the Big Bang. 

Read More: Did the Big Bang Happen More Than Once?

8. Vaccines

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin once said. A statement that, at the time, applied to making towns safer against fires. However, the same statement can  be true for health and wellness. The advent of vaccines has helped prevent several serious diseases and keep people safe. Thanks to vaccines, people rarely get diseases like polio, and smallpox has been eradicated . 

What Is a Vaccine?

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a vaccine is a method of protection that introduces a small amount of disease to the human body so that the body can form an immune response should that disease try to enter the body again. 

Basically, through a vaccine, the human body is exposed to a small out of a disease so that the immune system can build a defense against it. 

When Was the First Vaccine Created?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796 by using infected material from a cowpox sore — a disease similar to smallpox. He inoculated an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps with the matter and found that the boy, though he didn’t feel well at first, recovered from the illness. 

A few months later, Jenner tested Phipps with material from a smallpox sore and found that Phipps did not get ill at all. From there, the smallpox vaccine prevented countless deaths in the centuries to come. 

When Was the Polio Vaccine Invented?

From 1796 to 1945, doctors and scientists worked hard to create vaccines for other serious illnesses like the Spanish Flu, yellow fever, and influenza. One of these doctors was Jonas Salk. After Salk helped develop an influenza vaccine in 1945, he began working on the Polio vaccine. Between 1952 and 1955, Salk finished the vaccine, and clinical trials began. Salk’s vacation method required a needle and syringe, though, by 1960, Albert Sabin had created a different delivery method for the polio vaccine. Sabin’s version could be administered by drops or on a sugar cube.

Read More: The History of the Polio Vaccine

9. Evolution

What is evolution .

Evolution is a theory that suggests that organisms change and adapt to their environment on a genetic level from one generation to the next. This can take millions of years through methods such as natural selection. An animal’s color or beak may alter over time depending on the changes in their environment, helping them hide from predators or better capture prey. 

Who Is the Father of Evolution? 

After studying animals in the Galapagos , particularly the finches, a naturalist named Charles Darwin determined that the birds — who all resided on different Galapagos islands — were the same or similar species but had distinct characteristics. Darwin noted that the finches from each island had different beaks. These beaks helped the finches forage for their main food source on their specific island. Some had larger beaks for cracking open nuts and seeds, while others had smaller and more narrow beaks for finding insects. 

These observations earned Charles Darwin the title of the Father of Evolution. Though the theory of evolution has changed since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he helped lay the framework for modern scientists. 

Is Evolution a Theory or Fact? 

The long-held belief for thousands of years was that the world and all of its organisms were created by one power. But, as science has advanced, there is clear evidence to argue against that. 

The answer to this question is complicated because evolution is both fact and theory. According to the National Center for Science Education , scientific understanding needs both theories and facts. There is proof that organisms have changed or evolved over time, and scientists now have the means to study and identify how those changes happen. 

Read More : 7 Things You May Not Know About Charles Darwin

What Does CRISPR Stand For? 

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Researchers use this technology to modify the DNA of a living organism. 

Who Discovered CRISPR? 

There are several people involved and decades of research into the discovery of CRISPR . These researchers include Yoshizumi Ishino, Francisco Mojica, and the duo who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. 

What Is CRISPR?

CRISPR is a technology that can edit genes or even turn a gene “on” or “off.” Researchers have described CRISPR as a molecular scissors that clips apart DNA, then replaces, deletes, or modifies genes. According to a 2018 study, scientists can use this technology to help replace certain genes that may cause diseases such as cancer or heritable diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy — a degenerative disorder that can cause premature death.   

How Does CRISPR Work?

In short, scientists use CRISPR technology to find specific pieces of DNA inside of a cell. Scientists then alter that piece of DNA or replace it with a different DNA sequence. CRISPR technology also ensures that the changed gene passes on to the next offspring through gene drive. 

Read More: CRISPR Gene-Editing Technology Enters the Body — and Space

This article was originally published on Oct. 22, 2021 and has since been updated with new information from the Discover staff.

• earth science

Already a subscriber?

Register or Log In

Keep reading for as low as $1.99!

Sign up for our weekly science updates.

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

We have emailed you a PDF version of the article you requested.

Can't find the email?

Please check your spam or junk folder

You can also add [email protected] to your safe senders list to ensure you never miss a message from us.

20 Awesome Science Experiments You Can Do Right Now At Home

Complete the form below and we will email you a PDF version

Cancel and go back

IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out our Privacy Policy

Complete the form below to listen to the audio version of this article

Advertisement

Subscribe today for our  Weekly Newsletter  in your inbox!

Morenike Adebayo

Guest Author

DOWNLOAD PDF VERSION

We can all agree that science is awesome. And you can bring that awesomeness into your very own home with these 20 safe DIY experiments you can do right now with ordinary household items.

1. Make Objects Seemingly Disappear Refraction is when light changes direction and speed as it passes from one object to another. Only visible objects reflect light. When two materials with similar reflective properties come into contact, light will pass through both materials at the same speed, rendering the other material invisible. Check out this video from BritLab  on how to turn glass invisible using vegetable oil and pyrex glass.

2. Freeze Water Instantly When purified water is cooled to just below freezing point, a quick nudge or an icecube placed in it is all it takes for the water to instantly freeze. You can finally have the power of Frozone from The Incredibles on a very small scale! Check out the video on this "cool" experiment. 

3. Create Oobleck And Make It Dance To The Music Named after a sticky substance in a children’s book by Dr Seuss , Oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid, which means it can behave as both a solid and a liquid. And when placed on a sound source, the vibrations causes the mixture to gloopily dance. Check out these instructions from Housing A Forest  on how to make this groovy fluid funk out in every way.

4. Create Your Own Hybrid Rocket Engine With a combination of a solid fuel source and a liquid oxidizer, hybrid rocket engines can propel themselves. And on a small scale, you can create your own hybrid rocket engine, using pasta, mouthwash and yeast. Sadly, it won’t propel much, but who said rocket science ain’t easy? Check out this video from NightHawkInLight on how to make this mini engine.

5. Create "Magic Mud" Another non-Newtonian fluid here, this time from the humble potato. "Magic Mud" is actually starch found in potatoes. It’ll remain hard when handled but leave it alone and it turns into a liquid. Make your own “Magic Mud” with this video.

6. Command The Skies And Create A Cloud In A Bottle Not quite a storm in a teacup, but it is a cloud in a bottle. Clouds up in the sky are formed when water vapor cools and condenses into visible water droplets. Create your own cloud in a bottle using a few household items with these wikiHow instructions .

7. Create An Underwater Magical World First synthesized by Adolf van Baeyer in 1871, fluorescein is a non-toxic powder found in highlighter pens, and used by NASA to find shuttles that land in the sea. Create an underwater magical world with this video from NightHawkInLight .

9. Make Your Own Lava Lamp Inside a lava lamp are colored bubbles of wax suspended in a clear or colorless liquid, which changes density when warmed by a heating element at the base, allowing them to rise and fall hypnotically. Create your own lava lamp with these video instructions.

10. Create Magnetic Fluid A ferrofluid is a liquid that contains nanoscale particles of metal, which can become magnetized. And with oil, toner and a magnet , you can create your own ferrofluid and harness the power of magnetism! 

12. Make Waterproof Sand A hydrophobic substance is one that repels water. When sand is combined with a water-resistant chemical, it becomes hydrophobic. So when it comes into contact with water, the sand will remain dry and reusable. Make your own waterproof sand with this video .

13. Make Elephant's Toothpaste Elephant’s toothpaste is a steaming foamy substance created by the rapid decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, which sort of resembles giant-sized toothpaste. Make your own elephant’s toothpaste with these instructions.

14. Make Crystal Bubbles When the temperature falls below 0 o C (32 o F), it’s possible to freeze bubbles into crystals. No instructions needed here, just some bubble mix and chilly weather.

15. Make Moving Liquid Art Mixing dish soap and milk together causes the surface tension of the milk to break down. Throw in different food colorings and create this trippy chemical reaction.

16. Create Colourful Carnations Flowers absorb water through their stems, and if that water has food coloring in it, the flowers will also absorb that color. Create some wonderfully colored flowers with these wikiHow instructions .

17. "Magically" Turn Water Into Wine Turn water into wine with this  video  by experimenter Dave Hax . Because water has a higher density than wine, they can switch places. Amaze your friends with this fun science trick.

18. Release The Energy In Candy (Without Eating It) Dropping a gummy bear into a test tube with potassium chlorate releases the chemical energy inside in an intense chemical reaction. That’s exactly what's happening when you eat candy, kids.

19. Make Water "Mysteriously" Disappear Sodium polyacrylate is a super-absorbent polymer, capable of absorbing up to 300 times its own weight in water. Found in disposable diapers, you can make water disappear in seconds with this video .

20. Create A Rainbow In A Jar Different liquids have different masses and different densities. For example, oil is less dense than water and will float on top of its surface. By combining liquids of different densities and adding food coloring, you can make an entire rainbow in a jar with this video .

There you have it – 20 experiments for you to explore the incredible world of science!

ARTICLE POSTED IN

experiment,

fluorescein,

rocket engine,

hydrogen peroxide,

sodium acetate,

ferrofluid,

More Space and Physics Stories

link to article

World's Thinnest Spaghetti Is 200 Times Narrower Than A Hair

1981 Racing Car Incident Shows Why Invisible Methanol Fires Are So Dangerous

Astronomers May Have Found "Cracks In The Universe" After Looking Closer At Suspicious Galaxies

IFLScience presents True Crime in Science

IFLScience We Have Questions: The Biggest Wild Goose Is... Poisonous?

Uranus Is Windy, Saber-Toothed Baby, And Is Animal Testing Necessary?

Subscribe or renew today

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

Science News

The top 10 scientific surprises of science news’ first 100 years.

Antimatter, dark energy, plate tectonics and the role of DNA were unexpected discoveries

By Tom Siegfried

Contributing Correspondent

September 20, 2021 at 9:00 am

In 1929, Edwin Hubble (shown here at Mount Wilson Observatory) showed that more distant galaxies were flying away from us faster than nearby galaxies, which suggested an expanding universe.

Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Share this:

From the day Archimedes cut his bath short to shout “Eureka,” science has been a constant source of surprises.

Even after the abundant accumulation of knowledge in the intervening two millennia, science still retains the capacity to astonish, and the century since Science News began reporting has produced its share of shocking discoveries. Some such surprises happened suddenly (if not necessarily with eureka moments); in other cases, revolutionary shifts in understanding took a while to seep slowly into general scientific awareness.

In either case, Science News was sooner or later on the job during the last 100 years, identifying and reporting the never-ending series of surprises, too numerous to mention here, except for my Top 10.

10. Parity violation

In the 20th century, physicists established the importance of mathematical symmetries in the laws of nature. While all sorts of changes occur in the physical world, the equations describing them remain the same. So it seemed obvious that viewing the universe in a mirror — switching left and right — should have no effect on the accuracy of those equations. Hermann Weyl, a prominent mathematician who died in 1955, boldly stated that “there can be no doubt that all natural laws are invariant with respect to an interchange of right with left.”

But then in 1956 physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang published a theoretical paper suggesting otherwise, and almost immediately two teams of experimenters showed that nature did indeed distinguish left from right (in technical terms, violating parity). Radioactive beta decay of cobalt atoms and the decay of unstable particles called muons both exhibited a left-right disparity in the directions traveled by the emitted beta particles — a major surprise. “It was socko!” recalled Leon Lederman, one of the experimenters, in an interview four decades later. “ New atomic matter laws ” proclaimed the headline in Science News Letter , the predecessor to Science News , with the subhead declaring the results “a revolution in theoretical physics.”   

Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

Thank you for signing up!

There was a problem signing you up.

9. Inert gases make compounds

In the 1890s, chemists added a whole new family of elements to Dmitrii Mendeleev’s periodic table — the inert gases. Helium (detected on the sun decades earlier but not on Earth until 1895), neon, argon, xenon, krypton and radon had been previously missed because they did not — as far as anybody could tell — make compounds with other elements. Those reaction-resistant atoms became known as the inert or noble gases, as under ordinary conditions they all existed in the gaseous state. Textbooks all taught that the arrangement of electrons around the inert gas atoms precluded any opportunity for chemical combination.

Yet in 1962, a Science News Letter headline proclaimed “‘ Impossible’ compound made with inert gas .” That article reported a xenon compound, xenon tetrafluoride, created at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, while acknowledging that earlier in 1962 chemist Neil Bartlett had already prepared another xenon compound, xenon-platinum hexafluoride. Chemists had to scramble to revise their textbooks, and scientists everywhere were reminded that you shouldn’t always believe what you’re told.

8. Plate tectonics

In the 1960s, many earth scientists were stunned to learn that the textbooks describing the planet’s history needed to be thrown away. Alfred Wegener, however, would not have been so surprised. Wegener, who died in 1930, was an astronomer-turned-meteorologist who dabbled in paleontology and geophysics. In 1915 he wrote a book proposing that the Earth’s continents had once been assembled in a single land mass, called Pangaea; they then, over millions of years, drifted apart to their positions on today’s world map. That map is not a permanent portrait of the Earth’s features, Wegener contended, but rather a snapshot snagged from a long-running movie. But few people believed Wegener, and geophysicists argued that such large-scale motion of such huge rigid masses was physically inexplicable. Wegener’s idea of continental drift did not die, though. Geologists knew all about it. But it remained heresy until the 1960s, when magnetic patterns detected on the seafloor suggested that oceans had expanded, pushing the continents away from one another.

“New evidence … supports the long-debated theory that continents were once connected and have drifted apart,” Science News Letter reported in 1963 . Further work over the next few years showed that continental drift was a symptom of elaborate mechanisms inside the Earth that came to be known as plate tectonics. Plate tectonics explains not only the locations of the continents, but also how mountain ranges form and why earthquakes cluster in well-delineated zones of seismic activity. By 1969, Science News quoted experts declaring that it was time for “plate tectonics to be accepted as a basic theoretical model in geophysics.” And while many authorities for years remained reluctant to accept it, the decades following confirmed the surprising conclusion that Wegener had been essentially correct.

7. DNA makes genes

One of the last century’s most dramatic discoveries came in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick, aided by an X-ray image produced by Rosalind Franklin, figured out the double helix structure of the genetic molecule DNA. But perhaps the bigger surprise came a few years earlier, when Oswald Avery and colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York City showed that DNA was the substance that genes are made from. Although the reality of genes had been established in the early years of the 20th century, nobody had any good evidence about their physical structure. In the 1920s, “people were just as vague about what genes were … as they are now about consciousness,” Crick said in a 1998 interview. “The more professional people in the field … thought that it was a problem that was too early to tackle.”

By the 1940s, the predominant view was that genes must be constructed from proteins of some sort. DNA was just an obscure organic acid. But in 1944, Avery and colleagues demonstrated that genes consisted of strands of DNA, not proteins. Science News Letter , however, apparently did not notice the Avery paper, citing instead two subsequent studies, in 1950 and 1952, confirming DNA as the genetic material . In 1953, though, Science News Letter recognized the DNA double helix structure as the top science story of the year . “Way life is handed on” headlined the story on Watson and Crick’s proposal for how DNA replication serves as the basis for heredity.

6. Dark energy

By the 1990s, the Big Bang theory of the expanding universe had been established beyond reasonable doubt, but questions remained. Chief among them was the fate of the universe. Most experts believed that the gravitational pull of mass throughout the universe was slowing its expansion down. But they debated whether there was enough mass to reverse the expansion altogether, shrinking the cosmos into a “big crunch.” Some thought the universe would expand forever, if at an ever-diminishing rate.

The plot in that story twisted rather shockingly in 1998, when two teams of astronomers reported measurements of light from distant supernovas. Those reports, subsequently bolstered by additional data, revealed that universal expansion was not slowing, but accelerating . Some repulsive force, nicknamed “dark energy” in the absence of firm knowledge of its true nature, apparently pervades the cosmos. Researchers were “stunned to find that the cosmos was expanding 10 to 15 percent more slowly in the past than can be accounted for” without a repulsive force today, Science News reported.

5. Dark matter

In the 1930s, physicist-astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that the velocities of galaxies moving within a group called the Coma cluster seemed to defy expectations based on the gravitational effects of the visible mass. Zwicky concluded that some unseen matter — he called it dunkle Materie , or “dark matter” — must be lurking in the cluster to reconcile the observations with the law of gravity. Later astronomer Horace Babcock and others noticed a similar discrepancy in the outer reaches of some galaxies: Stars revolved around a galaxy’s outer edges much faster than allowed by the galaxy’s apparent mass. In the 1970s and thereafter, astronomer Vera Rubin and collaborators confirmed the rapid velocity of the outer stars in many galaxies. As Science News reported in 1994 , “Such behavior is a dead giveaway that the visible disk of these galaxies lies embedded in a much larger and more massive halo of unseen material.”

While the realization that most of the universe’s matter couldn’t be seen was surprising enough, an even greater surprise came when several lines of evidence affirmed that the dark matter could not be of the same type of matter known on Earth, composed primarily of protons and neutrons. Dark matter’s actual identity remains a mystery to this day; physicists have proposed some well-motivated possibilities, but the prospect remains that dark matter’s true nature will also come as a surprise.

4. Atomic bomb and nuclear fission

From the time of the discovery of radioactivity, physicists had speculated on the hidden energy packed into every piece of matter. And after Einstein published his famous equation E = mc 2 , it was clear that the amount of that energy would be enormous. But most experts doubted there would be any practical way to release such energy for useful purposes, or warfare weaponry. But in late 1938, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found that experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons produced evidence of the much lighter element barium. Lise Meitner (who had collaborated with Hahn before fleeing Nazi Germany) and her nephew Otto Frisch figured out what had happened — the uranium nucleus had been split into pieces. Frisch immediately told Niels Bohr, about to board a ship for America. And soon after Bohr arrived, the word was out. “ Atomic energy released” headlined a Science News Letter cover story in early 1939, while reassuring its readers that “physicists are anxious that there be no public alarm over the possibility of the world being blown to bits by their experiments.”

Soon, though, nuclear fission was transformed into a massive war project for building an unimaginably powerful explosive , shocking the world with its potential for destruction, while offering only partially fulfilled hope for a reliable source of useful energy. “Doomsday thunderbolts,” as Science News Letter labeled the atomic bombs dropped on Japan , “herald a revolution in war such as has not been seen since the first use of gunpowder, and later on another revolution in industry probably greater than the one ushered in by the invention of the steam engine.”

3. Expanding universe

Philosophers and physicists alike had long pondered deep questions about the nature of the universe — whether it was finite or infinite, for instance, or whether it had a beginning or had existed eternally. But just about everybody believed that on the whole it never changed, but rather just existed, its objects rotating and revolving in cycles that forever repeated. Only a rare few (the poet Edgar Allan Poe, for example) had imagined an evolving, changing universe. But in the 1920s, mathematician Alexander Friedmann suggested that the universe might be growing or shrinking, based on his solutions to the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein himself had noticed that possibility earlier, but altered his equations so that they would predict an unchanging universe, as he knew of no evidence that it was otherwise.

But such evidence was already being collected, in measurements of the colors of light emitted by distant nebulae (later called galaxies). Analysis of that data led Edwin Hubble to show, in 1929, that the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was flying away — implying (although Hubble didn’t immediately agree) that the universe is in fact expanding . “The distant nebulae are rushing away from us at tremendous speeds and thus the real universe is constantly expanding ,” Science News Letter reported in 1931.

2. Antimatter

In 1930, Science News-Letter reported on an incredibly bold proposal by a young British physicist named Paul Dirac. He argued that matter — the solidity from which physical objects are constructed — was in fact nothing more than a bunch of “holes” in the vacuum of space. Space, he suggested, is not empty, but rather completely full of electrons endowed with “negative energy.” Those negative energy electrons could not be detected. But in spots where a negative-energy electron had been given enough energy to lift it from the negative-energy sea, a hole would form, like an empty bubble in an ocean. The absence of the electron would make the hole appear to have a positive electric charge.

Dirac presumed such positively charged bubbles in the negative-energy ocean would correspond to protons, the fundamental particle making up the bulk of the mass of all atoms — in other words, all matter . But that turned out not to be the surprise, because Dirac was wrong. He soon realized that the positively charged holes could not be protons, but rather must be much lighter, with the same mass as an ordinary negatively charged electron. Dirac thus predicted the existence of antimatter, an entirely novel idea . An ordinary electron meeting its antimatter particle would disappear by filling the hole, releasing a burst of energy in the process.

Dirac’s “anti-electron” was very shortly thereafter detected in cosmic rays by physicist Carl Anderson, who reported “the probable existence of a … positively charged particle of the mass of the familiar negative electron .”  

1. Uncertainty principle

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg announced his uncertainty principle, the core idea underlying the newborn math for describing nature known as quantum mechanics. Heisenberg’s principle expressed the shocking realization that the unbroken chain of cause and effect deduced from Newtonian physics was an illusion, an approximation that nature did not observe on the subatomic scale. It took a couple of years, but Science News-Letter proclaimed “‘ Uncertainty principle’ enters science ” in a 1929 headline. “Crudely stated, the new theory holds that chance rules the physical world,” the article announced. “These weird sounding consequences arise from the contention that a particle may have an exact place or an exact speed, but it can not have both.” The report called it a “disturbing idea” that would “revolutionize the ideas of the universe … to an even greater extent than Einstein’s relativity” and was sure to make a stir “once philosophers and laymen begin their attempts at its interpretation.” Such attempts continue today — and any future interpretation succeeding in forging a consensus will surely come as an especially unexpected surprise.

More Stories from Science News on Science & Society

Researchers seek, and find, a magical illusion for the ears

Fire-prone neighborhoods on the fringes of nature are rapidly expanding

Exploiting a genetic quirk in potatoes may cut fertilizer needs

The ‘midlife crisis’ is too simple a story, scientists say

This marine biologist discovered a unique blue whale population in Sri Lanka

Using AI, historians track how astronomy ideas spread in the 16th century

A race to save Indigenous trails may change the face of archaeology

Drop in vaping drives tobacco product use by U.S. youth to a record low

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

32 physics experiments that changed the world

From the discovery of gravity to the first mission to defend Earth from an asteroid, here are the most important physics experiments that changed the world.

Physics experiments have changed the world irrevocably, altering our reality and enabling us to take gigantic leaps in technology. From ancient times to now, here's a look at some of the greatest physics experiments of all time.

Conservation of energy

Energy conservation — the idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed — is one of the most important laws of physics. James Prescott Joule demonstrated this rule, the first law of thermodynamics , when he filled a large container with water and fixed a paddle wheel inside it. The wheel was held in place by an axle with a string around it and then looped over a pulley and attached to a weight, which, when dropped, caused the wheel to spin. By sloshing the water with the wheel, Joule demonstrated that the heat energy gained by the water from the wheel's movement was equal to the potential energy lost by dropping the weight.

Measurement of the electron's charge

As the fundamental carriers of electric charge, electrons carry the smallest amount of electricity possible. But the particles are truly tiny, with a mass 1,838 times smaller than the already-minuscule proton.

So how could you measure the charge on something so small? Physicist Robert Millikan's answer was to drop electrically charged oil drops through the plates of a capacitor and adjust the voltage of the capacitor until the electric field it emitted produced a force on some of the drops that balanced out gravity — thus suspending them in the air. Repeating the experiment for different voltages revealed that, no matter the size of the drops, the total charge it carried was a multiple of a base number. Millikan had found the fundamental charge of the electron.

 "Gold foil experiment" revealing the structure of the atom

Once thought to be indivisible, the atom was slowly divided and split by a series of experiments during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These included J.J. Thomson's 1897 discovery of the electron and James Chadwick's 1932 identification of the neutron. But perhaps the most famous of these experiments was Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden's " gold foil experiment ." Under the direction of Ernest Rutherford, the students fired positively charged alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil. To their surprise, the particles passed through, revealing that atoms consisted of a positively charged nucleus separated by a significant empty space by their orbiting electrons.

Nuclear chain reaction

By the mid-20th century, scientists were aware of the basic structure of the atom and that, according to Einstein, matter and energy were different forms of the same thing. This set the stage for the wartime work of Enrico Fermi, who in 1942 demonstrated that atoms could be split to release enormous quantities of energy.

While working at the University of Chicago with an experimental setup he called an "atomic pile," Fermi demonstrated the first-ever controlled nuclear fission reaction. Fermi fired neutrons at the unstable isotope uranium-235, causing it to split and release more neutrons in a growing chain reaction. The experiment paved the way for the development of nuclear reactors and was used by J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs.

Wave-particle duality

One of the most famous experiments in physics is also one that illustrates, with disturbing simplicity, the bizarreness of the quantum world. The experiment consisted of two slits, through which electrons would travel to create an interference pattern on a screen, like waves. Scientists were stunned when they placed a detector near the screen and found that its presence caused the electrons to switch their behavior to act instead as particles.

First performed by Thomas Young to demonstrate the wave nature of light, the experiment was later used by physicists in the 20th century to show that all particles, including photons , were both waves and particles at the same time — and they acted more like particles when they were being measured directly.

Splitting of white light into colors

White light is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, but before 1672, the composite nature of light was completely unknown. Isaac Newton determined this by using a prism that bent light of different wavelengths, or colors, by different amounts, decomposing white light into its composite colors. The result was one of the most famous experiments in scientific history and a discovery that, alongside other contributions by Newton, gave birth to the modern field of optics.

Discovery of gravity

In perhaps the most widely repeated story in all of science, Newton is said to have chanced upon the theory of gravity while contemplating under the shade of an apple tree. According to the legend, when an apple fell and struck him on the head, he supposedly yelled "Eureka!" as he realized that the same force that brought the apple tumbling to Earth also kept the moon in orbit around our planet and Earth circling the sun. That force, of course, would become known as gravity .

The story is slightly embellished, however. According to Newton's own account, the apple did not strike him on the head, and there's no record of what he said or if he said anything, at the moment of discovery. Nonetheless, the realization led Newton to develop his theory of gravity in 1687, which was updated by Einstein's theory of general relativity 228 years later.

Blackbody radiation

By the turn of the 20th century, many physicists — having advanced theories that explained gravity, mechanics, thermodynamics and the behavior of electromagnetic fields — were confident that they had conquered the vast majority of their field. But one troubling source of doubt remained: Theories predicted the existence of a "blackbody" — an object capable of absorbing and then remitting all incident radiation. The problem was that physicists couldn't find it.

In fact, data from experiments conducted with close approximations of black bodies — a box with a single hole whose inside walls are black — revealed that significantly less energy was emitted from blackbodies than classical theories led scientists to believe, especially at shorter wavelengths. The contradiction between experiment and theory became known as the "ultraviolet catastrophe."

The discovery prompted Max Planck to propose that the energy emitted by blackbodies wasn't continuous but rather split into discrete integer chunks called quanta. His radical proposal catalyzed the development of quantum mechanics , whose bizarre rules are completely unintuitive to observers living in the macroscopic world.

Einstein and the eclipse

Following its publication in 1915, Einstein's groundbreaking theory of general relativity briefly remained just that — a theory. Then, in 1919, astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington devised and completed stunning proof using that year's total solar eclipse .

Key to Einstein's theory was the notion that space — and, therefore, the path that light would follow through it — was warped by powerful gravitational forces. So, as the moon's shadow passed in front of the sun, Eddington recorded the position of nearby stars from his vantage point on the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea. By comparing these positions to those he had recorded at night without the sun in the sky, Eddington observed that they had been shifted slightly by the sun's gravity, completing his stunning proof of Einstein's theory.

Higgs boson

In 1964, Peter Higgs suggested that matter gets its mass from a field that permeates all of space, imparting particles with mass through their interactions with a particle known as the Higgs boson .

To search for the boson, thousands of particle physicists planned, constructed and fired up the Large Hadron Collider . In 2012, after trillions upon trillions of collisions in which two protons are smashed together at near light speed, the physicists finally spotted the telltale signature of the boson.

Weighing the world

Although he's perhaps best known for his discovery of hydrogen, 18th-century physicist Henry Cavendish's most ingenious experiment accurately estimated the weight of our entire planet. Using a special piece of equipment known as a torsion balance (two rods with one smaller and one larger pair of lead balls attached to the end), Cavendish measured the minuscule force of gravitational attraction between the masses. Then, by measuring the weight of one of the small balls, he measured the gravitational force between it and Earth, giving him an easy formula for calculating our planet's density and — therefore, its weight — that remains accurate to this day.

Conservation of mass

Much like energy, matter in our universe is finite and cannot be created or destroyed, only rearranged. In 1789, to arrive at this startling conclusion, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier placed a burning candle inside a sealed glass jar. After the candle had burned and melted into a puddle of wax, Lavoisier weighed the jar and its contents, finding that it had not changed

Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment

Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that objects fall at different rates because the force acting upon them was stronger for heavier objects — a claim that went unchallenged for more than a millennium.

Then came the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, who corrected Aristotle's false claim by showing that two objects with different masses fall at exactly the same rate. Some claim Galileo's famous experiment was conducted by dropping two spheres from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but others say this part of the story is apocryphal. Nonetheless, the experiment was perhaps most famously demonstrated by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, who, while dropping a feather and a hammer on the moon, showed that without air, the two objects fell at the same speed.

Detection of gravitational waves

If gravity warps space-time as Einstein predicted, then the collision of two extremely dense objects, such as neutron stars or black holes , should also create detectable shock waves in space that could reveal physics unseen by light. The problem is that these gravitational waves are tiny, often the size of a few thousandths of a proton or neutron, so detecting them requires an extremely sensitive experiment.

Enter LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The L-shaped detector has two 2.5-mile-long (4 km) arms containing two identical laser beams. When a gravitational wave laps at our cosmic shores, the laser in one arm is compressed and the other expands, alerting scientists to the wave's presence. In 2015, LIGO achieved its task, making the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves and opening up an entirely new window to the cosmos.

Destruction of heliocentrism

The idea that Earth orbits the sun goes back to the fifth century B.C. to Greek philosophers Hicetas and Philolaus. Nonetheless, Claudius Ptolemy's belief that Earth was the center of the universe later took root and dominated scientific thought for more than a millennium.

Then came Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed that Earth did, in fact, revolve around the sun and not the other way around. Concrete evidence for this was later offered by Galileo, who in 1610 peered through his telescope to observe the planet Venus moving through distinct phases — proof that it, too, orbited the sun. Galileo's discovery did not win him any friends with the Catholic Church, which tried him for heresy for his unorthodox proposal.

Foucault's pendulum

First used by French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault in 1851, the famous pendulum consisted of a brass bob containing sand and suspended by a cable from the ceiling. As it swung back and forth, the angle of the line traced out by the sand changed subtly over time — clear evidence that some unknown rotation was causing it to shift. This rotation was the spinning of Earth on its axis.

Discovery of the electron

In the 19th century, physicists found that by creating a vacuum inside a glass tube and sending electricity through it, they could make the tube give off a fluorescent glow. But exactly what caused this effect, called a cathode ray, was unclear.

Then, in 1897, physicist J.J. Thomson discovered that by applying a magnetic field to the rays inside the tube, he could control the direction in which they traveled. This revelation showed Thomson that the charge within the tube came from tiny particles 1,000 times smaller than hydrogen atoms. The tiny electron had finally been found.

Deflection of an asteroid

In 2022, NASA scientists hit an astronomical "bull's-eye" by intentionally steering the 1,210-pound (550 kilograms), $314 million Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos just 56 feet (17 meters) from its center. The test was designed to see if a small spacecraft propelled along a planned trajectory could, if given enough lead time, redirect an asteroid from a potentially catastrophic impact with Earth.

DART was a smashing success . The probe's original goal was to change the orbit of Dimorphos around its larger partner — the 2,560-foot-wide (780 m) asteroid Didymos — by at least 73 seconds, but the spacecraft actually altered Dimorphos' orbit by a stunning 32 minutes. NASA hailed the collision as a watershed moment for planetary defense, marking the first time that humans proved capable of diverting Armageddon, and without any assistance from Bruce Willis.

Faraday induction

In 1831, Michael Faraday, the self-taught son of a blacksmith born in rural south England, proposed the law of electromagnetic induction. The law was the result of three experiments by Faraday, the most notable of which involved the movement of a magnet inside a coil made by wrapping a wire around a paper cylinder. As the magnet moved inside the cylinder, it induced an electric current through the coil — proving that electric and magnetic fields were inextricably linked and paving the way for electric generators and devices.

Measurement of the speed of light

Light is the fastest thing in our universe, which makes measuring its speed a unique challenge. In 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Roemer chanced upon the first estimate for light's propagation while studying Io, Jupiter's innermost moon. By timing the eclipses of Io by Jupiter, Roemer was hoping to find the moon's orbital period.

What he noticed instead was that, as Earth's orbit moved closer to Jupiter, the time intervals between successive eclipses became shorter. Roemer's crucial insight was that this was due to a finite speed of light, which he roughly calculated based on Earth's orbit. Other methods later refined the measurement of light's speed, eventually arriving at its current value of 2.98 × 10^8 meters per second (about 186,282 miles per second).

Disproof of the "luminiferous ether"

Most waves, such as sound waves and water waves, require a medium to travel through. In the 19th century, physicists thought the same rule applied to light, too, with electromagnetic waves traveling through a ubiquitous medium dubbed the "luminiferous ether."

Albert Michelson and Edward W. Morley set out to prove this conjecture with a remarkably ingenious hypothesis: As the sun moves through the ether, it should displace some of the strange substance, meaning light should travel detectably faster when it moves with the ether wind than against it. They set up an interferometer experiment that used mirrors to split light beams along two opposing directions before bouncing them back with distant mirrors. If the light beams returned at different times, then the ether was real.

But the light beams inside their interferometer did not vary. Michelson and Morley concluded that their experiment had failed and moved on to other projects. But the result — which had conclusively disproved the ether theory — was later used by Einstein in his theory of special relativity to correctly state that light's speed through a fixed medium does not change, even if its source is moving.

Discovery of radioactivity

In 1897, while working in a converted shed with her husband Pierre, Marie Curie began to investigate the source of a strange new type of radiation emitted from the elements thorium and uranium. Marie Curie discovered that the radiation these elements emitted did not depend on any other factors, such as their temperature or molecular structure, but changed purely based on their quantities. While grinding up an even more radioactive substance known as pitchblende, she also discovered that it consisted of two elements that she dubbed radium and polonium.

Curie's work revealed the nature of radioactivity, a truly random property of atoms that comes from their internal structure. Curie won the Nobel Prize (twice) for her discoveries — making her the first woman to do so — and later trained doctors to use X-rays to image broken bones and bullet wounds. She died of aplastic pernicious anemia, a disease caused by radiation exposure, in 1934.

Expansion of the universe

While using the 100-inch Hooker telescope in California to study the light glimmering from distant galaxies in 1929, Edwin Hubble made a surprising observation: The light from the distant galaxies appeared to be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that they were receding from Earth and each other. The farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away.

Hubble's observation became a crucial piece of evidence for the Big Bang theory of our universe. Yet precise measurements for galaxies' recession, known as the Hubble constant, still confound scientists to this day .

Put simply, the universe is indeed expanding, but depending on where cosmologists look, it's doing so at different rates. In the past, the two best experiments to measure the expansion rate were the European Space Agency 's Planck satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope . The two observatories, each of which used a different method to measure the expansion rate, arrived at different results. These conflicting measurements have led to what some call a "cosmology crisis" that could reveal new physics or even replace the standard model of cosmology.

Ignition of nuclear fusion

In 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used the world's most powerful laser to achieve something physicists have been dreaming about for nearly a century: the ignition of a pellet of fuel by nuclear fusion .

The demonstration marked the first time that the energy going out of the plasma in the nuclear reactor's fiery core exceeded the energy beamed in by the laser, and has been a rallying call for fusion scientists that the distant goal of near-limitless and clean power is, in fact, achievable.

However, scientists have cautioned that the energy from the plasma exceeds only that from the lasers, and not from the energy from the whole reactor. Additionally, the laser-confinement method used by the NIF reactor, built to test thermonuclear explosions for bomb development, will be difficult to scale up.

Measurement of Earth's circumference

By roughly 500 B.C., most ancient Greeks believed the world was round — citing evidence provided by Aristotle and guided by a suggestion from Pythagoras, who believed a sphere was the most aesthetically pleasing shape for our planet.

Then, around 245 B.C., Eratosthenes of Cyrene thought of a way to make the measurement directly. Eratosthenes hired a team of bematists (professional surveyors who measured distances by walking in equal-length steps called stadia) to walk from Syene to Alexandria. They found that the distance between the two cities was roughly 5,000 stadia.

Eratosthenes then visited a well in Syene that had been reported to have an interesting property: At noon on the summer solstice each year, the sun illuminated the well's bottom without casting any shadows. Eratosthenes went to Alexandria during the solstice, stuck a pole in the ground and measured the shadow from it to be about one-fiftieth of a complete circle. Pairing this with his measurement of the distance between the two cities, he determined that Earth's circumference was about 250,000 stadia, or 24,497 miles (39,424 km). Earth is now known to measure 24,901 miles (40,074 km) around the equator, making the ancient Greeks' measurements remarkably accurate.

Discovery of black holes

The acceptance of Einstein's theory of general relativity led to some startling predictions about our universe and the nature of reality. In 1915, Karl Schwarzschild's solutions to Einstein's field equations predicted that it was possible for mass to be compressed into such a small radius that it would collapse into a gravitational singularity from which not even light could escape — a black hole.

Schwarzschild's solution remained speculation until 1971, when Paul Murdin and Louise Webster used NASA's Uhuru X-ray Explorer Satellite to identify a bright X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus that they correctly contended was a black hole.

More conclusive evidence came in 2015, when the LIGO experiment detected gravitational waves from two of the colliding cosmic monsters. Then, in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of the accretion disk of superheated matter surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.

Discovery of X-rays

While testing whether the radiation produced by cathode rays could escape through glass in 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen saw that the radiation could not only do so, but it could also zip through very thick objects, leaving a shadow on a lead screen placed behind them. He quickly realized the medical potential of these rays — later known as X-rays — for imaging skeletons and organs. His observations gave birth to the field of radiology, enabling doctors to safely and noninvasively scan for tumors, broken bones and organ failure.

The Bell test

In 1964, physicist John Stewart Bell proposed a test to prove that quantum entanglement — the weird instantaneous connection between two far-apart particles that Einstein objected to as "spooky action at a distance" — was required by quantum theory.

The test has taken many experimental forms since Bell first proposed it, but the findings remain the same: Despite what our intuition tells us, what happens in one part of the universe can instantaneously affect what happens in another, provided the objects in each region are entangled.

Detection of the quark

In 1968, experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center found that electrons and their lepton cousins, muons, were scattering from protons in a distinct way that could only be explained by the protons being composed of smaller components. These findings matched predictions by physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who dubbed them "quarks" after a line in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."

Archimedes' naked leap from his bathtub

First recorded in the first century B.C. by Roman architect Vitruvius, Archimedes' discovery of buoyancy is one of the most famous stories in science. The prompting for Archimedes' finding came from King Hieron of Syracuse, who suspected that a pure-gold crown a blacksmith made for him actually contained silver. To get an answer, Hieron enlisted Archimedes' help.

The problem stumped Archimedes, but not long after, as the story goes, he filled up a bathtub with water and noticed that the water spilled out as he got in. This caused him to realize that the water displaced by his body was equal to his weight — and because gold weighed more than silver, he had found a method for judging the authenticity of the crown. "Eureka!" ("I've got it!") Archimedes is said to have cried, leaping from his bathtub to announce his discovery to the king.

Deepest and most detailed photo of the universe

In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope unveiled the deepest and most detailed picture of the universe ever taken . Called "Webb's First Deep Field," the image captures light as it appeared when our universe was just a few hundred million years old, right when galaxies began to form and light from the first stars started flickering.

The image contains an overwhelmingly dense collection of galaxies, the light from which, on its way to us, was warped by the gravitational pull of a galaxy cluster. This process, known as gravitational lensing, brings the fainter light into focus. Despite the dizzying number of galaxies in view, the image represents just a tiny sliver of sky — the speck of sky blocked out by a grain of sand held on the tip of a finger at arm's length.

OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission

In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft came hurtling back through Earth's atmosphere after a years-long journey to Bennu, a " potentially hazardous asteroid " with a 1-in-2,700 chance of smashing cataclysmically into Earth — the highest odds of any identified space object.

The goal of the mission was to see whether the building blocks for life on Earth came from outer space. OSIRIS-REx circled the asteroid for 22 months to search for a landing spot, touching down to collect a 2-ounce (60 grams) sample from Bennu's surface that could contain the extraterrestrial precursors to life on our planet. Scientists have already found many surprising details that have the potential to rewrite the history of our solar system .

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

'Gravity waves' from Hurricane Helene seen rippling through the sky in new NASA images

'Hawking radiation' may be erasing black holes. Watching it happen could reveal new physics.

Mountain lions in Los Angeles are becoming nocturnal to avoid humans

Most Popular

• 2 Woman accidentally discovers 280 million-year-old lost world while hiking in Italian Alps
• 3 'Bomb cyclone' bringing high winds to West Coast seen from space in stunning timelapse
• 4 'Like a reset button on a computer': Designer cells 'reboot' immune system in 3 different autoimmune diseases
• 5 AI could identify the next superbug-fighting drug

• Skip to primary navigation
• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar

• FREE Experiments
• Kitchen Science
• Climate Change
• Egg Experiments
• Fairy Tale Science
• Edible Science
• Human Health
• Inspirational Women
• Forces and Motion
• Science Fair Projects
• STEM Challenges
• Science Sparks Books
• Contact Science Sparks
• Science Resources for Home and School

10 of the BEST Science Experiments for Kids

May 28, 2021 By Emma Vanstone 1 Comment

Here at Science Sparks, we’ve tried a lot of science experiments over the years; some have been brilliant on the first go, some have taken a LOT of tweaking, and some have been a complete disaster! Most have been great fun, whatever the outcome. To save you and your budding scientist the disasters, I’ve put together a list of the BEST science experiments for kids !

The BEST Science Experiments for Kids

1. mini baking soda rocket.

Up first is my mini baking soda powered rocket . A fun way to do this activity is to split it into two parts.

Design the Rocket

It needs to stand up with a gap between where the cork fits and the floor. Remember not to add too many decorations or it will be too heavy.

Launch the Rocket

Experiment with different amounts of baking soda and vinegar to find the best rocket fuel !

The rocket must be placed on a hard surface to launch.

2. Skittles Experiment

If you haven’t tried the good old skittles experiment, where HAVE you been?

Pour water over Skittles on a plate and watch as the colours dissolve from the candy into the water.

Investigate using different temperatures of water and even different types of sweets. If you have any Skittles left over at the end, another idea is to try some candy chromatography .

3. Elephants Toothpaste

Babble Dabble Do has the most amazing version of this explosive science activity. Elephant toothpaste is always fun!

4. Colour Changing Potions

Everyone loves a fizzy potion, but it’s even better if you can get it to change colour!

If you use red cabbage indicator juice as the base liquid for a traditional baking soda and vinegar potion , it will change colour as it reacts.

5. Chromatography

Chromatography is a visual way to separate the different dyes in inks. All you need is some non-washable felt tip pens, filter paper and water. It’s a brilliant colourful science investigation for kids .

A fun twist on this activity is to use candy instead of felt-tip pens. Watch as the candy colours separate as they travel up the filter paper.

6. Create a Chain Reaction or Rube Goldberg Machine

A Rube Goldberg machine uses the principle of a chain reaction to achieve an end goal. Examples are popping a balloon or delivering an item to someone.

7. Lolly Stick Explosion

A craft or lolly stick explosion is a fantastic group activity or science demonstration.

They take some time to set up but are worth the effort.

Oobleck is made from cornflour and water . It’s called a Non-Newtonian liquid as it feels solid when you squish it between your fingers but turns back into a liquid when the pressure is released.

9. Absorbing with Sugar Cubes

This activity uses sugar cubes to learn about absorption and properties of materials , especially whether they are waterproof or not.

The idea is to build a tower of sugar cubes and test different materials to see which can save the higher cubes. It’s a lovely visual, hands-on experiment.

10. Bouncy Egg

Do you know how to make an egg bounce ?

First, you need to remove the shell by soaking the egg in vinegar. This leaves just the membrane behind. Once you’ve washed off the shell, you can bounce the egg.

Take care with this one, as eventually, the egg will break!

What do you think? Have I missed any? What would you add to the list? Perhaps a mento geyser ?

More of the best science experiments for kids

Make dry erase pictures float with The Best Ideas for Kids.

Create a lens with jello and Science Fun.

Make a bouncy ball with The 36th Avenue , and then find out why balls bounce !

Set up a colourful fizzy rainbow with Messy Little Monster.

Make water travel down a string with Rookie Parenting.

Last Updated on April 9, 2024 by Emma Vanstone

Safety Notice

Science Sparks ( Wild Sparks Enterprises Ltd ) are not liable for the actions of activity of any person who uses the information in this resource or in any of the suggested further resources. Science Sparks assume no liability with regard to injuries or damage to property that may occur as a result of using the information and carrying out the practical activities contained in this resource or in any of the suggested further resources.

These activities are designed to be carried out by children working with a parent, guardian or other appropriate adult. The adult involved is fully responsible for ensuring that the activities are carried out safely.

Reader Interactions

November 09, 2022 at 4:15 pm

Love the experiments! I really want to try one!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The Ten Most Significant Science Stories of 2022

From Omicron’s spread to a revelation made using ancient DNA, these were the biggest moments of the past year

Carlyn Kranking and Joe Spring

2022 marked a year when the world continued to feel its way through the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet another new variant upended the desire to arrive at a “new normal,” but the development of improved vaccines kept utter despondency at bay. In many ways, the pandemic became part of the noise surrounding us on a daily basis, maintaining its place as not just a major science story, but a geopolitical one as well.

The rest of the science world upended our lives, too, in good ways and bad. Jaw-dropping images from space kept our eyes looking upward, and discoveries about our ancient past kept our interests back on Earth. Natural disasters left deadly scars, and a new outbreak left us worried about what diseases awaited us on the horizon.

Before we jump forward into 2023, we wanted to take one last look at the stories that affected us the most the past 12 months. Here are the discoveries and events that marked 2022 as a major year in science.

The James Webb Space Telescope sends back mind-bending images

Sure, the James Webb Space Telescope launched Christmas of last year , but that gift was by no means the end of its story. The observatory had to make a 30-day, million-mile journey, then unwrap itself over the course of several months, showcasing an 18-segment, 21.3-foot hexagonal gold and beryllium mirror that became operational this year. On July 12, NASA released the first series of breathtaking images from the groundbreaking, $10 billion telescope. The shots included the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant universe, a snapshot of a turbulent region of star birth and death, and an image showing the presence of atmospheric water vapor on a planet 1,150 light years from Earth. In the months that followed, more spectacular shots of our universe— Jupiter , Mars and the Cartwheel Galaxy —were unveiled, delighting everyone from astronomers to the general public. Beyond a visual feast, the data from the telescope will help researchers understand how early galaxies formed and grew, and detect signatures of life on other planets. The telescope is far from finished with its work, as it will likely deliver more astronomical presents for years to come. (Joe Spring)

An eruption in Tonga creates shock waves

The mid-January eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haʻapai volcano in Tonga generated nearly 50-foot tsunami waves that hit the country, damaging more than 100 homes and killing three people . The explosion, which was hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, created a shock wave that circled the Earth for days. It all began with rumblings on January 14, but the main event, the most powerful eruption of the 21st century, occurred a day later on January 15. The caldera of the volcano sits roughly 500 feet below sea level, and when it lit up, it sent a three-mile-wide plume of steam and ash as high as 35 miles into the sky. Research from NASA showed the event sent enough water vapor into the air to fill 58,000 Olympic swimming pools. Those droplets may sit there for five to ten years and impact our climate. Though past volcanic eruptions have had a temporary cooling effect on Earth because ash and dust reflect sunlight back to space, due to water vapor’s heat-trapping properties, this one will likely raise temperatures . ( J.S.)

Omicron spikes, and a booster shot is met with ambivalence

First, some bad news. In the United States, a daily average of more than 66,000 cases, 40,000 hospitalizations and 426 deaths are still occurring due to Covid-19, as roughly a third of the U.S. population haven’t even finished their primary series of vaccines. The good news is that case numbers have droppe d significantly from the Omicron surge of earlier this year, when an average of more than 800,000 cases and 1,900 deaths a day were reported. According to a Nature article from February , U.S. data showed people with three doses of the vaccine were much more likely to have so-called breakthrough infections from Omicron than from the previous Delta variant. The dramatic spike of the more transmissible variant followed similar patterns in other countries around the world.

But U.S. cases and deaths had dropped by late February , for a number of reasons , including the adoption of mitigation behaviors by the public. An “increase in testing and implementation of public health interventions helps us not only reduce transmission, but also more accurately and timely identify dips in cases,” Saskia Popescu , an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, wrote in an email to Vox in late January. To further help fight Omicron, on August 31 the Food and Drug Administration authorized bivalent boosters targeted at the variant, which also work against previous variants. But by mid-December only about 14 percent of the U.S. population ages 5 and older had received the updated booster in addition to their original shots. And that lag in acceptance may have consequences, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced two studies show that the bivalent shots reduce hospitalizations more than the original vaccines. ( J.S.)

NASA lets out its inner toddler and proves it could save the world

In September, NASA crashed a $300 million spacecraft into an asteroid at 14,000 miles per hour— on purpose . The craft, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART for short, began its 6.8-million-mile journey in November 2021. It had one mission: slam into Dimorphos, a 500-foot-wide asteroid, in an attempt to alter its trajectory.

Ten months later, as DART’s moment of collision drew nearer, the spacecraft beamed a series of images back to Earth at the rate of about one per second. These images showed Dimorphos looming larger and larger until DART stopped transmitting altogether, signaling that it had completed its mission. With the spacecraft successfully destroyed, NASA researchers turned their attention to calculating whether the collision had put Dimorphos on a new path. In two weeks’ time, they announced yet another success : Dimorphos’ orbit around its sister asteroid was shortened by 32 minutes, exceeding NASA’s benchmark goal by more than 25 times.

The asteroid hadn’t been a threat to Earth, but the test demonstrated that NASA could shift the trajectory of an incoming space rock in the future. Currently, about 2,000 asteroids are identified as “potentially hazardous” due to their size or proximity to Earth’s orbit. None poses an immediate risk, but scientists want to be ready for when or if one does. ( Carlyn Kranking)

Climate protests escalate

The human toll of climate change is climbing. This year, devastating floods in Pakistan killed almost 1,700 people and injured nearly 13,000 others. Nigeria faced its worst flooding in a decade , drought plagued the American West and wildfires blazed through the Amazon. Activists have demanded government action for decades, and this year was no exception as their alarms broke through the noise.

In the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, which warned that drastic cuts to emissions are required by 2025 to prevent catastrophic climate impacts, scientists worldwide staged demonstrations . They chained themselves to buildings and even threw fake blood on the facade of Spain’s National Congress. Throughout the year, other activists took to throwing food at world-renowned masterpieces . From hurling soup at a van Gogh, to tossing mashed potatoes at a Vermeer, to smearing cake on the protective glass covering the Mona Lisa , environmental protesters caused scenes in several museums around the world. Some glued their hands to frames, and others tried to do the same. All aimed to draw attention to the importance of advancing climate goals or halting the use of fossil fuels.

But at the 27th annual United Nations climate summit ( COP27 ) in November, countries used what Teresa Anderson, global climate justice lead for ActionAid International, referred to as “weak language on fossil fuels” in a statement . The final agreement called for curbing coal and gradually removing some fossil fuel subsidies, but the total phaseout that many activists called for did not materialize. Still, delegates established a loss and damage fund that would have high-emitting countries give financial support to nations that are at a greater risk from climate change. ( C.K.)

Ancient DNA reveals the first known Neanderthal family

In one of the latest achievements in the remarkable field of ancient DNA analysis, scientists were able to identify a Neanderthal family for the first time. A team that included Svante Pääbo , this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, extracted DNA from the bones and teeth of 13 individuals who lived in Siberian caves roughly 54,000 years ago. After analysis, they identified a father and a teenage daughter, and other probable relatives, who may have met a tragic end in one cave. Tools and butchered bison bones were found at the site, but researchers suspect the Neanderthals likely died around the same time from starvation . The team’s results, published in October in Nature , added another missing piece to the puzzle of what life was like for Neanderthals, who inhabited Europe and Asia for more than 350,000 years before disappearing 40,000 years ago. The find even surprised Pääbo, who has studied Neanderthals for more than two decades. “It has been an amazing journey,” he told the New York Times . ( J.S.)

A successful mission takes the United States one step closer to returning to the moon

On November 16, NASA launched its most powerful rocket to date as the first phase of the agency’s plans to return Americans to the moon. Artemis 1 was an uncrewed test of the equipment that will be used on the crewed Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 missions, the latter of which will bring astronauts to the lunar surface. This initial mission scrutinized how the heat shield of the crew capsule Orion would hold up against the 5,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures generated upon re-entry and provided an opportunity for NASA to collect data on the possible health effects of space radiation.

For most of the year, though, things looked bleak for the multibillion-dollar program. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s test runs were repeatedly plagued by a faulty vent valve and leaking hydrogen. Technical issues and storms foiled several launch attempts, and in November, both the SLS and Orion stood unsheltered on the launch pad as Hurricane Nicole battered Florida. But once Orion began its journey, everything went “exceedingly well,” NASA officials said . Over 25.5 days, the capsule maneuvered out of Earth’s orbit, released small satellites carrying science experiments, sent back breathtaking images of the Earth and moon , and completed multiple flybys of the lunar surface; it flew farther away from Earth than any spacecraft built for human occupancy had flown before. On December 11, Orion splashed down successfully off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California. With Artemis 1 in the rearview mirror, NASA has set its sights on the program’s next phase: crewed moon missions. ( C.K.)

Lost cities of the Amazon are discovered

For centuries, legends have existed of lost cities of the Amazon, inspiring quests like that described in David Grann’s 2009 book, The Lost City of Z , about British explorer Percy Fawcett’s mission to find a metropolis in the jungle. Fawcett vanished, but this year a scientist with the German Archaeological Institute and his colleagues succeeded where Fawcett likely failed. They attached light-based remote sensing technology (known as “lidar”) to a helicopter and scanned through the canopy of the Bolivian Amazon from 650 feet in the sky. The images they created showed vast urban settlements under the forest around Llanos de Mojos that included monumental platform and pyramid architecture. Raised causeways connected the urban centers to suburban settlements complete with canals and reservoirs.

The finding, published in May in Nature , reverses the narrative that the Amazon was a mostly wild and sparsely populated landscape before Europeans arrived. Scientists hypothesize that the settlements, built by the Casarabe culture, were abandoned around 1400 C.E., possibly due to drought. Researchers say this find emphasizes the need to study and preserve parts of the Amazon before they are developed. “I’m sure that in the next 10 or 20 years we’ll see a lot of these cities, and some even bigger than the ones we are presenting in our paper,” study co-author Heiko Prümers, of the German Archaeological Institute, told Smithsonian . ( J.S.)

Mpox spreads against a meager response

In May, doctors in the United States detected two cases of mpox ( formerly known as monkeypox ). The disease, which can cause painful blisters on the skin, had also popped up in England, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Italy and France. What made these cases different than previous outbreaks is that mpox rarely spreads outside West and Central Africa. The disease passes from one person to the next through close physical contact, and as cases moved across the U.S. over the summer, researchers noted that more than 90 percent of cases occurred in men who were in sexual or close contact with other men—though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that anyone in close contact with an infected person can contract the virus.

Though the U.S. had some preparations for an outbreak, the available vaccine and four medications used to treat the disease were at first hard to come by. In August, the disease overwhelmed the country’s meager preparations, and the Biden administration declared mpox a public health emergency . By December, roughly 30,000 mpox cases and 20 related deaths were recorded in the U.S.—more than a third of total cases reported around the world. The failure to control mpox was yet another reminder the U.S. has a long way to go in building a more robust public health infrastructure to deal with potentially disastrous outbreaks. ( J.S.)

A fusion breakthrough could advance clean energy

Scientists have long believed that nuclear fusion could be key to slowing the effects of climate change by reducing humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels. This atom-fusing process that powers the cores of stars seemed like a golden opportunity for generating zero-carbon energy on Earth. For at least 30 years, nuclear researchers had been unable to initiate a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it required to get started. But on December 5, a team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did just that—as nuclear physicists would say, they achieved “ignition.”

In their experiment, the team concentrated 192 laser beams on a gold cylinder, inside of which were two isotopes of hydrogen encased in a diamond capsule. The lasers instantaneously vaporized the gold and converted the diamond to plasma. As these precious materials were blown to smithereens, they initiated a shock wave that blasted the hydrogen isotopes with X-rays, fusing them together. In the near future, the military might benefit the most from this advance—using data from this experiment, experts can model explosions of the country’s nuclear weapons, effectively estimating how much power warheads still have without needing to conduct real-world explosive tests. As for clean energy, though, a nuclear fusion power plant is still decades down the line, not likely to come to fruition until at least the 2060s or 2070s, experts say. Several logistical problems still must be ironed out—such as the vast space and impractical quantity of power required to run such a facility—before the technology can be used at scale. But the breakthrough signals that innovation is possible, and a future powered by fusion is within reach. ( C.K.)

Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Carlyn Kranking | | READ MORE

Carlyn Kranking is the assistant web editor for science and innovation.

Joe Spring | READ MORE

Joe Spring is the associate digital science editor for Smithsonian magazine.