The secret behind Mercury’s low visibility to astronomers has finally been revealed thanks to a recent mission to the planet. The reason for planet Mercury’s ‘dark’ appearance to astronomers has been found to be graphite, astronomers examining data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission found. The study, carried out at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory... 

A new material absorbs up to 99 percent of light that hits its surface, making it the ‘blackest’ man-made material ever produced. Scientists from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have developed a material comprising nanoparticles composed of a nano rod – which helps absorb light. Light is absorbed regardless of the angle or polarization at which it hits... 

After 80 years of painstaking experimentation, scientists have directly observed a sub-atomic particle that is its own antiparticle. The breakthrough promises a leap forward in quantum computing and potentially shows the path to finding dark matter. The particles are called the Majorana fermions, after the Italian scientist who proposed their existence back in 1937. Quantum theory was in its infancy... 

A computer visualization of dark matter in the Universe which scientists have previously battled to explain People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down – and may eventually grind to a halt altogether. The latest mind-bending findings... 

Scientists working on the Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers (CRESST) experiment may have recorded evidence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – a crucial step towards solving the mystery of ‘dark matter’, a material thought to make up the huge majority of the matter in the universe, but which is extremely difficult to detect. WIMPs are bodies...