experiments 2022

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.)

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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.

22 of the biggest scientific discoveries of 2022

The year 2022 was an exciting one for science. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope yielded two major breakthroughs: new infrared images of the universe and the first evidence of carbon dioxide outside of the solar system. The ongoing pandemic spurred the innovative development of a nasal vaccine for the latest variants of the coronavirus and a renewed urgency in finding a universal vaccine for the flu.

What's more, many feats not entirely new to the past year received either validation from the scientific community, such as the FDA's first approval of lab-grown or "cultivated" meat , or represented signs of important progress in a specific field, as evidenced by the historic procedure that provided a human man with a heart transplant from a pig , marking a new level of possibility in xenotransplantation. And as to the enrichment of the collective knowledge about the development of the human race, human footprints dating back to the ice age were discovered in Utah.

To outline some of the most impressive scientific gains over the past year, Stacker consulted scientific journals and the latest news reports to compile a list of 22 major scientific discoveries and innovations that happened in 2022. The fields outlined here range from biology to geology, engineering to paleontology, and genetics to artificial intelligence, among others.

Read on to learn more about some of this year's most significant discoveries and what they mean for the future of health care, technology, climate, and more.

Tonga's January volcano was the biggest eruption ever recorded

On Jan. 15, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted underwater in the South Pacific Ocean. Volcanic eruptions don't normally send noticeable amounts of water into the atmosphere, but this one sent a whopping 146 teragrams into the stratosphere—enough to temporarily warm the Earth's atmosphere and, according to NASA, fill "58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools."

Ameca debuts at Consumer Electronics Show 2022

In January, Britain's Engineered Arts introduced Ameca, a robot of unprecedented humanlike appearance. Complete with teeth, a gender-neutral body, and "eerily lifelike expressions," Ameca can respond to questions and engage in conversation. Engineered Arts hopes it is just the first in a line of increasingly advanced humanoids the company plans to produce.

Discovery of a 30,000-year-old preserved baby mammoth

In July, paleontologists in the Yukon region of Canada were astonished to come upon the most complete remains of a woolly mammoth ever recorded. Whereas elsewhere only the bones of such creatures usually remain, this region's icy temperatures acted as a freezer to preserve the muscle, skin, and DNA of Nun cho ga, as the female baby mammoth is known. It is surmised that the infant lived more than 30,000 years ago .

Breakthroughs in fungus communication

New studies have revealed that mushrooms—specifically ghost, caterpillar, split gill, and enoki fungi—can  "talk" to each other by sending electrical impulses to each other through a web of underground mycelium similar to the human body's nervous system. Though the mushrooms were found to utilize up to 50 "words" closely resembling human language, researchers are not yet ready to directly link their communication to human speech . It is hypothesized that the fungi transmit information to each other about injuries and food sources.

James Webb space telescope captures new images of cosmos

The world was entranced by images that emerged from the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared camera, which boasts a mirror five times larger than that of its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. A telescope's mirror is like the pupil of a human eye in that it lets in light. So, the larger the mirror, the more light it can capture. Scenes of the Pillars of Creation, stars from the Big Bang era, and a previously unknown universe were captured using infrared light, which detects colors invisible to the human eye. The telescope's visual haul will be crucial in helping scientists better understand the life cycles of stars and creating a more accurate map of the cosmos.

Dead pigs' organs were revived

Researchers used the OrganEx, a specialized machine that enables them to pump blood and bodily fluids into an organism's circulatory system, to breathe new life into the organs of a pig that had died an hour before. Every single major organ showed some level of not only response "but also exhibited signs of cellular repair ." The feat could be a major step toward developing innovative methods for human organ transplants.

Ice volcanoes on Pluto

NASA's New Horizons mission stumbled upon what could be two cryovolcanoes on the surface of Pluto. Cryovolcanoes develop from frozen ice, indicating that there may be a liquid ocean beneath the dwarf planet's surface, as well as an internal heat source. Both are important stepping stones in establishing the plausibility of life on other planets.

Recovery of Endurance ship off the coast of Antarctica

The discovery of the Endurance off the coast of Antarctica has been called "the world's most challenging shipwreck search" due to the volatile conditions in "the worst portion of the worst sea in the world." Remarkably, the ship was found in near-identical condition from when it sank in 1915, more than a century ago, thanks to the icy temperatures and lack of wood-eating organisms in the water. Due to the clarity of the Antarctic waters, researchers were able to photograph the wreck in astounding detail.

NASA's DART mission destroys Dimorphos asteroid

For the first time in history, a celestial object's trajectory has been altered. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, also known as DART, successfully collided with an asteroid dubbed Dimorphos in September, offering insight into both the ability of humans to develop potential Earth defense technologies and the properties of asteroids themselves. NASA administrator Bill Nelson spoke about why the agency conducted the mission , saying: "All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it's the only one we have."

First complete sequence of the human genome

Building off of the foundation laid by the Human Genome Project, which sequenced 92% of the human genome two decades ago, the National Human Genome Research Institute successfully completed the final 8% . The complete human genome sequence is now available for geneticists to study, offering particular insights into how cells function and person-to-person variations in DNA .

Hydrogen-powered trains debut in Germany

Germany introduced a fleet of zero-emission trains powered solely by hydrogen in northern Lower Saxony. By combining hydrogen and oxygen, the trains can  run while only emitting steam and water . The trains are projected to eliminate 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere each year.

Oldest DNA ever found in Greenland

In early December, researchers working in Greenland's northernmost region uncovered DNA samples from 2 million years ago, marking the oldest DNA ever discovered . The samples had remained preserved in situ by the region's freezing temperatures. Never before have scientists been able to examine an ecosystem this far into the past, and it has proved full of surprises thus far—the area turns out to have been home to many species never known to have existed there, including reindeer and mastodons, as well as a dense forest.

Human brain cells were successfully implanted into rats

It has historically been very difficult to study neurological dysfunction in humans since living human brain neurons can be neither directly tampered with nor replicated fully in petri dishes. However, scientists have successfully transplanted and grown them in rats . Early-stage application demonstrated that the introduced human cells became nourished by the rat's own biology and grew to cover one-third of its total brain area and function normally. The milestone presents a promising opportunity to study little-understood disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

Some people in comas are discovered to be conscious

Scientists have realized that up to 1 in 5 comatose patients actually possess "covert consciousness" and can comprehend and internally respond to stimuli from the outside world. Though such patients cannot physically act on commands, their brains' electrical activity has been observed to change when asked to complete physical tasks, demonstrating a level of understanding while otherwise assumed totally unconscious. The discovery was enabled by new advancements in brain monitoring technology and could be key in advancing methods to communicate with and rehabilitate persons in comas.

Lab-grown brain cells learned to play Pong

"Mini-brains"—lab-grown brain cells fostered in petri dishes— have been taught to play the classic video game Pong , marking the first time lab-grown neural cells have successfully interacted with an external entity. Though the achievement is a milestone, there is some debate as to whether the cells can be classified as sentient or not. The development could lead to advanced ways to study neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

Microplastics were found in human lung tissue

Though microplastics have already been found in abundance in the ocean, they were recently found for the first time in an even more remote location: the lowest airways of living human lungs. Researchers at the Hull York Medical School in the United Kingdom observed microplastics in lung tissue collected from patients undergoing routine procedures—in other words, persons who didn't exhibit symptoms indicating their presence. The startling discovery , according to ecotoxicologist Dick Vethaak, "is proof that we have plastics in our body—and we shouldn't."

COVID-19 nasal vaccine

Washington University in St. Louis developed the first nasal vaccine for COVID-19 , which is hypothesized to offer better protection against the virus. After demonstrating an ability to prevent infection in mice , scientists believe the nasal approach has an edge on injectable vaccines because it reaches the nasal cavity directly, thus preventing not only severe illness but also infection in the first place. Additionally, bypassing needles could encourage more people to receive the vaccine, boosting global immunity. In December, the nasal vaccine was approved for emergency use in India.

AI systems reach new bounds

Several companies are racing to achieve new milestones in artificial intelligence with hopes of becoming innovators in transportation, health care, communications, and many other fields. Over the past year, progress has been made toward the development of fully autonomous cars , virtual nursing assistants to monitor hospital patients, emotion-detecting technology to monitor students' performances in school, and " cyborg journalists " to churn out automated reporting, to name just a few.

Progress toward a universal flu vaccine

A universal flu vaccine has eluded scientists for decades, largely due to the virus's ability to mutate and overcome previous immunity. However, by manipulating the lower portion of a flu virus' hemagglutinins, which are less variable than other parts of the virus, researchers have developed  antibodies resistant to multiple flu strains at once.

Major population declines of Alaskan crabs

A startling 84% of Alaskan snow crabs have died off since 2018, leading to the first ban on catching the species in the Bering Sea. Since they thrive in chilled waters, it is thought that warming temperatures are the key culprit behind this alarming population decline—making them visible harbingers of the increasing intensity of climate change .

Carbon dioxide discovered in exoplanet's atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope captured images of a large gas planet 700 light-years away, marking the " first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system ." The finding provides important information to help scientists understand how planets are formed.

New milestone in nuclear fusion technology

It is extraordinarily difficult to generate the energy required to replicate the atomic reactions that take place inside the sun, but scientists have created the first controlled fusion reaction that resulted in the ignition—that is, the reaction created more energy than was input. Such a fusion reaction is considered "clean," meaning it creates large amounts of energy without the emissions characteristic of fossil fuels. The landmark could pave the way for a new way to provide power to humans without degrading the Earth's atmosphere.

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• 2022 IN REVIEW

The 22 most amazing discoveries of 2022

New clues from the day the dinosaurs died. A mysterious ancient human tooth. Primordial galaxies. See how the past year expanded our knowledge of the cosmos and our own backyard.

Each year, researchers around the world contribute to humanity’s accumulation of knowledge. Paleontologists and archaeologists uncover traces of the past, revealing ecosystems and civilizations lost to time. Astronomers seek to explain the mysteries of other worlds, while biologists and Earth scientists unravel the workings of our own planet and the life it harbors. And medical researchers study the intricacies of the human body and the diseases that threaten it, developing new tools to safeguard our species.

The revelations that come from our ceaseless exploration and experimentation are often unexpected and extraordinary. Here are some of the year’s most remarkable discoveries.

Spectacular fossils reveal a prehistoric rainforest

In January 2022, researchers unveiled a site in southeastern Australia where the rocks contain an astonishing record of life in an ancient rainforest . The fossils at McGraths Flat are between 11 million and 16 million years old, representing some of the only known rainforest ecosystems dating back to the Miocene epoch. Small, soft-bodied creatures are preserved in extraordinary detail, including spiders fossilized down to their leg hairs and fish with bellies full of midges. The researchers could even see the pores in fossilized leaves that once took in carbon dioxide. “Because of the quality of preservation, we can see into these ecosystems like never before,” says Matthew McCurry, a paleontologist at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney and co-lead author of a study about the find .

Perseverance rover explores the Martian landscape

NASA's newest Mars rover continued its hunt for signs of ancient life this year in Jezero crater—a 28-mile-wide impact basin that was likely once filled with water. The rover spotted a few surprising features as it trekked across the crater’s floor, such as thin purple coatings on some rocks that are reminiscent of a kind of rock varnish formed on Earth by microbes. The rover has also been making steady progress on its rock collection , scooping up 14 samples that will be cached on Mars's surface for a future mission to collect. In September, the rover embarked on the much-anticipated exploration of an ancient river delta at the crater's edge. NASA and the European Space Agency are continuing to develop plans for returning the samples, which will require multiple spacecraft, including a pair of helicopters .

Legendary Spanish shipwreck discovered on Oregon coast

Remains from a 17th-century Spanish galleon were identified on Oregon’s northern coast . They likely belong to Santo Cristo de Burgos , a ship that was sailing from the Philippines to Mexico in 1693 when it veered off course and vanished.

Known as the “Beeswax Wreck” for the blocks of beeswax carried by the vessel that still occasionally wash up on shore, the lost galleon has been a part of local lore for centuries. Remnants of the ship’s hull, however, remained unidentified until researchers analyzed timbers found in a sea cave near Astoria and revealed that they were crafted from a type of hardwood used to build ships in Asia during the 17th century: a perfect match for the missing Santo Cristo de Burgos.

Resurrecting dying organs

In a medical first, scientists at Yale University preserved the function of multiple pig organs including the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys a full hour after the animals had died . The research could one day help extend the viability of human organs intended for life-saving transplants, thousands of which are discarded annually because they aren’t immediately preserved.

Normally organs must be harvested right after the heart stops pumping blood for them to be viable. But a sapphire-blue solution called OrganEx developed by neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and his team allowed them to restore basic organ functions well after the tissues had last received fresh blood. The researchers induced cardiac arrest in pigs and left the dead bodies at room temperature for an hour before infusing their blood with OrganEx, which contains amino acids, vitamins, metabolites, and 13 additional compounds. Using a machine, they circulated the mix for six hours and noticed signs of revival in the dying organs—heart cells began beating, liver cells absorbed glucose from blood, and DNA repair resumed.

Still, Sestan urges caution. “We can say that the heart is beating, but to what extent it’s beating like a healthy heart—that will require more studies.” The next steps will include transplanting OrganEx-treated organs into live pigs to see how well they function.

Tonga volcano erupts with surprising intensity

In January, a submarine volcano in the Kingdom of Tonga, known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, unleashed an eruption unlike any seen in recent decades . The blast sent a pressure wave around the globe multiple times and caused towering tsunami waves to crash on shores near and far. Even before the volcanic dust settled, scientists were racing to gather data about the eruption's oddities with the hope of better understanding the mechanism behind this surprisingly powerful blast and cascade of effects. "Everything so far about this eruption is off-the-scale weird," says volcanologist Janine Krippner , who was with the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program when the event occurred.

The eruption excavated some 2.3 cubic miles of rock from the seafloor, making it the largest volcanic blast in a century . The explosion also unleashed avalanches of hot ash and volcanic rubble known as pyroclastic flows that raced along the seafloor for at least 50 miles.

New snail species are the world's smallest

While searching for animals in the soil in two spots in Southeast Asia, scientists discovered a handful of new snail species , two of them smaller than any seen before. They dubbed one Angustopila psammion , a fitting name, as “psammion” derives from the ancient Greek word for “grain of sand.” This species lives within the walls of Vietnamese caves and measures only 0.6 millimeters in diameter . Many hundreds could fit on a single U.S. quarter.

The other snail is ever-so-slightly larger and was unearthed in a Laotian limestone gorge. It has a shell with pointy projections adorned with mud-like beads, which are likely fecal pellets, hence its name, A. coprologos , from the Greek for “dung gatherer.”

UN report reveals climate change’s toll on our health

For decades, scientists have warned of the coming risks of climate change. But some of the dangers we face are already here , including a direct impact on human health , according to a landmark report released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By 2100, three-quarters of all humans on Earth could regularly suffer extreme heat stress, the report found. People also face increased lung damage from air pollution and more vector-borne diseases from blood-feeding bugs, such as mosquitos and ticks, as they spread to new areas. The report’s authors stress the need to quickly and aggressively cut emissions and adapt to a hotter world before climate-related health threats get even worse.

A bobcat eating python eggs shows 'Everglades fighting back'

Burmese pythons have been overrunning the Florida Everglades for decades. These invasive animals are so ecologically destructive in part because they have no native predators—or so scientists thought.

For the first time, biologists have observed a native species, a bobcat, raiding a python nest and eating its eggs . Later, when the bobcat returned to find the snake guarding its nest, the cat took a swipe at the reptile. “When you get interactions like this and see the native wildlife fighting back, it’s like a ray of sunshine for us,” says Ian Bartoszek , an ecologist with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. “In 10 years of tracking snakes, I can count on one hand the number of observations” of native animals standing up to the reptiles. The confrontation could represent a step toward restoring ecological balance in the python-troubled Everglades.

A new space telescope achieves the deepest view of the universe  

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the giant infrared instrument now parked a million miles from Earth, spent half of 2022 getting ready to take its first images. In July, those images were finally presented, revealing an unprecedentedly detailed view of the cosmos. One image of distant galaxies magnified by the gravity of other galaxies in the foreground represents “the deepest view of the universe ever,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator at NASA. JWST’s other breathtaking images include a now-iconic view of the Carina Nebula and a striking picture of Neptune’s rings . The telescope is now busily working through a long list of planned observations, exploring everything from the oldest galaxies to the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

Antarctica’s ice shelves unexpectedly fracture

West Antarctica, the wedge of the continent that sits directly south of Argentina, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet. Some of that ice is bound to melt as climate change bakes the South Pole, but climate scientists still don’t know how much will melt—or how fast. But early this year, researchers saw ominous hints that a large collapse could happen soon . A major ice shelf—a protrusion of ice floating on the sea that prevents the ice sheet above from slipping into the ocean and melting—cracked suddenly and unexpectedly. The rupture could kick off a destructive chain reaction causing the ice shelf to “shatter into hundreds of icebergs, just like your car window,” the first step in a major collapse, says researcher Erin Pettit.

Ancient tooth adds to the story of mysterious human relative

All the confirmed remains of Denisovan, a mysterious relative to the Neanderthals, could easily fit in a sandwich bag: a few teeth, a pinky bone, a fragment of skull, and a partial jaw. And until recently, they were all from just two sites, one in Siberia and another in Tibet. But in May, scientists announced the discovery of a likely Denisovan molar from a cave in Laos, thousands of miles from all other Denisovan finds. The find reveals the hominin’s stunningly varied range and ability to survive in a variety of climates. “It kind of makes me think about how similar they are to us,” says study author Laura Shackelford, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We’re incredibly flexible—that’s sort of the hallmark of modern humans.”

Enormous stingray sets record for largest freshwater fish  

Since 2005, National Geographic Explorer Zeb Hogan has been searching the world to find the world’s largest fish. In mid-June, a team he leads in Cambodia got a call from a fisherman named Moul Thun who was fishing in the Mekong River when he accidentally snagged a giant freshwater stingray “much bigger” than any he had previously seen .

Upon arrival, the researchers found this female ray measured 13 feet from snout to tail and weighed in at a whopping 661 pounds, making it the largest freshwater fish ever recorded, certified by Guinness World Records on June 24.

New details of the dino-killing impact

Sixty-six million years ago, the trajectory of life took a sudden, violent turn when a 6.5-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the waters off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The apocalyptic blow ushered in a mass extinction that felled more than three-fourths of all species, including all the dinosaurs except birds. It left behind a gigantic undersea crater known as Chicxulub.

In February, researchers studying a set of fossil fish that died in the blast concluded the asteroid struck during spring in the Northern Hemisphere . In March, scientists provided another glimpse of the asteroid’s devastation : Within minutes of the impact, rocks that formed in the extreme temperatures rained down more than a thousand miles from the crater’s center. And in August, researchers announced that they had found signs of another possible undersea crater off the coast of West Africa that is about the same age as Chicxulub—perhaps evidence that a fragment of the incoming asteroid broke off and smashed into Earth separately.

Microplastics found in the human body

Plastic fragments have been found at the heights of Mount Everest and in the deepest depths of the ocean —and now, for the first time, within the blood and lungs of the human body . In donated blood, researchers found nanoplastics, less than one micrometer across, which could have been inhaled or eaten. They also found plastic fibers as long as two millimeters in the lungs of surgical patients. It’s still not clear how, or even whether, these plastic bits can harm our health—but “yes, we should be concerned,” says ecotoxicologist Dick Vethaak . “Plastics should not be in your blood.”

Volcanic eruption in Iceland heralds decades of activity

For nearly 800 years, the volcanoes of Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula had slumbered. But they awoke in 2021, spewing lava for six months —and this year they began yet another fiery fit . Volcanism in this region sleeps and wakes in cycles, and the second outpouring of lava in less than a year suggests the island nation may be in for decades of volcanic activity.

Each new eruption is like a window into our planet's inner workings , and scientists have already begun to explore the depths beneath Iceland, one of the few places in the world where part of the mid-ocean ridge stands above the sea. Along this boundary, tectonic plates pull apart, causing bits of hot mantle to well up and erupt at the surface. The island also sits atop a searing hot plume of rock that helps drive eruptions. By studying these phenomena, researchers hope to better understand the forces that shaped the country’s landscape.

New evidence suggests spiders can dream

Daniela Roessler , an ecologist the University of Konstanz, normally does field research in the Amazon rainforest. But during the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, she turned her attention to the jumping spiders that inhabit a field near her home in Trier, Germany. She noticed that sometimes when the little arachnids snooze, they dangle from a thread of silk with legs curled—and occasionally jerk as if in the throes of a revery.

“The way they twitched just made me think of dogs and cats dreaming,” Roessler says. So she set up a lab to observe them, and the resulting study published this year reveals that jumping spiders experience a sleep-like state with rapid eye movements similar to those observed in dreaming humans.

Africa’s oldest dinosaur fossil discovered

In August, a research team funded by the National Geographic Society unveiled a remarkable fossil: the oldest definitive dinosaur discovered in Africa . The ancient creature, known as Mbiresaurus raathi , lived about 230 million years ago during the Triassic period, and it was found within rocks in Zimbabwe known as the Pebbly Arkose Formation. Though Mbiresaurus   is one of the earliest known ancestors to sauropods, the group that includes the iconic long-necked giants such as Brontosaurus , it was itself no giant. Experts estimate the animal would have been less than two feet tall at the hip, revealing the humble evolutionary beginnings of a group of animals that would later include the largest creatures ever to walk on land.

A synthetic human microbiome built from scratch

Stanford University researchers revealed a complex synthetic microbiome that they constructed from scratch . When transplanted into mice free of microorganisms, the 119 species of bacteria, all of which can be found in the human gut, remained stable and even resisted pathogens.

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Scientists’ knowledge about gut microbiota has mainly come from transplanting the full microbial community in human feces to animals or other humans. But there are no tools to manipulate the species in stool samples, which each contain hundreds if not thousands of microbial species that vary widely between individuals.

The new synthetic microbiome is broadly representative of the human gut microbiota, according to the Stanford team. And scientists can modify this microbial community by adding or removing species to understand how they influence human health—a complex process that could result in new ways to treat diseases. Additional iterations of the synthetic microbiome may be coming as other researchers tinker with this colony, adding or eliminating species to study different disorders and to design new therapeutics.

‘Miracle plant’ thought to have been eaten into extinction possibly rediscovered

The plant was literally worth its weight in gold, stored alongside precious metals in the imperial treasury of ancient Rome. Silphion, a flowering plant thought to cure illness and make food taste extraordinary, was so popular in the ancient Mediterranean world that it was likely eaten into extinction nearly 2,000 years ago. Or was it?

Mahmut Miski, a professor of pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from natural sources) at Istanbul University believes he’s rediscovered the storied plant in a small stone enclosure in the Turkish countryside . And while its propagation and appearance are consistent with ancient descriptions of the plant, the true test came when the modern plant was used as an ingredient in ancient recipes calling for silphion, resulting in pleasant flavors that may have indeed delighted the Romans. “Finding the original silphion, and experiencing ancient recipes afresh with it, is a kind of Holy Grail,” says ancient cooking expert Sally Grainger.

Three new snake species discovered in graveyards

Biologist Alejandro Arteaga and his colleagues were traveling through the cloud forests of Ecuador in November 2021 looking for toads. They stopped in a small town and were welcomed in by a friendly woman whom they learned had seen odd snakes slithering around a graveyard.

The researchers, intrigued by the sightings, searched the area and discovered three new colorful snake species —two within the soft soil of the hillside graveyard and a third nearby. All three species, described in a scientific paper this year , are ground snakes of the genus Atractus , a group of secretive soil-dwellers that remains little understood. The biologists plan to name the new species as follows: A. discovery , which has especially small eyes and a yellow belly with a black line; A. zgap , which has a yellow belly with no line; and A. michaelsabini,   which is “the chubbiest of the lot,” Arteaga says.

Stunning ancient artwork found at site attacked by ISIS

Archaeologists digging in the ruins of an ancient palatial gate destroyed by ISIS discovered stunning artworks behind a sealed door last opened some 2,600 years ago . A joint Iraqi-American team found seven carved stone panels dating to roughly 700 B.C. Believed to have originally come from the Southwest Palace of the ancient city of Nineveh, near modern Mosul in northern Iraq, the panels likely depict the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s military campaigns. Similar panels from the palace are considered a turning point in the history of art and are a highlight of the British Museum’s collections.

“The land is just full of antiquities,” says Zainab Bahrani of Columbia University. “It's full of ancient sites. And there is no way that you can erase all that history.”

Unraveling the ‘dark matter’ of the protein universe

Big tech companies took major steps this year to reveal the building blocks of life. Facebook’s parent company Meta and DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, both released databases of hundreds of millions of protein structures—many of them previously unknown to science. The companies used artificial intelligence to predict the shapes of these proteins, a tool that could help scientists understand their functions and aid the development of new drugs.

Researchers supplied the models with sequences of known proteins so the AI systems could learn patterns and generate accurate 3D structures. Meta also used models to fill in the blanks in protein sequences that were missing amino acid units before predicting their structures.

In just two weeks, Meta’s system predicted the structures of more than 600 million proteins from viruses, bacteria, and other microbes. The protein data are publicly accessible via Meta’s ESM Metagenomic Atlas . Meanwhile, DeepMind predicted the structure of about 220 million proteins found in about a million different species, including plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria.

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Science News

Here’s how scientists reached nuclear fusion ‘ignition’ for the first time.

The experiment, performed in 2022, also revealed a never-before-seen phenomenon

In December 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (pictured) achieved nuclear fusion “ignition,” in which the energy produced by the fusing of atomic nuclei exceeds that needed to kick the fusion off.

Jason Laurea/LLNL

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By Emily Conover

February 16, 2024 at 9:30 am

One of nuclear fusion’s biggest advances wouldn’t have happened without some impeccable scientific artistry.

In December 2022, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California created fusion reactions that produced an excess of energy — a first. In the experiment, 192 lasers blasted a small chamber, setting off fusion reactions — in which smaller atomic nuclei merge to form larger ones — that released more energy than initially kicked them off ( SN: 12/12/22 ). It’s a milestone known as “ignition,” and it has been decades in the making.

Now, researchers have released details of that experiment in five peer-reviewed papers published online February 5 in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review E . The feat demanded an extraordinary level of finesse, tweaking conditions just so to get more energy out of the lasers and create the ideal conditions for fusion.

The work is “exquisitely beautiful,” says physicist Peter Norreys of the University of Oxford. Norreys, who was not involved with the research, compares the achievement to conducting a world-class orchestra: Different elements of the experiment had to be meticulously coordinated and precisely timed.

Scientists also discovered a long-predicted heating effect that could expose the physics of other violent environments, such as exploding stars called supernovas. “People say [physics is] a dry subject,” Norreys says. “But I always think that physics is at the very forefront of creativity,”

The road to nuclear fusion’s big break

Fusion, the same process that takes place in the sun, is an appealing energy source. Fusion power plants wouldn’t emit greenhouse gases. And unlike current nuclear fission power plants, which split atomic nuclei to produce energy, nuclear fusion plants wouldn’t produce dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste. Ignition is the first step toward harnessing such power.

Generating fusion requires extreme pressures and temperatures. In the experiment, the lasers at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility pelted the inside of a hollow cylinder, called a hohlraum, which is about the size of a pencil eraser. The blast heated the hohlraum to a sizzling 3 million degrees Celsius — so hot that it emitted X-rays. Inside this X-ray oven, a diamond capsule contained the fuel: two heavy varieties of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. The radiation vaporized the capsule’s diamond shell, triggering the fuel to implode at speeds of around 400 kilometers per second, forming the hot, dense conditions that spark fusion.

Previous experiments had gotten tantalizingly close to ignition ( SN: 8/18/21 ). To push further, the researchers increased the energy of the laser pulse from 1.92 million joules to 2.05 million joules. This they accomplished by slightly lengthening the laser pulse, which blasts the target for just a few nanoseconds, extending it by a mere fraction of a nanosecond. (Increasing the laser power directly, rather than lengthening the pulse, risked damage to the facility.)

The team also thickened the capsule’s diamond shell by about 7 percent — a difference of just a few micrometers — which slowed down the capsule’s implosion, allowing the scientists to fully capitalize on the longer laser pulse.  “That was a quite remarkable achievement,” Norreys says.

But these tweaks altered the symmetry of the implosion, which meant other adjustments were needed. It’s like trying to squeeze a basketball down to the size of a pea, says physicist Annie Kritcher of LLNL, “and we’re trying to do that spherically symmetric to within 1 percent.”

That’s particularly challenging because of the mishmash of electrically charged particles, or plasma, that fills the hohlraum during the laser blast. This plasma can absorb the laser beams before they reach the walls of the hohlraum, messing with the implosion’s symmetry.

To even things out, Kritcher and colleagues slightly altered the wavelengths of the laser beams in a way that allowed them to transfer energy from one beam to another. The fix required tweaking the beams’ wavelengths by mere angstroms — tenths of a billionth of a meter.

“Engineering-wise, that’s amazing they could do that,” says physicist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the work. What’s more, “these tiny, tiny tweaks make such a phenomenal difference.”

After all the adjustments, the ensuing fusion reactions yielded 3.15 million joules of energy — about 1.5 times the input energy, Kritcher and colleagues reported in Physical Review E . The total energy needed to power NIF’s lasers is much larger, around 350 million joules. While NIF’s lasers are not designed to be energy-efficient, this means that fusion is still far from a practical power source.

Another experiment in July 2023 used a higher-quality diamond capsule and obtained an even larger energy gain of 1.9, meaning it released nearly twice as much energy as went into the reactions ( SN: 10/2/23 ). In the future, NIF researchers hope to be able to increase the laser’s energy from around 2 million joules up to 3 million , which could kick off fusion reactions with a gain as large as 10.

What’s next for fusion

The researchers also discovered a long-predicted phenomenon that could be useful for future experiments: After the lasers heated the hohlraum, it was heated further by effects of the fusion reactions, physicist Mordy Rosen and colleagues report in Physical Review Letters .

Following the implosion, the ignited fuel expanded outward, plowing into the remnants of the diamond shell. That heated the material, which then radiated its heat to the hohlraum. It’s reminiscent of a supernova, in which the shock wave from an exploding star plows through debris the star expelled prior to its explosion ( SN: 2/8/17 ).

“This is exactly the collision that’s happening in this hohlraum,” says Rosen, of LLNL, a coauthor of the study. In addition to explaining supernovas, the effect could help scientists study the physics of nuclear weapons and other extreme situations.

NIF is not the only fusion game in town. Other researchers aim to kick off fusion by confining plasma into a torus, or donut shape, using a device called a tokamak. In a new record, the Joint European Torus in Abingdon, England, generated 69 million joules , a record for total fusion energy production, researchers reported February 8.

After decades of slow progress on fusion, scientists are beginning to get their atomic orchestras in sync.

More Stories from Science News on Physics

X-rays from nuclear blasts could defend Earth from asteroids

A materials scientist seeks to extract lithium from untapped sources

How did dark matter shape the universe? This physicist has ideas

This biophysicist’s work could one day let doctors control immune cells

This engineer’s light-based computers take inspiration from the brain

Why this physicist is bringing thermodynamics to the quantum age

A neutrino mass mismatch could shake cosmology’s foundations

The Large Hadron Collider exposes quarks’ quantum entanglement

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The nobel prize in physics 2022.

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Alain Aspect

Prize share: 1/3

John F. Clauser

Anton Zeilinger

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science"

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100 Easy Science Experiments for Kids to do at Home (2024)

Welcome, young scientists! If you’ve arrived here today, you’re probably looking for easy science experiments for kids that you can do at home. 

Good news! There are literally hundreds of simple science experiments & STEM activities you can do at home, with materials you already have on hand.

We scoured the internet and practiced these experiments with our own young kids to test them out and make sure they were good ones. They’re super educational and so much fun for kids of all ages!

Each of these easy STEM challenges and science experiments will take about 30 minutes to complete from start to finish, and they’re a great way to teach simple science concepts that your kids will use in school.

The best part? They each use simple ingredients from around the house like food coloring, dish soap, paper towels, ice cubes, rubber bands, white vinegar, vegetable oil, and baking soda.

So, let’s dive in to our giant list of 100 fun science experiments for kids!

Chemistry Experiments For Kids

Invisible ink (chemical reactions).

In this fun experiment, your kids can write a secret message with invisible ink that they will learn how to reveal scientifically. Like all of these at-home science experiments, you need only basic materials, and it’s sure to be a big hit.

• lemon juice
• Cotton swab
• lamp or light bulb
• plain white paper
• bowl or cup

Mini Volcanos (Acid – Base Reaction)

This super easy baking soda and vinegar volcano eruption is a real crowd-pleaser for kids of all ages, and your kids will be begging to do it over and over again!

All you need is a few very basic household ingredients, and your colorful volcano will be erupting in no time. It only takes about three minutes to prep.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (8 oz) of Vinegar
• Plastic cup
• 3-4 Tbs of baking soda at least
• 1 tsp of dish soap
• Food coloring (or washable paint if you want to avoid staining)

Elephant Toothpaste (Exothermic Reaction)

H ave you heard of the elephant toothpaste experiment yet? It’s a blast! You will need an adult for this experiment. Kids of all ages will love learning about catalysts and exothermic reactions in this simple fun science activity

What You Need:

• 16-oz plastic soda bottle
• 1/2 cup 20-volume of 6% solution hydrogen peroxide liquid
• 1 Tablespoon dry yeast
• 3 Tablespoons of warm water
• Liquid dish soap
• Food coloring
• Safety goggles

Shiny Pennies (Oxidation and Chemical Reactions)

You definitely have some dirty pennies lying around your house, so let’s put them to good use in a classic science experiment that even young kids can enjoy. Pennies are copper, and they are often in circulation for years (yuck!), so they often appear very tarnished. In this experience, you’re going to see if soap or vinegar (or other liquids) do a better job at cleaning the exterior of the dirty copper penny.

What You’ll Need

• dirty pennies
• 2 paper cups
• Paper towel
• Different liquids from around the house (ketchup, soda, Diet Coke, etc.)

Orange Fizz (Acid – Base Reaction)

Discover orange fizz bubbles popping inside of your mouth! This sensory experiment is really fun for learning about acids and bases. And hardly any materials are needed.

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• Orange or clementine

Tie-Dye (Absorption and Chemical Bonding)

Who would have thought that everyone’s favorite t-shirt pattern is actually a great science lesson, too? As your child dyes the shirt, they’ll be observing water solubility and absorption in real time. The dyes are fiber-reactive, which means that a chemical reaction takes places between the dye molecules and fabric molecules so that they actually become one. The dye bonds with the fabric and actually becomes a part of it.

• Plastic gloves  
• White T-shirt or pillowcase
• Buckets or bins filled with water
• Rubberbands

Here are 10 Easy Tie-Dye Patterns For Kids . To learn how to wash and care

Exploding Soap (Air Expansion)

The Exploding Soap experiment is a surefire hit with all ages, and all you need is soap and microwave! (And a little help from your parents.)

Exploring Colors With Baking Soda / Vinegar (Chemical Reactions with pH)

I n this science activity for kids of all ages, your little scientists will create a chemical reaction, explore color mixing, AND create colorful artwork. Triple win!

• Tray (A baking sheet will do)
• Baking soda
• White vinegar
• Ice Cube Trays or other containers to hold the colored vinegar
• Pipettes or eye droppers
• Liquid watercolors or food coloring

Water Cycle In A Bag (Evaporation, Condensation, & Precipitation)

This is one of the best science experiments to teach your kids about the water cycle, and it’s so easy to do! They’ll watch the water cycle in a bag play out right before their eyes.

• Zip lock bag
• permanent marker
• blue food coloring

Mixing Impossible (Immiscibility)

This super easy experiment involves mixing equal parts oil and water and adding a drop of food coloring to see what happens. Kids will love watching the food coloring make it through the oil. You will love how easy it is to set up and clean up!

• Several drinking glasses
• vegetable oil
• liquid food coloring
• a toothpick (if you have it)

Static Electricity Hair

Want to provide your kids with (literally) hair-raising good time? It’s super simple to teach your kids about static electricity with this easy, no-mess science activity.

What You need:

• an inflated balloon
• a piece of cloth

Rub the surface of the balloon with the cloth for at least40 seconds. Then, hold the balloon a short distance above your head and watch your hair stick to it!

What’s Happening:

T he balloon gains electrons from the cloth and becomes negatively-charged when you rub it together. Then, when the balloon touches you hair, it attracts your hair, which is positively charged.

Magic Milk Experiment

• Full Fat Milk
• Food Coloring
• Dawn Dish Soap
• Cotton Swabs

First, pour the milk in a small baking dish until the bottom is covered. Next, fill the milk with drops of food coloring. Glitter is optional!

Then, pour some dishwashing soap into a bowl, and dip your cotton swap tip into the dish soap to coat it. Then, gently touch your cotton swab to the milk and watch what happens!

Milk is composed of minerals, proteins, and fats, which are easy to change. When you add the dish soap to the milk, the soap molecules try to attach to the fat molecules in the milk.

When everything stops moving, you can see where all the fat molecules are.

Melting Snowballs

This is another acid and base experiment, and it’s perfect for a winter day (or any time of year!) when you’ve got cabin fever.

• Baking Soda

First, form snowballs by adding water to the baking soda. You’ll need about a 1/3 cup per snowball. Then, place them in the freezer for 15 minutes. Finally, pour drop of vinegar on the snowballs and watch them sizzle and melt. You can also make a snowman and do the same thing!

More Quick Chemistry Experiments:

• Rock Candy Experiment – Grow colorful rock candy in a glass!
• Naked Egg Experiment – Dissolve an eggshell with vinegar and see the membrane below!
• Balloon Magic – Blow up a balloon without blowing, using vinegar and baking soda.
• Egg Teeth – Explore how sugar affects teeth in this easy experiment.
• Make Butter – Shake cream and turn it into butter!
• Ice Cream in a Bag – Turn simple ingredients into delicious ice cream.
• Moldy Bread Experiment – See how important it is to wash your hands in the viral science experiment. Exploding baggie – Use a simple chemical reaction to explode a plastic zip close baggie. 
• Flame-Proof Balloon – Use cold water to make a balloon resistant to a fire’s flame!
• Rotten Banana Balloon – Use that rotten banana in your kitchen to blow up a balloon. You can also try it with a lemon. (Here’s the Lemon Balloon Trick .)
• Mouth-Foaming Fun – Experience a chemical reaction first hand while brushing your teeth.
• Smashing Seashells – Discover how to easily smash seashells with vinegar.
• Super Bubble Solution – Find out how you can make giant bubbles with an easy homemade solution.
• Water Fireworks – Create fireworks in a glass of water using this simple experiment with household ingredient.
• Dancing Corn Experiment – Explore and investigate carbon dioxide by making corn dance. 
• Homemade Bouncy Balls – Make your own bouncy ball toys with household ingredients.
• Steel Wool & Vinegar Experiment – Get a better understand of how things rust!

Physics Experiments For Kids

Jumping pepper (static electricity).

Have you ever seen pepper jump ? You’re about to! This simple experience using water, soap, and black pepper will get kids of all ages exploring the concept of surface tension.

• liquid soap
• black pepper
• a plate or bowl

Homemade Lava Lamp (Density & Buoyancy)

This simple lava lamp experiment is especially a hit with kids ages 4-12 (and beyond!), and it will take their favorite adults back a few decades, too! It’s a fun way to learn about density.

Food Coloring A clean plastic bottle or glass jar Vegetable Oil Baking Soda

Dry Erase Marker Magic (Surface Tension & Floating Objects)

Bring your drawings to life with nothing more than a glass plate, a dry erase marker, and a little water! Dive into this magical and straightforward dry erase marker experiment that will not only wow the kids but also ignite their curiosity about chemistry and physics. 

Poke-Through Science Tricks

Are you ready to wow your kids with some magical science tricks?

In these two fun experiments, you’ll learn how to poke pencils through a bag of water without a leak and push a needle through a balloon without popping it—both using nothing but simple household materials.

• Ziplock bag or balloon
• Very sharp pencils or needle

Light Refraction Magic

This super simple science experiment is really more of a magic trick, and it will teach your kids all about light refraction.

• Piece of Paper

Dancing Raisins (Buoyancy and Gas Bubbles)

Home science experiments don’t have to be complicated. My little ones liked watching the raisins dance and prance around the bubbled.

In this very easy science experiment that’s perfect for young kids, you’ll need a few simple ingredients that you probably already have in your household: clear soda, a glass of water, and a handful of raisins. With these simple ingredients, you’ll produce chemical reactions that your kids can watch in real time!

What You’ll Need:

• A clear glass of water
• Handful of raisins

Sink or Float? (Density)

Kids of all ages – but especially young children – will love this easy science experiment that builds a foundation to understanding density. This is one of our favorite science activities for the little ones!

• Two glasses of water
• Small items from around the house
• A piece of paper and a pen

Floating Eggs (Density and Buoyancy)

This experiment will show your child how things float differently in fresh water and salt water.

• 2 tall drinking glasses

First, fill one glass with water. Then, fill another glass with water and add 8 tablespoons of salt. Mix it up. Next, place an egg in both glasses. One will float and the other will sink. Adding salt to the water increases the water’s density which causes the egg to float.

DIY Parachute (Air Resistance & Gravity)

Looking for a fun, hands-on way to teach your kids about gravity? 

Building a DIY parachute at home is a great way to combine learning and creativity. Plus, you probably already have all the materials you need!

Materials You’ll Need:

• Plastic bag  (like a grocery bag)
• Yarn or string

Paper Airplanes

There’s no better way for kids to learn about aerodynamics than by making a paper airplane. Wow Fold, a paper airplane website, offers dozens of paper airplane designs and easy to follow instructions.

How far did you paper airplanes fly? Make some observations about what worked and didn’t work, and try again!

Flying Ping Pong

Your kids will love this flying ping pong trick, and there are only two things you need.

Steps: First, make sure your hair dryer is on a cool setting. Then, hold the ping pong above the nozzle and turn on the air. When you let the ping pong go, it should float! Next, try it on different settings. Try to see how far you can tilt your hair dryer before the ball drops.

Magnet Magic

Using simple household items, this activity helps kids practice sorting, classifying, and making predictions, while learning the basic principles of magnetism.

Materials You Need:

• A variety of small household objects (e.g., paperclips, coins, screws, buttons, erasers)
• Clear plastic box (like a recycled food container)
• Pipe cleaners
• Small containers for sorting

Sugar Water Rainbows (Density and Buoyancy)

If you’re looking for a fun and educational activity that brings science to life, this “ Sugar Water Rainbow ” experiment is perfect! 

• Food coloring 
• Water 
• 5 cups 
• Pipette or syringe

Walking on Eggs

You’ve heard about walking on eggshells, but what about walking on eggs? In this easy science experiments for kids – albeit a messy one – your kids will be astonished to see that they can actually walk on eggs without breaking them!

• 6 dozen eggs in their cartons-Drop cloth / newspaper

Lay down your drop cloth in case the experiment doesn’t work as expected!

Place the open egg cartons next to each other. Take off your sock and shoes and gently step onto the eggs keeping your feet flat. Step gently and slowly to not concertante force. Then bring up your other foot and carefully walk across the eggs.

The key is to evenly distribute your weight across many eggs, so no single egg bears too much pressure. Eggs are surprisingly strong when pressure is applied evenly across their surface, thanks to their arched shape, which helps them distribute force efficiently.

Disappearing Reflection

Make your reflection vanish! All you need is aluminum foil.

• Aluminum Foil
• Scissors (optional)

Rip off a large piece of aluminum foil (ten inches should do) and take a look at your reflection. Then, crumple up the aluminum foil. Next, Carefully flatten it back out. Finally, look for your reflection. It’s nowhere to be found!

When the aluminum foil is smooth, light reflect off of it in straight lines, which enables you to see your reflection. But once you crumple the foil, it has a wrinkled surface that sends your reflection in all different direction, causing it to disappear.  

Defy Gravity!

Be like Elfaba and defy gravity with this extremely easy science experiment for kids. When you turn over a cup of water, you expect the water to spill and fall. But that’s not always what happens!

• Clear plastic cup
• Playing card or notecard

First, fill your clear glass about 3/4 of the way with water. Next press your playing card or notecard gently on the top of your glass to completely cover the top. Gently rotate the cup upside down. After a few moments, remove the card. The water will stay in place!

Try it again, adding something that will float in the water. Repeat the steps, and see what happens!

More Quick Physics Experiments:

• Giant Dish Soap Bubbles – Make a giant bubble with household ingredients.
• Layering Liquids – See how liquids can stack on top of each other according to density.
• Liquid Sandwich – Learn about density with water, oil, and honey.
• Step Through an Index Card – Amaze your kids by stepping through an index card that’s been strategically cut.
• Frozen Bubbles – Find out what happens when you blow bubbles in freezing temperatures.
• Big Stick Balance – This surprising experiment will teach kids about balance.
• Upside Down Reflection – All you need is a kitchen spoon to learn about the principles of reflection.
• Soap Boats – Explore density with this easy DIY boat-making activity.
• Water Bending Trick – Learn how to bend water with one simple thing you have lying around your house.
• Dry Paper Experiment – See how you can magically dunk paper in water and not make it wet.
• Bending Straw Illusion – Learn about light refraction in this quick and simple experiment.
• Magic Napkin – Learn about inertia with a napkin and a plastic cup filled with water.
• Talking String – Learn about sound waves and make a string “sing” by using one simple button.
• Noisy Paper – Create a loud vibration noise with just two pieces of computer paper.
• Make a Rainbow – See how you can easily create your own rainbow.

Biology Experiments For Kids

Rainbow celery (capillary action in plants).

Got some celery in the fridge? Then you can begin to l earn about capillary action with a simple and colorful color-changing celery experiment . It’s a really cool project that your kids are sure to remember for years to come!

What you need:

• Glasses of water

Traveling Rainbows (Capillary Action in Plants)

This colorful experiment is an easy way of demonstrating capillary action, water travel, and color mixing. Kids of all ages will love watching the color move through the paper towel on its own, and they’ll have a better idea of how plants get their nutrients.

• 6 glasses or jars
• Paper towels
• Food coloring (red, yellow, & blue)

Skittle Heart Experiment (Water Solubility)

This visually stunning experiment is not only a treat to watch but also a great way to explore concepts of water solubility and color mixing. Let’s dive into the simple Skittle Heart Experiment that will capture your kids’ hearts.

Homemade Slime (Polymers & Viscosity)

What kid doesn’t love slime? This is one of our favorite science experiments because it’s a sure kid-pleaser! In this basic recipe , you can make some of your own right in your kitchen, and have fun squeezing it with your bare hands all day long.

Slime has quickly become one of those classic science experiments that every family should try at least once!

• White school glue
• food coloring

More Quick Biology Experiments For Kids

• Map Your Taste Buds – Learn about your taste buds in this easy mapping activity.
• Growing Gummy Bears – Watch gummy bears grow before your eyes.
• Foot Fat Experiment – Compare the levels of fat in different foods with this simple experiment.
• Fingerprinting – Dive into the infinite world of fingerprints with a no. 2 pencil and paper.
• Sunscreen and Skin – Learn about the human body and how sunscreen works with this simple experiment using sunscreen and construction paper.
• Taste Bud 101 – Learn about the taste buds with this fun and interactive experiment.

Earth Science Experiments For Kids

Bird feeder fun.

In this simple science project, you’ll learn where birds like to have their meals.

• Pipe Cleaner

Place cheerios on a pipe clean and make a simple circle. Place it out for the birds to eat.

To experiment, place different bird feeders in different places and see if it makes a difference for how much gets eaten.

You could also make your bird feeder into different shapes to see how the birds prefer it.

It’s super simple to make a rain gauge from a soda bottle and track your area’s rain water! We did this easy science experiment at the start of the you-know-what, and it got us through another rainy day.

• Soda Bottle
• X-acto knife (with parental supervision)

Cut the top off of a soda bottle and invert the top so that the rain water funnels into the bottle. You may want to secure it with duct tape. Next, place it outside in a spot where it can collect rain water. You’ll want to secure it so it doesn’t fall over. Then, begin measuring the rain water each day!

More Quick Earth Science Experiments:

• Solar Oven S’mores – Cook up a tasty snack in a solar oven.
• Human Sundial – Become a human sundial to learn about solar patterns.
• Windowsill Trash – Demonstrate how the heat of the sun helps trash decompose
• Tornado in a Bottle – Create a cyclone in a bottle in this classic, simple experiment.
• Make a Sundial – Learn how to tell time with the sun by making a simple sundial.
• Shaving Cream Rain Clouds – learn about the water cycle with shaving cream. The shaving cream represents the rain cloud and the water is the atmosphere.

Engineering/Technology Experiments For Kids

Lego boats (buoyancy & design).

This experiements present a great opportunity to get kids thinking about engineering and design.

First, challenge your kids to build their own boat out of LEGO bricks. For an added challenge, only give them a certain number of pieces.

Once everyone has finished building, put the boats to the test in a tub of water.

Add pennies a few at a time to see how many each boat can hold.

Talk to your kids about how weight and design matter. Reflect on good designs and help them understand why they worked well.

Rubber Band Guitar

Tap into your musical side and explore sound with this simple rubber band guitar.

Paper or plastic cup Rubber bands

First, wrap your rubber bands of different sizes around the cup so that the rubber bands act as strings over the hole of the cup. Then, pinch the sides of them together as best you can and tap them around the sides of the cup. See what sounds they make, and experiments with rubber bands of various sizes to see what sounds they make!

Paper Cup Tower

Similar to the “walking on Egg” experiment listed above, this activity will wow your children as they discover they won’t crush the paper cups by standing on them!

• 8 paper cups

First, set the paper cups on the grounds, spaced evenly. Next, place the cardboard on top of them. Then, try to stand on it and see what happens. Can you make another level?

More Engineering Experiments for Kids:

• Egg Drop Project – See if you can build a contraction to protect an egg from breaking.

So, there you have it – 100 kids science experiments that are super easy to do at home! They all use simple household items and take about 30 minutes to complete.

If your child is interested in science check out the videos at How Stuff Works . It will keep them informed and entertained for hours! They also may be interested in reading about the latest news in science at Science News Explores .

Do you have other ideas for easy science experiments for kids? We’d love to hear about them! Email us at [email protected] to add your idea.

RELATED POSTS:

10 Best Cold Weather Science Experiments For Kids

Related Post: 100+ Science Trivia Questions for Kids

25 Best Science Books for Your First Grader

50 Best Fourth Grade Science Experiments

Calie Herbst, Editor-in-Chief of Milwaukee With Kids, has spent over a decade combining her experiences as a parent of three to create a hub for Milwaukee’s family adventures.

Her decade-long teaching career in Milwaukee Public Schools and academic background, including a Master’s in Teaching from Marquette University and dual B.A.s in Sociology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, fuel her passion for inclusive and engaging family content.

Calie is also a recognized voice in local media, contributing to WISN Channel 12 News, WTMJ Wisconsin Morning News, Fox 6’s Real Milwaukee, and B93.3.

Discover more about Calie’s journey and editorial approach on her About Page  and Editorial Policy Page .

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Science News Explores

Experiments on ‘entangled’ quantum particles won the physics nobel prize.

Physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger share the award

Experiments on entanglement — a strange feature of quantum physics — have netted three scientists the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. When two particles are entangled (illustrated), what happens to one determines what happens to the other — even when the second one is far away.

Nicolle R. Fuller/NSF

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By James R. Riordon and Maria Temming

October 5, 2022 at 10:23 am

For their tests of quantum weirdness and its real-world uses, three scientists will share the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics.

Quantum physics is the science of super small things. It governs how atoms and even tinier particles behave. Such itty-bitty bits of matter don’t obey the same rules as larger objects. One especially strange feature of quantum physics is “entanglement.” When two particles are entangled, everything about them — from their speed to the way they spin — is perfectly connected. If you know the state of one particle, then you know the state of the other. This is true even when the linked particles are very far apart.

When this idea was first proposed, physicists like Albert Einstein were skeptical. Math might allow entanglement in theory, they thought. But there should be no way such linked particles could exist in the real world.

This year’s Nobel Prize winners show that, in fact, it does. And it could lead to many new technologies. Completely secure systems of communication, for instance. Or quantum computers that solve problems that stump any ordinary computer.

Each of this year’s winners will take home a third of the prize money, which totals 10 million Swedish kronor (worth roughly $900,000).

One winner is Alain Aspect. He works at the Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique in France. Another is John Clauser, who runs a company in California. These two confirmed that the rules of quantum physics really do rule the world.

Anton Zeilinger, the third winner, works at the University of Vienna in Austria. He has taken advantage of the quantum strangeness confirmed by Aspect and Clauser to develop new technologies.

“Today, we honor three physicists whose pioneering experiments showed us that the strange world of entanglement … is not just the micro-world of atoms, and certainly not the virtual world of science fiction or mysticism,” said Thors Hans Hansson. “It’s the real world that we all live in.” Hansson is a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, which chose the winners. He spoke at an October 4 press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. It’s where the award was announced.

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“It was certainly very exciting to learn about the three laureates,” says Jerry Chow. He’s a physicist at IBM Quantum in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. “They’re all very, very well known in our quantum community. And their work is something that’s really been a big part of many people’s research efforts over many years.”

Proving entanglement

The discovery that quantum rules govern tiny things like atoms and electrons shook up early 20th century physics. Many leading scientists, such as Einstein, thought the math of quantum physics worked in theory . But they weren’t sure it could truly describe the real world. Ideas like entanglement were just too weird. How could you really know the state of one particle by looking at another?

Einstein suspected the quantum weirdness of entanglement was an illusion. There must be some classical physics that could explain how it worked — like the secret to a magic trick. Lab tests, he suspected, were just too crude to uncover that hidden information.

Other scientists believed there was no secret to entanglement. Quantum particles had no hidden back channels for sending information. Some particles could just become perfectly linked, and that was that. It was the way the world worked.

In the 1960s, physicist John Bell came up with a test to prove there was no hidden communication between quantum objects. Clauser was the first one to develop an experiment to run this test. His results supported Bell’s idea about entanglement. Linked particles just are .

But Clauser’s test had some loopholes. These left room for doubt. Aspect ran another test that ruled out any chance quantum strangeness could be cleared up by some hidden explanation.

Clauser and Aspect’s experiments involved pairs of light particles, or photons . They created pairs of entangled photons. This meant the particles acted like a single object. As the photons moved apart, they stayed entangled. That is, they kept acting as a single, extended object. Measuring the features of one instantly revealed those of the other. This was true no matter how far apart the photons got.

Entanglement is fragile and hard to maintain. But Clauser and Aspect’s work showed that quantum effects could not be explained by classical physics.

Zeilinger’s experiments show the practical uses of these effects. For instance, he has used entanglement to create absolutely secure encryption and communication. Here’s how it works: Interacting with one entangled particle affects another. So, anyone trying to peek at secret quantum information would break the particles’ entanglement as soon as they snooped. That means nobody can spy on a quantum message without getting caught.  

Zeilinger has also pioneered another use for entanglement. That is quantum teleportation . This isn’t like people popping from one place to another in science fiction and fantasy. The effect involves sending information from one place to another about a quantum object.

Quantum computers are another technology that would rely on entangled particles. Normal computers process data using ones and zeroes. Quantum computers would use bits of information that are each a blend of one and zero. In theory, such machines could run calculations that no normal computer can.

Quantum boom

“This [award] is a very nice and positive surprise to me,” says Nicolas Gisin. He’s a physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “This prize is very well-deserved. But comes a bit late. Most of that work was done in the [1970s and 1980s]. But the Nobel Committee was very slow and now is rushing after the boom of quantum technologies.”

That boom is happening around the world, Gisin says. “Instead of having a few individuals pioneering the field, now we have really huge crowds of physicists and engineers that work together.”

Some of the most cutting-edge uses of quantum physics are still in their infancy. But the three new Nobel laureates have helped transform this strange science from an abstract curiosity into something useful. Their work validates some key, once-contested ideas of modern physics. Someday, it may also become a basic part of our daily lives, in ways not even Einstein could deny.

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The Year in Biology

December 21, 2022

Myriam Wares for Quanta Magazine

Introduction

Our memories are the cornerstone of our identity. Their importance is a big part of what makes Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia so cruel and poignant. It’s why we’ve hoped so desperately for science to deliver a cure for Alzheimer’s, and why it is so frustrating and tragic that useful treatments have been slow to emerge. Great excitement therefore surrounded the announcement in September that a new drug, lecanemab, slowed the progression of the disease in clinical trials. If it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, lecanemab will become only the second Alzheimer’s treatment that counteracts amyloid-beta protein, which is widely supposed to be the cause of the disease.  

Yet the effects of lecanemab are so marginal that researchers debate whether the drug will really make a practical difference for patients. The fact that lecanemab stands out as a bright spot speaks to how dismal much of the history of research on treatments for Alzheimer’s has been. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the biology at play is fueling interest in the leading alternative theories for what causes the disease.

Speculation about how memory works is at least as old as Plato, who in one of his Socratic dialogues wrote about “the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses,” and compared its operation to a wax stamp in the soul. We can be grateful that science has vastly improved on our understanding of memory since Plato’s time — out with the wax stamps, in with “engrams” of changes in our neurons. In this past year alone, researchers have made exciting strides toward learning how and where in the brain different aspects of our memories reside. More surprisingly, they have even found biochemical mechanisms that distinguish good memories from bad ones.

Because we are creatures with brains, we often think about memory in purely neurological terms. Yet work published early in 2022 by researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that even individual cells in developing tissues may carry some records of their lineage’s history. These stem cells seem to rely on that stored information when they are faced with decisions about how to specialize in response to chemical cues. Advances in biology over this past year unveiled many other surprises as well, including insights into how the brain adapts to extended food insufficiency and how migrating cells follow a path through the body. It’s worth looking back on some of the best of that work before the revelations of the coming year give us a new perspective on ourselves again.

Harol Bustos for Quanta Magazine

A Turning Point in Alzheimer’s Research?

Many people connected to Alzheimer’s disease, either through research or through personal ties to patients, hoped that 2022 would be a banner year. Major clinical trials would finally reveal whether two new drugs addressing the perceived root cause of the disease worked. The results fell unfortunately short of expectations. One of the drugs, lecanemab, showed potential for slightly slowing the cognitive decline of some patients but was also linked to sometimes fatal side effects; the other, gantenerumab, was deemed an outright failure.  

The disappointing outcomes cap three decades of research based heavily on the theory that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by plaques of amyloid proteins that build up between brain cells and kill them. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that amyloid is only one component in a much more complex disease process that involves damaging inflammation and malfunctions in how cells recycle their proteins. Most of these ideas have been around for as long as the amyloid hypothesis but are only just beginning to receive the attention they deserve.

In fact, aggregations of proteins around cells are beginning to look like an almost universal phenomenon in aging tissues and not a condition peculiar to amyloid and Alzheimer’s disease, according to work by Stanford University researchers that was announced in a preprint last spring. The observation may be one more bit of proof that worsening problems with protein management may be a routine consequence of aging for cells.

Andrey Andreev, Thai Truong, Scott Fraser; Translational Imaging Center, USC

Watching a Memory Form

Neuroscientists have long understood a lot about how memories form — in principle. They’ve known that as the brain perceives, feels and thinks, the neural activity that gives rise to those experiences strengthens the synaptic connections between the neurons involved. Those lasting changes in our neural circuitry become the physical records of our memories, making it possible to re-evoke the electrical patterns of our experiences when they are needed. The exact details of that process have nevertheless been cryptic. Early this year, that changed when researchers at the University of Southern California described a technique for visualizing those changes as they occur in a living brain, which they used to watch a fish learn to associate unpleasant heat with a light cue. To their surprise, while this process strengthened some synapses, it deleted others.  

The information content of a memory is only part of what the brain stores. Memories are also encoded with an emotional “valence” that categorizes them as a positive or negative experience. Last summer, researchers reported that levels of a single molecule released by neurons, called neurotensin, seem to act as flags for that labeling.  

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

Molecular Ecosystems Started Life

Life on Earth began with the first appearance of cells roughly 3.8 billion years ago. But paradoxically, before there were cells, there must have been collections of molecules doing surprisingly lifelike things. Over the past decade, researchers in Japan have been conducting experiments with RNA molecules to learn whether a single type of replicating molecule could evolve into a throng of different replicators, as researchers on the origin of life have theorized must have happened in nature. The Japanese scientists found that this diversification did occur, with various molecules coevolving into competing hosts and parasites that rose and fell in dominance. Last March, the scientists reported a new development: The diverse molecules had started working together in a more stable ecosystem . Their work suggests that RNAs and other molecules in the prebiotic world could likewise have coevolved to lay the foundations of cellular life.

Self-replication is often treated as the essential first step in any origin-of-life hypothesis, but it doesn’t have to be. This year, Nick Lane and other evolutionary biologists continued to find evidence that before cells existed,  systems of “proto-metabolism” involving complex sets of energetic reactions might have arisen in the porous materials near hydrothermal vents.

Jonas Hartmann/Mayor Lab

How Body Cells Find Their Place

How does a single fertilized egg cell grow into an adult human body with upward of 30 trillion cells in more than 200 specialized categories? It’s the quintessential mystery of development. For much of the past century, the predominant explanation has been that chemical gradients established in various parts of the developing body guide cells to where they’re needed and tell them how to differentiate into the constituents of skin, muscles, bones, brain and other organs.  

But chemicals now seem to be only part of the answer. Recent work suggests that while cells do use chemical gradient clues to guide their navigation, they also follow patterns of physical tension in the tissues that surround them, like tightrope walkers crossing a taut cable. Physical tension does more than tell cells where to go. Other work reported in May showed that mechanical forces inside an embryo also help induce sets of cells to become specific structures , such as feathers instead of skin.

Meanwhile, synthetic biologists — researchers who take an engineering approach to the study of life — made important progress in understanding the kinds of genetic algorithms that control how cells differentiate in response to chemical cues. A team at Caltech demonstrated an artificial network of genes that could stably transform stem cells into a number of more specialized cell types. They haven’t identified what the natural genetic control system in cells is, but the success of their model proves that whatever the real system is, it probably doesn’t need to be much more complicated.

Matt Curtis for Quanta Magazine

What the Low-Energy Brain Sees

The brain is the most energy-hungry organ in the body, so perhaps it’s not surprising that evolution devised an emergency strategy to help brains cope with lengthy periods of food deficiency. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh discovered that when mice have to survive on short rations for weeks on end, their brains start to operate in the equivalent of a “low power” mode .  

In this state, neurons in the visual cortex use almost 30% less energy at their synapses. From an engineering standpoint, it’s a neat solution for stretching the brain’s energy resources, but there’s a catch. In effect, the low-power mode reduces the resolution of the animal’s vision by making the visual system process signals less precisely.  

An engineering view of the brain also recently improved our understanding of another sensory system: our sense of smell. Researchers have been trying to improve the ability of computerized “artificial noses” to recognize smells. Chemical structures alone go a long way toward defining the smells we associate with various molecules. But new work suggests that the metabolic processes that create molecules in nature also reflect our sense of the smell of the molecules. Neural networks that included metabolic information in their analyses came significantly closer to classifying smells the way humans do.

Paşca Lab, Stanford University

Human Brain Cells Connect Inside Animal Brains

A living human brain is still a maddeningly difficult thing for neuroscientists to study: The skull obstructs their view and ethical considerations rule out many potentially informative experiments. That’s why researchers have begun growing isolated brain tissue in the laboratory and letting it form “organoids” with physical and electrical similarities to real brains. This year, the neuroscientist Sergiu Paşca and his colleagues showed how far those similarities go by implanting  human brain organoids into newborn laboratory rats. The human cells integrated themselves into the animal’s neural circuitry and took on a role in its sense of smell. Moreover, the transplanted neurons looked healthier than ones growing in isolated organoids, which suggests, as Paşca noted in an interview with Quanta , the importance of providing neurons with inputs and outputs. The work points the way toward developing better experimental models for human brains in the future.

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Also in Biology

Cells Across the Tree of Life Exchange ‘Text Messages’ Using RNA

The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea

How Our Longest Nerve Orchestrates the Mind-Body Connection

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Analysis puts W boson mass mystery to rest

Evrim Yazgin

Cosmos science journalist

Physicists rocked the boat in 2022 when they measured the mass of the W boson particle and came up with a result that was “in tension” with Standard Model of particle physics predictions.

A new precise measurement of the W boson mass by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) puts the mystery of the fundamental particle’s mass to rest.

The new result is consistent with predictions made in the Standard Model.

Nearly a decade of analysis used 300 million events collected from the 2016 run of the LHC, as well as 4 billion simulated events. The team then reconstructed and measured the mass from more than 100 million W bosons.

The results are published on the CMS Collaboration’s website.

The measured mass of the W boson is 80,360.2 ± 9.9 megaelectronvolts (MeV). For comparison, this is a little less than a single silver atom. Standard Model predictions place the W boson mass at 80,357 ± 6 MeV. The new CMS measurement has a precision of 0.01%.

W bosons are among the fundamental particles in the Standard Model which describes all the basic building blocks of the universe.

W bosons are force carriers – along with Z bosons – which translate the nuclear weak force that governs radioactivity.

Understanding the W boson’s mass allows scientists to grasp the interaction of forces and particles. This includes the strength of the Higgs field (responsible for giving all particles their mass) and the merging of the weak force with electromagnetism.

“The entire universe is a delicate balancing act,” says Anadi Canepa, deputy spokesperson of the CMS experiment and a senior scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Research Laboratory (Fermilab). “If the W boson mass is different from what we expect, there could be new particles or forces at play.”

Quantum “pseudo-gap” aids quest for high temperature superconductor

If new, exotic physics is to be found, the CMS measurement suggests it won’t be in the W boson mass.

“CMS’s design makes it particularly well-suited for precision mass measurements,” says Patty McBride, a distinguished scientist at Fermilab and the former CMS spokesperson. “It’s a next generation experiment.”

Most fundamental particles are only around for a fraction of a second before decaying into other particles. Physicists work their masses out in collider experiments by measuring the combined mass of the particles they decay into.

This works well for particles like the W boson’s sibling, the Z boson. But W bosons pose a problem – one of their decay products is a neutrino.

“Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to measure,” says Josh Bendavid, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who worked on the analysis. “In collider experiments, the neutrino goes undetected, so we can only work with half the picture.”

To get around this problem, physicists have to use simulations of LHC collisions to supplement the experimental data. In the past, physicists used Z bosons as stand ins for W bosons in their simulations. But this adds uncertainty into the theoretical models.

“Z and W bosons are siblings, but not twins,” says Elisabetta Manca, a researcher at the University of California Los Angeles.

To reduce uncertainty, the CMS Collaboration used only real W boson data to build their theoretical models.

“We were able to do this effectively thanks to a combination of a larger data set, the experience we gained from an earlier W boson study, and the latest theoretical developments,” Bendavid explains. “This has allowed us to free ourselves from the Z boson as our reference point.”

Originally published by Cosmos as Analysis puts W boson mass mystery to rest

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October 6, 2022

11 min read

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality

By Daniel Garisto

Athul Satheesh/500px/Getty Images

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. As Albert Einstein once bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” To adapt a phrase from author Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the trailblazing work of physicist John Stewart Bell of Northern Ireland, who laid the foundations for the 2022 Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. “It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol in England. “Without any doubt, the prize is well deserved.”

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“The experiments beginning with the earliest one of Clauser and continuing along show that this stuff isn’t just philosophical, it’s real—and like other real things, potentially useful,” says Charles Bennett, an eminent quantum researcher at IBM. “Each year I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is the year,’” says David Kaiser, a physicist and historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “[In 2022] it really was. It was very emotional—and very thrilling.”

The journey from fringe to favor was a long one. From about 1940 until as late as 1990, studies of so-called quantum foundations were often treated as philosophy at best and crackpottery at worst. Many scientific journals refused to publish papers on the topic, and academic positions indulging such investigations were nearly impossible to come by. In 1985 Popescu’s adviser warned him against a Ph.D. in the subject. “He said, ‘Look, if you do that, you will have fun for five years, and then you will be jobless,’” Popescu says.

Today quantum information science is among the most vibrant subfields in all of physics. It links Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics via the still mysterious behavior of black holes. It dictates the design and function of quantum sensors, which are increasingly being used to study everything from earthquakes to dark matter. And it clarifies the often confusing nature of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that is pivotal to modern ma­­ter­i­als science and that lies at the heart of quantum computing. “What even makes a quantum computer ‘quantum?’” Nicole Yunger Halpern, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, asks rhetorically. “One of the most popular answers is en­­tanglement, and the main reason why we understand entanglement is the grand work participated in by Bell and these Nobel Prize winners. Without that understanding of entanglement, we probably wouldn’t be able to realize quantum computers.”

Work by John Stewart Bell in the 1960s sparked a quiet revolution in quantum physics.

Peter Menzel/Science Source

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

The trouble with quantum mechanics was never that it made the wrong predictions—in fact, the theory described the microscopic world splendidly right from the start when physicists devised it in the opening decades of the 20th century. What Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen took issue with, as they explained in their iconic 1935 paper, was the theory’s uncomfortable implications for reality. Their analysis, known by their initials EPR, centered on a thought ex­­periment meant to illustrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics. The goal was to show how under certain conditions the theory can break—or at least de­­­liver nonsensical results that conflict with our deepest assumptions about reality.

A simplified and modernized version of EPR goes something like this: Pairs of particles are sent off in different directions from a common source, targeted for two observers, Alice and Bob, each stationed at opposite ends of the solar system. Quantum mechanics dictates that it is impossible to know the spin, a quantum property of individual particles, prior to measurement. Once Alice measures one of her particles, she finds its spin to be either “up” or “down.” Her results are random, and yet when she measures up, she instantly knows that Bob’s corresponding particle—which had a random, indefinite spin—must now be down. At first glance, this is not so odd. Maybe the particles are like a pair of socks—if Alice gets the right sock, Bob must have the left.

But under quantum mechanics, particles are not like socks, and only when measured do they settle on a spin of up or down. This is EPR’s key conundrum: If Alice’s particles lack a spin until measurement, then how (as they whiz past Neptune) do they know what Bob’s particles will do as they fly out of the solar system in the other direction? Each time Alice measures, she quizzes her particle on what Bob will get if he flips a coin: up or down? The odds of correctly predicting this even 200 times in a row are one in 10 60 —a number greater than all the atoms in the solar system. Yet despite the billions of kilometers that separate the particle pairs, quantum mechanics says Alice’s particles can keep correctly predicting, as though they were telepathically connected to Bob’s particles.

Designed to reveal the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, EPR eventually led to experimental results that instead reinforce the theory’s most mind-boggling tenets. Under quantum mechanics, nature is not locally real: particles may lack properties such as spin up or spin down prior to measurement, and they seem to talk to one another no matter the distance. (Be­­cause the outcomes of measurements are random, these correlations cannot be used for faster-than-light communication.)

Physicists skeptical of quantum mechanics proposed that this puzzle could be explained by hidden variables, factors that existed in some imperceptible level of reality, under the subatomic realm, that contained information about a particle’s future state. They hoped that in hidden variable theories, nature could recover the local realism denied it by quantum mechanics. “One would have thought that the arguments of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen would produce a revolution at that moment, and everybody would have started working on hidden variables,” Popescu says.

Einstein’s “attack” on quantum mechanics, however, did not catch on among physicists, who by and large accepted quantum mechanics as is. This was less a thoughtful embrace of nonlocal reality than a desire not to think too hard—a head-in-the-sand sentiment later summarized by American physicist N. David Mermin as a demand to “shut up and calculate.” The lack of interest was driven in part because John von Neumann, a highly regarded scientist, had in 1932 published a mathematical proof ruling out hidden variable theories. Von Neumann’s proof, it must be said, was refuted just three years later by a young female mathematician, Grete Hermann, but at the time no one seemed to notice.

The problem of nonlocal realism would languish for another three decades before being shattered by Bell. From the start of his career, Bell was bothered by quantum orthodoxy and sympathetic toward hidden variable theories. Inspiration struck him in 1952, when he learned that American physicist David Bohm had formulated a viable nonlocal hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics—something von Neumann had claimed was impossible.

Bell mulled the ideas for years, as a side project to his job working as a particle physicist at CERN near Geneva. In 1964 he rediscovered the same flaws in von Neumann’s argument that Hermann had. And then, in a triumph of rigorous thinking, Bell concocted a theorem that dragged the question of local hidden variables from its metaphysical quagmire onto the concrete ground of experiment.

Typically local hidden variable theories and quantum mechanics predict indistinguishable experimental outcomes. What Bell realized is that under precise circumstances, an empirical discrepancy between the two can emerge. In the eponymous Bell test (an evolution of the EPR thought experiment), Alice and Bob receive the same paired particles, but now they each have two different detector settings—A and a, B and b. These detector settings are an additional trick to throw off Alice and Bob’s apparent telepathy. In local hidden variable theories, one particle cannot know which question the other is asked. Their correlation is secretly set ahead of time and is not sensitive to up­­dated detector settings. But according to quantum mechanics, when Alice and Bob use the same settings (both uppercase or both lowercase), each particle is aware of the question the other is posed, and the two will correlate perfectly—in sync in a way no local theory can account for. They are, in a word, entangled.

Measuring the correlation multiple times for many particle pairs, therefore, could prove which theory was correct. If the correlation remained below a limit derived from Bell’s theorem, this would suggest hidden variables were real; if it exceeded Bell’s limit, then the mind-boggling tenets of quantum mechanics would reign supreme. And yet, in spite of its potential to help determine the nature of reality, Bell’s theorem languished unnoticed in a relatively obscure journal for years.

THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE

In 1967 a graduate student at Columbia University named John Clauser accidentally stumbled across a library copy of Bell’s paper and became enthralled by the possibility of proving hidden variable theories correct. When Clauser wrote to Bell two years later, asking if anyone had performed the test, it was among the first feedback Bell had received.

Three years after that, with Bell’s encouragement, Clauser and his graduate student Stuart Freedman performed the first Bell test. Clauser had secured permission from his supervisors but little in the way of funds, so he became, as he said in a later interview, adept at “dumpster diving” to obtain equipment—some of which he and Freedman then duct-taped together. In Clauser’s setup—a kayak-size apparatus requiring careful tuning by hand—pairs of photons were sent in opposite directions toward detectors that could measure their state, or polarization.

Unfortunately for Clauser and his infatuation with hidden variables, once he and Freedman completed their analysis, they had to conclude that they had found strong evidence against them. Still, the result was hardly conclusive because of various “loopholes” in the experiment that conceivably could allow the influence of hidden variables to slip through undetected. The most concerning of these was the locality loophole: if either the photon source or the detectors could have somehow shared information (which was plausible within an object the size of a kayak), the resulting measured correlations could still emerge from hidden variables. As M.I.T.’s Kaiser explained, if Alice tweets at Bob to tell him her detector setting, that interference makes ruling out hidden variables impossible.

Closing the locality loophole is easier said than done. The detector setting must be quickly changed while photons are on the fly—“quickly” meaning in a matter of mere nanoseconds. In 1976 a young French ex­­pert in optics, Alain Aspect, proposed a way to carry out this ultraspeedy switch. His group’s experimental re­­sults, published in 1982, only bolstered Clauser’s re­­sults: local hidden variables looked extremely un­­likely. “Perhaps Nature is not so queer as quantum mechanics,” Bell wrote in response to Aspect’s test. “But the experimental situation is not very encouraging from this point of view.”

Other loopholes remained, however, and Bell died in 1990 without witnessing their closure. Even As­­pect’s experiment had not fully ruled out local ef­­fects, because it took place over too small a distance. Similarly, as Clauser and others had realized, if Alice and Bob detected an unrepresentative sample of particles—like a survey that contacted only right-handed people—their experiments could reach the wrong conclusions.

No one pounced to close these loopholes with more gusto than Anton Zeilinger, an ambitious, gregarious Austrian physicist. In 1997 he and his team improved on Aspect’s earlier work by conducting a Bell test over a then unprecedented distance of nearly half a kilometer. The era of divining reality’s nonlocality from kayak-size experiments had drawn to a close. Finally, in 2013, Zeilinger’s group took the next logical step, tackling multiple loopholes at the same time.

“Before quantum mechanics, I actually was interested in engineering. I like building things with my hands,” says Marissa Giustina, a quantum researcher at Google who worked with Zeilinger. “In retrospect, a loophole-free Bell experiment is a giant systems-engineering project.” One requirement for creating an experiment closing multiple loopholes was finding a perfectly straight, unoccupied 60-meter tunnel with access to fiber-optic cables. As it turned out, the dungeon of Vienna’s Hofburg palace was an almost ideal setting—aside from being caked with a century’s worth of dust. Their results, published in 2015, coincided with similar tests from two other groups that also found quantum mechanics as flawless as ever.

BELL’S TEST REACHES THE STARS

One great final loophole remained to be closed—or at least narrowed. Any prior physical connection between components, no matter how distant in the past, has the potential to interfere with the validity of a Bell test’s results. If Alice shakes Bob’s hand prior to departing on a spaceship, they share a past. It is seemingly im­­­plausible that a local hidden variable theory would exploit these kinds of loopholes, but it was still possible.

Today quantum information science is among the most vibrant subfields in all of physics.

In 2016 a team that included Kaiser and Zeilinger performed a cosmic Bell test. Using telescopes in the Canary Islands, the researchers sourced random decisions for detector settings from stars sufficiently far apart in the sky that light from one would not reach the other for hundreds of years, ensuring a centuries-spanning gap in their shared cosmic past. Yet even then, quantum mechanics again proved triumphant.

One of the principal difficulties in explaining the importance of Bell tests to the public—as well as to skeptical physicists—is the perception that the veracity of quantum mechanics was a foregone conclusion. After all, researchers have measured many key aspects of quantum mechanics to a precision of greater than 10 parts in a billion. “I actually didn’t want to work on it,” Giustina says. “I thought, like, ‘Come on, this is old physics. We all know what’s going to happen.’” But the accuracy of quantum mechanics could not rule out the possibility of local hidden variables; only Bell tests could do that.

“What drew each of these Nobel recipients to the topic, and what drew John Bell himself to the topic, was indeed [the question], ‘Can the world work that way?’” Kaiser says. “And how do we really know with confidence?” What Bell tests allow physicists to do is remove the bias of anthropocentric aesthetic judgments from the equation. They purge from their work the parts of human cognition that recoil at the possibility of eerily inexplicable entanglement or that scoff at hidden variable theories as just more debates over how many angels may dance on the head of a pin.

The 2022 award honors Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger, but it is testament to all the researchers who were unsatisfied with superficial explanations about quantum mechanics and who asked their questions even when doing so was unpopular. “Bell tests,” Giustina concludes, “are a very useful way of looking at reality.”

Daniel Garisto is a freelance science journalist covering advances in physics and other natural sciences. He is based in New York.

CERN Accelerating science

Experiments

A range of experiments at CERN investigate physics from cosmic rays to supersymmetry

Diverse experiments at CERN

CERN is home to a wide range of experiments. Scientists from institutes all over the world form experimental collaborations to carry out a diverse research programme , ensuring that CERN covers a wealth of topics in physics, from the Standard Model to supersymmetry and from exotic isotopes to cosmic rays .

Several collaborations run experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful accelerator in the world. In addition, fixed-target experiments, antimatter experiments and experimental facilities make use of the LHC injector chain.

LHC experiments

Nine experiments at the Large Hadron Collider  (LHC) use detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by collisions in the accelerator . These experiments are run by collaborations of scientists from institutes all over the world. Each experiment is distinct and characterised by its detectors.

The biggest of these experiments, ATLAS and CMS , use general-purpose detectors to investigate the largest range of physics possible. Having two independently designed detectors is vital for cross-confirmation of any new discoveries made.  ALICE and LHCb  have detectors specialised for focussing on specific phenomena. These four detectors sit underground in huge caverns on the LHC ring.

The smallest experiments on the LHC are  TOTEM  and  LHCf , which focus on "forward particles" – protons or heavy ions that brush past each other rather than meeting head on when the beams collide. TOTEM uses detectors positioned on either side of the CMS interaction point, while LHCf is made up of two detectors which sit along the LHC beamline, at 140 metres either side of the ATLAS collision point.  MoEDAL-MAPP uses detectors deployed near LHCb to search for a hypothetical particle called the magnetic monopole. FASER and SND@LHC , the two newest LHC experiments, are situated close to the ATLAS collision point in order to search for light new particles and to study neutrinos.

MoEDAL-MAPP

Fixed-target experiments.

In “fixed-target” experiments, a beam of accelerated particles is directed at a solid, liquid or gas target, which itself can be part of the detection system. 

COMPASS , which looks at the structure of hadrons – particles made of quarks – uses beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

The SPS also feeds the North Area (NA), which houses a number of experiments. NA61/SHINE studies a phase transition between hadrons and quark-gluon plasma, and conducts measurements for experiments involving cosmic rays and long-baseline neutrino oscillations. NA62 uses protons from the SPS to study rare decays of kaons. NA63 directs beams of electrons and positrons onto a variety of targets to study radiation processes in strong electromagnetic fields. NA64 is looking for new particles that would mediate an unknown interaction between visible matter and dark matter. NA65 studies the production of tau neutrinos. UA9 is investigating how crystals could help to steer particle beams in high-energy colliders.

The CLOUD experiment uses beams from the  Proton Synchrotron (PS) to investigate a possible link between cosmic rays and cloud formation. DIRAC , which is now analysing data, is investigating the strong force between quarks.

Antimatter experiments

Currently the Antiproton Decelerator and ELENA serve several experiments that are studying antimatter and its properties:  AEGIS, ALPHA ,  ASACUSA ,  BASE and  GBAR . PUMA is designed to carry antiprotons to ISOLDE . Earlier experiments ( ATHENA , ATRAP  and ACE ) are now completed.

Experimental facilities

Experimental facilities at CERN include ISOLDE , MEDICIS , the neutron time-of-flight facility (n_TOF) and the CERN Neutrino Platform .

CERN Neutrino Platform

Non-accelerator experiments.

Not all experiments rely on CERN’s accelerator complex. AMS , for example, is a CERN-recognised experiment located on the International Space Station, which has its control centre at CERN. The CAST and OSQAR experiments are both looking for hypothetical dark matter particles called axions.

Past experiments

CERN’s experimental programme has consisted of hundreds of experiments spanning decades.

Among these were pioneering experiments for electroweak physics, a branch of physics that unifies the electromagnetic and weak fundamental forces . In 1958, an experiment at the Synchrocyclotron discovered a rare pion decay that spread CERN’s name around the world. Then in 1973, the Gargamelle bubble chamber presented first direct evidence of the weak neutral current. Ten years later, CERN physicists working on the UA1 and UA2 detectors announced the discovery of the W boson in January and Z boson in June – the two carriers of the electroweak force. Two key scientists behind the discoveries – Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer – received the Nobel prize in physics in 1984.

From 1989, the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) enabled the ALEPH , DELPHI , L3 and OPAL experiments to put the Standard Model of particle physics on a strong experimental basis. In 2000, LEP made way for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the same tunnel.

CERN’s huge contributions to electroweak physics are just some of the highlights of the experiments over the years.

Experiments with Google

A note to our community

Experiments with Google was born out of a simple idea, but you all turned it into something beyond anything we could have ever imagined. You filled it with thousands of experiments that inspired people everywhere - from the classroom to the surface of Mars.

When it comes to the internet, 14 years is a long time. So in the spirit of experimentation we’re trying something new.

This site will continue as a rich archival gallery for all existing experiments. But the action will live on at labs.google, a new place filled with new tools and toys for you to play with. And together we can continue to experiment with the future of technology.

Since 2009, coders have created thousands of amazing experiments using Chrome, Android, AI, AR and more. We're showcasing projects here, along with helpful tools and resources, to inspire others to create new experiments. Here are collections of experiments to explore, with new ones added every week. Have fun.

Featured Collections

View all collections.

WebXR Experiments

AR and VR made for the web

AI Experiments

Celebrating Creativity and AI

Arts & Culture Experiments

See what happens at the crossroads of art and technology

Experiments for Learning

A collection of experiments that teachers, students, and families are using to learn from home.

Start With One

A collection of experiments that started by working with one person to make something impactful for them and their community

Chrome Experiments

Creative code for the web

Recent Experiments

View all experiments, passage of water, instrument playground, cultural icons, say what you see, don’t touch the art, what's happening.

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September 22, 2024

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New results from the CMS experiment put W boson mass mystery to rest

by Tracy Marc, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

After an unexpected measurement by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment in 2022, physicists on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced today a new mass measurement of the W boson, one of nature's force-carrying particles.

This new measurement, which is a first for the CMS experiment, uses a new technique that makes it the most elaborate investigation of the W boson's mass to date. Following nearly a decade of analysis, CMS has found that the W boson's mass is consistent with predictions, finally putting a multi-year long mystery to rest.

The final analysis used 300 million events collected from the 2016 run of the LHC, and 4 billion simulated events. From this dataset, the team reconstructed and then measured the mass from more than 100 million W bosons.

They found that the W boson's mass is 80,360.2 ± 9.9 megaelectron volts (MeV), which is consistent with the Standard Model's predictions of 80,357 ± 6 MeV. They also ran a separate analysis that cross-checks the theoretical assumptions.

"The new CMS result is unique because of its precision and the way we determined the uncertainties," said Patty McBride, a distinguished scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Research Laboratory and the former CMS spokesperson.

"We've learned a lot from CDF and the other experiments who have worked on the W boson mass question. We are standing on their shoulders, and this is one of the reasons why we are able to take this study a big step forward."

Since the W boson was discovered in 1983, physicists on 10 different experiments have measured its mass.

The W boson is one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that describes nature at its most fundamental level. A precise understanding of the W boson's mass allows scientists to map the interplay of particles and forces, including the strength of the Higgs field and merger of electromagnetism with the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay.

"The entire universe is a delicate balancing act," said Anadi Canepa, deputy spokesperson of the CMS experiment and a senior scientist at Fermilab. "If the W mass is different from what we expect, there could be new particles or forces at play."

The new CMS measurement has a precision of 0.01%. This level of precision corresponds to measuring a 4-inch-long pencil to between 3.9996 and 4.0004 inches. But unlike pencils, the W boson is a fundamental particle with no physical volume and a mass that is less than a single atom of silver.

"This measurement is extremely difficult to make," Canepa added. "We need multiple measurements from multiple experiments to cross-check the value."

The CMS experiment is unique from the other experiments that have made this measurement because of its compact design, specialized sensors for fundamental particles called muons and an extremely strong solenoid magnet that bends the trajectories of charged particles as they move through the detector.

"CMS's design makes it particularly well-suited for precision mass measurements," McBride said. "It's a next generation experiment."

Because most fundamental particles are incredibly short-lived, scientists measure their masses by adding up the masses and momenta of everything they decay into. This method works well for particles like the Z boson, a cousin of the W boson, which decays into two muons. But the W boson poses a big challenge because one of its decay products is a tiny fundamental particle called a neutrino.

"Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to measure," said Josh Bendavid, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on this analysis. "In collider experiments, the neutrino goes undetected, so we can only work with half the picture."

Working with just half the picture means that the physicists need to be creative. Before running the analysis on real experimental data, the scientists first simulated billions of LHC collisions.

"In some cases, we even had to model small deformations in the detector," Bendavid said. "The precision is high enough that we care about small twists and bends; even if they're as small as the width of a human hair."

Physicists also need numerous theoretical inputs, such as what is happening inside the protons when they collide, how the W boson is produced, and how it moves before it decays.

"It's a real art to figure out the impact of theory inputs," McBride said.

In the past, physicists used the Z boson as a stand-in for the W boson while calibrating their theoretical models. While this method has many advantages, it also adds a layer of uncertainty into the process.

"Z and W bosons are siblings, but not twins," said Elisabetta Manca, a researcher at the University of California Los Angeles and one of the analyzers. "Physicists need to make a few assumptions when extrapolating from the Z to the W, and these assumptions are still under discussion."

To reduce this uncertainty, CMS researchers developed a novel analysis technique that uses only real W boson data to constrain the theoretical inputs.

"We were able to do this effectively thanks to a combination of a larger data set, the experience we gained from an earlier W boson study, and the latest theoretical developments," Bendavid said. "This has allowed us to free ourselves from the Z boson as our reference point."

As part of this analysis, they also examined 100 million tracks from the decays of well-known particles to recalibrate a massive section of the CMS detector until it was an order of magnitude more precise.

"This new level of precision will allow us to tackle critical measurements, such as those involving the W, Z and Higgs bosons, with enhanced accuracy," Manca said.

The most challenging part of the analysis was its time intensiveness, since it required creating a novel analysis technique and developing an incredibly deep understanding of the CMS detector.

"I started this research as a summer student, and now I'm in my third year as a postdoc," Manca said. "It's a marathon, not a sprint."

Provided by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

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The U.S. hasn’t seen syphilis numbers this high since 1950. Other STD rates are down or flat.

The U.S. syphilis epidemic isn’t abating, with the rate of infectious cases rising 9% in 2022, according to a new federal government report on sexually transmitted diseases in adults.

But there’s some unexpected good news: The rate of new gonorrhea cases fell for the first time in a decade.

It’s not clear why  syphilis  rose 9% while gonorrhea dropped 9%, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, adding that it’s too soon to know whether a new downward trend is emerging for the latter.

They are most focused on syphilis, which is less common than gonorrhea or chlamydia but considered more dangerous. Total cases surpassed 207,000 in 2022, the highest count in the United States since 1950, according to data released Tuesday.

And while it continues to have a disproportionate impact on gay and bisexual men, it is expanding in heterosexual men and women, and  increasingly affecting newborns, too , CDC officials said.

Syphilis is a bacterial disease that can surface as painless genital sores but can ultimately lead to paralysis, hearing loss, dementia and even death if left untreated.

New syphilis infections plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when antibiotics became widely available and fell to their lowest by 1998.

About 59,000 of the 2022 cases involved the most infectious forms of syphilis. Of those, about a quarter were women and nearly a quarter were heterosexual men.

“I think its unknowingly being spread in the cisgender heterosexual population because we really aren’t testing for it. We really aren’t looking for it” in that population, said Dr. Philip Chan, who teaches at Brown University and is chief medical officer of Open Door Health, a health center for gay, lesbian and transgender patients in Providence, Rhode Island.

The report also shows rates of the most infectious types of syphilis rose not just across the country but also across different racial and ethnic groups, with American Indian and Alaska Native people having the highest rate. South Dakota outpaced any other state for the highest rate of infectious syphilis at 84 cases per 100,000 people — more than twice as high as the state with the second-highest rate, New Mexico.

South Dakota’s increase was driven by an outbreak in the Native American community, said Dr. Meghan O’Connell, chief public health officer at the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board based in Rapid City, South Dakota. Nearly all of the cases were in heterosexual people, and O’Connell said that STD testing and treatment was already limited in isolated tribal communities and only got worse during the pandemic.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year convened a syphilis task force focused on stopping the spread of the STD, with an emphasis on places with the highest syphilis rates — South Dakota, 12 other states and the District of Columbia.

The report also looked at the more common STDs of chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Chlamydia cases were relatively flat from 2021 to 2022, staying at a rate of about 495 per 100,000, though there were declines noted in men and especially women in their early 20s. For gonorrhea, the most pronounced decline was seen in women in their early 20s as well.

Experts say they’re not sure why gonorrhea rates declined. It happened in about 40 states, so whatever explains the decrease appears to have occurred across most of the country. STD testing was disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and officials believe that’s the reason the chlamydia rate fell in 2020.

It’s possible that testing and diagnoses were still shaking out in 2022, said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.

“We are encouraged by the magnitude of the decline,” Mermin said, though the gonorrhea rate is still higher now than it was pre-pandemic. “We need to examine what happened, and whether it’s going to continue to happen.”

The Associated Press

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• 17 September 2024

‘The standard model is not dead’: ultra-precise particle measurement thrills physicists

• Elizabeth Gibney

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The CMS detector at CERN measured the decays of proton–proton collisions. Credit: Harold Cunningham/Getty

Physicists have nailed a fiendishly difficult measurement — the mass of the fundamental particle the W boson. The result, from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , is in line with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics , and pours cold water on an anomaly in the W boson mass that surfaced in 2022 . That measurement had hinted at the existence of phenomena beyond the standard model, physicists’ best description of particles and forces.

Particle’s surprise mass threatens to upend the standard model

“The standard model is not dead,” said Josh Bendavid, a particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a member of the CMS collaboration, when he presented the result on 17 September. Rapturous applause met the announcement, made at a seminar at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which hosts the LHC. The result was ten years in the making, and produced a mass of 80,360.2 million electronvolts for the W boson, which is involved in carrying the weak nuclear force (see ‘The W boson puzzle’). If the finding had been close to the 2022 result, we would be declaring the standard model’s death, said Bendavid.

“The community will be excited by the fact that we can reach this precision and have this understanding of the standard model at this level,” says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who works on the CMS experiment but was not involved in the result.

Source: CERN/compiled by Nature

Relief for physicists

The 2022 result 1 , produced by an experiment called Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, used ten-year-old data to calculate that the W boson was heavier than predicted, opening the exciting possibility of a crack in the standard model. Although the model is incredibly successful, physicists know it can’t be complete, because it doesn’t account for mysterious phenomena such as dark matter.

How the revamped Large Hadron Collider will hunt for new physics

The CMS result is the most precise measurement of the W mass to come out of the LHC, and its precision is roughly on par with that of the CDF result. It is also in line with the four measurements that preceded the CDF figure, leaving that value as an outlier. “They cannot both be right,” says Ashutosh Kotwal, an experimental particle physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the CDF study.

“It would have been probably better for the community if we found something totally different from the standard model, because that would have been exciting for the future of our field,” says Elisabetta Manca, a particle physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was one of the main analysts behind the CMS finding. But in terms of confidence in the result, the value was a “relief”, she says.

Fundamental forces

The W boson, along with its sister particle, the Z , are involved in radioactive decay as carriers of the weak nuclear force, one of four fundamental forces of nature. Its mass is one of the few values in the standard model that can be predicted with high precision by theory and measured experimentally. This makes it a great way to hunt for cracks in the standard model. “There are not many high-precision observables. That’s what makes it important and worthwhile,” says Kotwal.

Exotic four-quark particle spotted at Large Hadron Collider

But the W mass is extremely difficult to measure. The LHC makes bosons by accelerating protons to produce extremely high-energy collisions. These particles quickly decay into other particles that the experiments can detect. But the W boson decays into two particles, and only one is detectable — a lepton, such as an electron, or its heavier cousin the muon. The other particle, a neutrino, zips straight out of the detector, leaving no trace.

Muon decays

The CMS analysis looked mostly at muon decays. The team reconstructed properties of muons from around 100 million W decays from the LHC with unprecedented precision, says Manca. They then compared the data with four billion simulated collisions and decays that used different values for the W mass — and different values for thousands of parameters that could bias the results — and looked for the best match. “The one that matches is the one we extract,” says Canelli.

Illustration of a CMS collision event in which a W boson decays into a muon (red line). Credit: CMS/CERN

The team used cutting-edge software and theory, and calibrated and cross-checked their results with alternative measurements of the W boson and against Z decays to ensure that their methods were working as expected, says Manca.

Because the CMS result is broadly in line with those from other LHC experiments — ATLAS and LHCb — which used different detectors and methodologies, the team has confidence that the figure is correct, says Manca.

Anomaly assessment

No one can yet say why CDF’s result stands out. It’s possible that the CDF detector used different theoretical tools from those in CMS to generate the simulations. CDF detected collisions from a proton–antiproton accelerator called the Tevatron , which closed in 2011, whereas the LHC collides only protons. “There is no one thing where we can say, ‘That’s the reason why the result is so different,’” says Manca.

Kotwal says he will need to see the CMS paper, which will be published in coming months, to see the team’s methodology. “People have been reviewing how we’ve done it, and we haven’t received any clear indication that any flaw has been noticed. The same has to be done for CMS,” he says.

To reach agreement on humankind’s best guess of the W mass, experts from each experiment and theorists will have to come together to try to understand the differing results. “We shouldn’t leave the CDF result as an outlier, we need to understand why or how it is there,” says Canelli.

Although CMS did not find an anomaly, the ten-year process resulted in tools that allow physicists to make other precise measurements. Such high-precision comparisons are what Manca thinks will ultimately break open the standard model.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03042-9

Aaltonen, T. et al. Science 376 , 170–176 (2022).

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• Feb 21, 2021
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The Dyatlov Pass Incident

What is the Dyatlov Pass incident? Well, as we’ll find out, it was when nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains between February 1st & 2nd in 1959, under supposed uncertain circumstances. The experienced trekking group, who were all from the Ural Polytechnical Institute , had established a camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl , in an area now named in honour of the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov. During the night, something caused them to cut their way out of their tent and attempt to flee the campsite while not being dressed for the heavy ass snowfall and subzero temperatures. Subzero was one of my favorite Mortal Kombat characters… god I loved that game.

After the group's bodies were grusomly discovered, an investigation by Soviet authorities determined that six of them had died from hypothermia while the other three had been killed by physical trauma . One victim actually had major skull damage, two had severe chest trauma, and another had a small crack in the skull . Was all of this caused by an avalanche or from something nefarious? Four of the bodies were found lying in running water in a creek, and three of these had soft tissue damage of the head and face – two of the bodies were missing their eyes, one was missing its tongue, and one was missing its eyebrows. It’s eyebrows! The Soviet investigation concluded that a "compelling natural force" had caused the untimely deaths. Numerous theories have been brought forward to account for the unexplained deaths, including animal attacks, hypothermia, avalanche , katabatic winds , infrasound -induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these. We’ll discuss all these in further detail later on.

Recently, Russia has opened a new investigation into the Dyatlov incident in 2019, and its conclusions were presented in July 2020: Simply put, they believe that an avalanche had led to the deaths of the hikers. Survivors of the avalanche had been forced to suddenly leave their camp in low visibility conditions with inadequate clothing, and had died of hypothermia. Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the regional prosecutor's office, said: "It was a heroic struggle. There was no panic. But they had no chance to save themselves under the circumstances." A study published in 2021 suggested that a type of avalanche known as a slab avalanche could explain some of the injuries. However, we’ll run through everything and you can come to your own conclusion.

Ok, let’s dive into the details of the event.

In 1959, the group was formed for a skiing expedition across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union. According to Prosecutor Tempalov, documents that were found in the tent of the expedition suggest that the expedition was named for the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was possibly dispatched by the local Komsomol organisation.Which was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union , which was sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute; now Ural Federal University, was the leader who assembled a group of nine others for the trip, most of whom were fellow students and peers at the university.Ok, so they were mostly students. Each member of the group, which consisted of eight men and two women, was an experienced Grade II-hiker with ski tour experience, and would be receiving Grade III certification upon their return. So, this trekk was like a test. I hated tests. Especially ones that could KILL YOU! At the time, this was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union, and required candidates to traverse 190 mi. The route was designed by Igor Dyatlov's group in order to reach the far northern regions of Sverdlovsk Oblast and the upper-streams of the Lozva river. The route was approved by the Sverdlovsk city route commission, which was a division of the Sverdlovsk Committee of Physical Culture and Sport. They approved of and confirmed the group of 10 people on January 8th, 1959. The goal of the expedition was to reach Otorten, a mountain(6.2 mi north of the site where the incident took place. This path, taken in February, was estimated as a Category III, the most difficult time to traverse.

On January 23rd, 1959 the Dyatlov group was issued their route book which listed their course as following the No.5 trail. At that time, the Sverdlovsk City Committee of Physical Culture and Sport listed approval for 11 people. The 11th person was listed as Semyon Zolotaryov who was previously certified to go with another expedition of similar difficulty (that was the Sogrin expedition group). The Dyatlov group left the Sverdlovsk city (today called Yekaterinburg) on the same day they received the route book.

The members of the group were Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov, Yuri Nikolayevich Doroshenko, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Dubinina, Georgiy (Yuri) Alexeyevich Krivonischenko, Alexander Sergeyevich Kolevatov, Zinaida Alekseevna Kolmogorova, Rustem Vladimirovich Slobodin, Nikolai Vladimirovich Thibeaux-Brignolles, Semyon (Alexander) Alekseevich Zolotaryov, and Yuri Yefimovich Yudin

The group arrived by train at Ivdel , a town at the centre of the northern province of Sverdlovsk Oblast in the early morning hours of January 25, 1959. They took a truck to Vizhai, a little village that is the last inhabited settlement to the north. As of 2010, only 207 really, really fucking cold people lived there. While spending the night in Vizhai, and probably freezing their baguettes off, the skiers purchased and ate loaves of bread to keep their energy levels up for the following day's hike.

On January 27, they began their trek toward Gora Otorten. On January 28, one member, Yuri Yudin, who suffered from several health ailments (including rheumatism and a congenital heart defect ) turned back due to knee and joint pain that made him unable to continue the hike. The remaining nine hikers continued the trek. Ok, my first question with this is, why in the fuck was that guy there, to begin with??

Diaries and cameras found around their last campsite made it possible to track the group's route up to the day before the incident. On January 31st, the group arrived at the edge of a highland area and began to prepare for climbing. In a wooded valley, they rounded up surplus food and equipment that they would use for the trip back. The next day, the hikers started to move through the pass. It seems they planned to get over the pass and make camp for the next night on the opposite side, but because of worsening weather conditions—like snowstorms, decreasing visibility... large piles of yeti shit—they lost their direction and headed west, toward the top of Kholat Syakhl . When they realised their mistake, the group decided to set up camp there on the slope of the mountain, rather than move almost a mile downhill to a forested area that would have offered some shelter from the weather. Yudin, the debilitated goofball that shouldn’t have even been there speculated, "Dyatlov probably did not want to lose the altitude they had gained, or he decided to practice camping on the mountain slope."

Before leaving, Captain Dyatlov had agreed he would send a telegram to their sports club as soon as the group returned to teeny, tiny Vizhai. It was expected that this would happen no later than February 12th, but Dyatlov had told Yudin, before he departed from the group, that he expected it to actually be longer. When the 12th passed and no messages had been received, there was no immediate reaction because, ya know… fuck it. Just kidding, these types of delays were actually common with such expeditions. On February 20th, the travellers' worried relatives demanded a rescue operation and the head of the institute sent the first rescue groups, consisting of volunteer students and teachers. Later, the army and militsiya forces (aka the Soviet police) became involved, with planes and helicopters ordered to join in on the search party.

On February 26th, the searchers found the group's abandoned and super fucked up tent on Kholat Syakhl . The campsite undoubtedly baffled the search party. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said “HOLY SHIT! THIS PLACE IS FUCKED UP!”... No, that’s not true. He actually said, "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind." Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside. Which seems like a serious and quick escape route was needed. Nine sets of footprints, left by people wearing only socks or a single shoe or even barefoot, could actually be followed, leading down to the edge of a nearby wood, on the opposite side of the pass, about a mile to the north-east. After approximately 1,600 ft, these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large Siberian pine , the searchers found the visible remains of a small fire. There were the first two bodies, those of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, shoeless and dressed only in their tighty whiteys. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, maybe the camp. Between the pine and the camp, the searchers found three more corpses: Dyatlov, Kolmogorova, and Slobodin, who died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent. They were found at distances of 980, 1,570, and 2,070 ft from the tree.

Finding the remaining four travellers took more than two frigging months. They were finally found on May 4th under 13 ft of snow in a ravine 246 ft further into the woods from the pine tree. Three of the four were better dressed than the others, and there were signs that some clothing of those who had died first had been taken off of their corpses for use by the others. Dubinina was wearing Krivonishenko's burned, torn trousers, and her left foot and shin were wrapped in a torn jacket.

Let’s get into the investigation. A legal inquest started immediately after the first five bodies were found. A medical examination found no injuries that might have led to their deaths, and it was concluded that they had all died of hypothermia .Which would make sense because it was colder than a polar bear’s butthole. Slobodin had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.

An examination of the four bodies found in May shifted the overall narrative of what they initially believed transpired. Three of the hikers had fatal injuries: Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage, and Dubinina and Zolotaryov had major chest fractures. According to Boris Vozrozhdenny, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, comparable to that of a car crash.Also, the bodies had no external wounds associated with the bone fractures, as if they had been subjected to a high level of pressure.

All four bodies found at the bottom of the creek in a running stream of water had soft tissue damage to their head and face. For example, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue and a fragment of her skullbone, while Zolotaryov was missing his friggin eyeballs, and Aleksander Kolevatov his eyebrows. V. A. Vozrozhdenny, the forensic expert performing the post-mortem examination , judged that these injuries happened after they had died, due to the location of the bodies in a stream.

At first, there was speculation that the indigenous Mansi people , who were just simple reindeer herders local to the area, had attacked and murdered the group for making fun of Rudolph. Several Mansi were interrogated, but the investigation indicated that the nature of the deaths did not support this hypothesis: only the hikers' footprints were visible, and they showed no sign of hand-to-hand struggle. Oh, I was kidding about the Rudolph thing. They thought they attacked the hikers for being on their land.

Although the temperature was very low, around −13 to −22 °F with a storm blowing, the dead were only partially dressed, as I mentioned.

Journalists reporting on the available parts of the inquest files claim that it states:

Six of the group members died of hypothermia and three of fatal injuries.

There were no indications of other people nearby on Kholat Syakhl apart from the nine travellers.

The tent had been ripped open from within.

The victims had died six to eight hours after their last meal.

Traces from the camp showed that all group members left the campsite of their own accord, on foot.

Some levels of radiation were found on one victim's clothing.

To dispel the theory of an attack by the indigenous Mansi people, Vozrozhdenny stated that the fatal injuries of the three bodies could not have been caused by human beings, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged".

Released documents contained no information about the condition of the skiers' internal organs.

And most obviously, There were no survivors.

At the time, the official conclusion was that the group members had died because of a compelling natural force.The inquest officially ceased in May 1959 as a result of the absence of a guilty party. The files were sent to a secret archive.

In 1997, it was revealed that the negatives from Krivonischenko's camera were kept in the private archive of one of the investigators, Lev Ivanov. The film material was donated by Ivanov's daughter to the Dyatlov Foundation. The diaries of the hiking party fell into Russia's public domain in 2009.

On April 12th, 2018, Zolotarev's remains were exhumed on the initiative of journalists of the Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda . Contradictory results were obtained: one of the experts said that the character of the injuries resembled a person knocked down by a car, and the DNA analysis did not reveal any similarity to the DNA of living relatives. In addition, it turned out that Zolotarev's name was not on the list of those buried at the Ivanovskoye cemetery. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the face from the exhumed skull matched postwar photographs of Zolotarev, although journalists expressed suspicions that another person was hiding under Zolotarev's name after World War II .

In February 2019, Russian authorities reopened the investigation into the incident, yet again, although only three possible explanations were being considered: an avalanche, a slab avalanche , or a hurricane . The possibility of a crime had been discounted.

Other reports brought about a whole bunch of additional speculation.

Twelve-year-old Yury Kuntsevich, who later became the head of the Yekaterinburg-based Dyatlov Foundation, attended five of the hikers' funerals. He recalled that their skin had a "deep brown tan".

Another group of hikers 31 mi south of the incident reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the sky to the north on the night of the incident.Similar spheres were observed in Ivdel and other areas continually during the period from February to March of 1959, by various independent witnesses (including the meteorology service and the military). These sightings were not noted in the 1959 investigation, and the various witnesses came forward years later.

After the initial investigation,

Anatoly Gushchin summarized his research in the book The Price of State Secrets Is Nine Lives. Some researchers criticised the work for its concentration on the speculative theory of a Soviet secret weapon experiment, but its publication led to public discussion, stimulated by interest in the paranormal .It is true that many of those who had remained silent for thirty years reported new facts about the accident. One of them was the former police officer, Lev Ivanov, who led the official inquest in 1959. In 1990, he published an article that included his admission that the investigation team had no rational explanation for the incident. He also stated that, after his team reported that they had seen flying spheres, he then received direct orders from high-ranking regional officials to dismiss this claim.

In 2000, a regional television company produced the documentary film The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass . With the help of the film crew, a Yekaterinburg writer, Anna Matveyeva, published a docudrama of the same name. A large part of the book includes broad quotations from the official case, diaries of victims, interviews with searchers and other documentaries collected by the film-makers. The narrative line of the book details the everyday life and thoughts of a modern woman (an alter ego of the author herself, which is super weird) who attempts to resolve the case. Despite its fictional narrative, Matveyeva's book remains the largest source of documentary materials ever made available to the public regarding the incident. Also, the pages of the case files and other documentaries (in photocopies and transcripts) are gradually being published on a web forum for nerds just like you and i!.

The Dyatlov Foundation was founded in 1999 at Yekaterinburg, with the help of Ural State Technical University, led by Yuri Kuntsevitch. The foundation's stated aim is to continue investigation of the case and to maintain the Dyatlov Museum to preserve the memory of the dead hikers. On July 1st 2016, a memorial plaque was inaugurated in Solikamsk in Ural's Perm Region, dedicated to Yuri Yudin (the dude who pussed out and is the sole survivor of the expedition group), who died in 2013.

Now, let’s go over some of the theories of what actually took place at the pass.

On July 11 2020, Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the Urals Federal District directorate of the Prosecutor-General 's Office, announced an avalanche to be the "official cause of death" for the Dyatlov group in 1959. Later independent computer simulation and analysis by Swiss researchers also suggest avalanche as the cause.

Reviewing the sensationalist " Yeti " hypothesis , American skeptic author Benjamin Radford suggests an avalanche as more plausible:

“that the group woke up in a panic (...) and cut their way out the tent either because an avalanche had covered the entrance to their tent or because they were scared that an avalanche was imminent (...) (better to have a potentially repairable slit in a tent than risk being buried alive in it under tons of snow). They were poorly clothed because they had been sleeping, and ran to the safety of the nearby woods where trees would help slow oncoming snow. In the darkness of night, they got separated into two or three groups; one group made a fire (hence the burned hands) while the others tried to return to the tent to recover their clothing since the danger had passed. But it was too cold, and they all froze to death before they could locate their tent in the darkness. At some point, some of the clothes may have been recovered or swapped from the dead, but at any rate, the group of four whose bodies was most severely damaged were caught in an avalanche and buried under 4 meters (13 ft) of snow (more than enough to account for the 'compelling natural force' the medical examiner described). Dubinina's tongue was likely removed by scavengers and ordinary predation.”

Evidence contradicting the avalanche theory includes:

The location of the incident did not have any obvious signs of an avalanche having taken place. An avalanche would have left certain patterns and debris distributed over a wide area. The bodies found within a month of the event were covered with a very shallow layer of snow and, had there been an avalanche of sufficient strength to sweep away the second party, these bodies would have been swept away as well; this would have caused more serious and different injuries in the process and would have damaged the tree line.

Over 100 expeditions to the region had been held since the incident, and none of them ever reported conditions that might create an avalanche. A study of the area using up-to-date terrain-related physics revealed that the location was entirely unlikely for such an avalanche to have occurred. The "dangerous conditions" found in another nearby area (which had significantly steeper slopes and cornices) were observed in April and May when the snowfalls of winter were melting. During February, when the incident occurred, there were no such conditions.

An analysis of the terrain and the slope showed that even if there could have been a very specific avalanche that found its way into the area, its path would have gone past the tent. The tent had collapsed from the side but not in a horizontal direction.

Dyatlov was an experienced skier and the much older Zolotaryov was studying for his Masters Certificate in ski instruction and mountain hiking. Neither of these two men would have been likely to camp anywhere in the path of a potential avalanche.

Footprint patterns leading away from the tent were inconsistent with someone, let alone a group of nine people, running in panic from either real or imagined danger. All the footprints leading away from the tent and towards the woods were consistent with individuals who were walking at a normal pace.

Repeated 2015 investigation [ edit ]

A review of the 1959 investigation's evidence completed in 2015–2019 by experienced investigators from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) on request of the families confirmed the avalanche with several important details added. First of all, the ICRF investigators (one of them an experienced alpinist ) confirmed that the weather on the night of the tragedy was very harsh, with wind speeds up to hurricane force,(45–67 mph, a snowstorm and temperatures reaching −40 °C. These factors weren't considered by the 1959 investigators who arrived at the scene of the accident three weeks later when the weather had much improved and any remains of the snow slide had settled and been covered with fresh snowfall. The harsh weather at the same time played a critical role in the events of the tragic night, which have been reconstructed as follows:

On 1 February the group arrives at the Kholat Syakhl mountain and erects a large, 9-person tent on an open slope, without any natural barriers such as forests. On the day and a few preceding days, a heavy snowfall continued, with strong wind and frost.

The group traversing the slope and digging a tent site into the snow weakens the snow base. During the night the snowfield above the tent starts to slide down slowly under the weight of the new snow, gradually pushing on the tent fabric, starting from the entrance. The group wakes up and starts evacuation in panic, with only some able to put on warm clothes. With the entrance blocked, the group escapes through a hole cut in the tent fabric and descends the slope to find a place perceived as safe from the avalanche only 1500 m down, at the forest border.

Because some of the members have only incomplete clothing, the group splits. Two of the group, only in their underwear and pajamas, were found at the Siberian pine tree, near a fire pit. Their bodies were found first and confirmed to have died from hypothermia.

Three hikers, including Dyatlov, attempted to climb back to the tent, possibly to get sleeping bags. They had better clothes than those at the fire pit, but still quite light and with inadequate footwear. Their bodies were found at various distances 300–600 m from the campfire, in poses suggesting that they had fallen exhausted while trying to climb in deep snow in extremely cold weather.

The remaining four, equipped with warm clothing and footwear, were trying to find or build a better camping place in the forest further down the slope. Their bodies were found 70 m from the fireplace, under several meters of snow and with traumas indicating that they had fallen into a snow hole formed above a stream. These bodies were found only after two months.

According to the ICRF investigators, the factors contributing to the tragedy were extremely bad weather and lack of experience of the group leader in such conditions, which led to the selection of a dangerous camping place. After the snow slide, another mistake of the group was to split up, rather than building a temporary camp down in the forest and trying to survive through the night. Negligence of the 1959 investigators contributed to their report creating more questions than answers and inspiring numerous conspiracy theories.

In 2021 a team of physicists and engineers led by Alexander Puzrin published a new model that demonstrated how even a relatively small slide of snow slab on the Kholat Syakhl slope could cause tent damage and injuries consistent with those suffered by Dyatlov team.

Ok, what about the Katabatic wind that I mentioned earlier?

In 2019, a Swedish-Russian expedition was made to the site, and after investigations, they proposed that a violent katabatic wind was a plausible explanation for the incident. Katabatic winds are a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. They are somewhat rare events and can be extremely violent. They were implicated in a 1978 case at Anaris Mountain in Sweden, where eight hikers were killed and one was severely injured in the aftermath of katabatic wind. The topography of these locations were noted to be very similar according to the expedition.

A sudden katabatic wind would have made it impossible to remain in the tent, and the most rational course of action would have been for the hikers to cover the tent with snow and seek shelter behind the treeline. On top of the tent, there was also a torch left turned on, possibly left there intentionally so that the hikers could find their way back to the tent once the winds subsided. The expedition proposed that the group of hikers constructed two bivouac shelters , or just makeshift shelters, one of which collapsed, leaving four of the hikers buried with the severe injuries observed.

Another hypothesis popularised by Donnie Eichar 's 2013 book Dead Mountain is that wind going around Kholat Syakal created a Kármán vortex street , a repeating pattern of swirling vortices , caused by a process known as vortex shedding , which is responsible for the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid around blunt bodies. which can produce infrasound capable of inducing panic attacks in humans. According to Eichar's theory, the infrasound generated by the wind as it passed over the top of the Holatchahl mountain was responsible for causing physical discomfort and mental distress in the hikers. Eichar claims that, because of their panic, the hikers were driven to leave the tent by whatever means necessary, and fled down the slope. By the time they were further down the hill, they would have been out of the infrasound's path and would have regained their composure, but in the darkness would have been unable to return to their shelter. The traumatic injuries suffered by three of the victims were the result of their stumbling over the edge of a ravine in the darkness and landing on the rocks at the bottom. Hmmm...plausible.

Military tests

In another theory, the campsite fell within the path of a Soviet parachute mine exercise. This theory alleges that the hikers, woken up by loud explosions, fled the tent in a shoeless panic and found themselves unable to return for their shit. After some members froze to death attempting to endure the bombardment, others commandeered their clothing only to be fatally injured by subsequent parachute mine concussions. There are in fact records of parachute mines being tested by the Soviet military in the area around the time the hikers were out there, fuckin’ around. Parachute mines detonate while still in the air rather than upon striking the Earth's surface and produce signature injuries similar to those experienced by the hikers: heavy internal damage with relatively little external trauma. The theory coincides with reported sightings of glowing, orange orbs floating or falling in the sky within the general vicinity of the hikers and allegedly photographed by them, potentially military aircraft or descending parachute mines. (remember the camera they found? HUH? Yeah?)

This theory (among others) uses scavenging animals to explain Dubinina's injuries. Some speculate that the bodies were unnaturally manipulated, on the basis of characteristic livor mortis markings discovered during an autopsy, as well as burns to hair and skin. Photographs of the tent allegedly show that it was erected incorrectly, something the experienced hikers were unlikely to have done.

A similar theory alleges the testing of radiological weapons and is based partly on the discovery of radioactivity on some of the clothing as well as the descriptions of the bodies by relatives as having orange skin and grey hair. However, radioactive dispersal would have affected all, not just some, of the hikers and equipment, and the skin and hair discoloration can be explained by a natural process of mummification after three months of exposure to the cold and wind. The initial suppression by Soviet authorities of files describing the group's disappearance is sometimes mentioned as evidence of a cover-up, but the concealment of information about domestic incidents was standard procedure in the USSR and thus nothing strange.. And by the late 1980s, all Dyatlov files had been released in some manner.

Let’s talk about Paradoxical undressing

International Science Times proposed that the hikers' deaths were caused by hypothermia, which can induce a behavior known as paradoxical undressing in which hypothermic subjects remove their clothes in response to perceived feelings of burning warmth. It is undisputed that six of the nine hikers died of hypothermia. However, others in the group appear to have acquired additional clothing (from those who had already died), which suggests that they were of a sound enough mind to try to add layers.

Keith McCloskey, who has researched the incident for many years and has appeared in several TV documentaries on the subject, traveled to the Dyatlov Pass in 2015 with Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Foundation and a group. At the Dyatlov Pass he noted:

There were wide discrepancies in distances quoted between the two possible locations of the snow shelter where Dubinina, Kolevatov, Zolotarev, and Thibault-Brignolles were found. One location was approximately 80 to 100 meters from the pine tree where the bodies of Doroshenko and Krivonischenko were found and the other suggested location was so close to the tree that anyone in the snow shelter could have spoken to those at the tree without raising their voices to be heard. This second location also has a rock in the stream where Dubinina's body was found and is the more likely location of the two. However, the second suggested location of the two has a topography that is closer to the photos taken at the time of the search in 1959.

The location of the tent near the ridge was found to be too close to the spur of the ridge for any significant build-up of snow to cause an avalanche. Furthermore, the prevailing wind blowing over the ridge had the effect of blowing snow away from the edge of the ridge on the side where the tent was. This further reduced any build-up of snow to cause an avalanche. This aspect of the lack of snow on the top and near the top of the ridge was pointed out by Sergey Sogrin in 2010.

McCloskey also noted:

Lev Ivanov's boss, Evgeny Okishev (Deputy Head of the Investigative Department of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Prosecution Office), was still alive in 2015 and had given an interview to former Kemerovo prosecutor Leonid Proshkin in which Okishev stated that he was arranging another trip to the Pass to fully investigate the strange deaths of the last four bodies when Deputy Prosecutor General Urakov arrived from Moscow and ordered the case shut down.

Evgeny Okishev also stated in his interview with Leonid Proshkin that Klinov, head of the Sverdlovsk Prosecutor's Office, was present at the first post mortems in the morgue and spent three days there, something Okishev regarded as highly unusual and the only time, in his experience, it had happened.

Donnie Eichar , who investigated and made a documentary about the incident, evaluated several other theories that are deemed unlikely or have been discredited:

They were attacked by Mansi or other local tribesmen. The local tribesmen were known to be peaceful and there was no track evidence of anyone approaching the tent.

They were attacked and chased by animal wildlife. There were no animal tracks and the group would not have abandoned the relative security of the tent.

High winds blew one member away, and the others attempted to rescue the person. A large experienced group would not have behaved like that, and winds strong enough to blow away people with such force would have also blown away the tent.

An argument, possibly related to a romantic encounter that left some of them only partially clothed, led to a violent dispute. About this, Eichar states that it is "highly implausible. By all indications, the group was largely harmonious, and sexual tension was confined to platonic flirtation and crushes. There were no drugs present and the only alcohol was a small flask of medicinal alcohol, found intact at the scene. The group had even sworn off cigarettes for the expedition." Furthermore, a fight could not have left the massive injuries that one body had suffered.

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YEKATERINBURG: FACTORIES, URAL SIGHTS, YELTSIN AND THE WHERE NICHOLAS II WAS KILLED

Sverdlovsk oblast.

Sverdlovsk Oblast is the largest region in the Urals; it lies in the foothills of mountains and contains a monument indicating the border between Europe and Asia. The region covers 194,800 square kilometers (75,200 square miles), is home to about 4.3 million people and has a population density of 22 people per square kilometer. About 83 percent of the population live in urban areas. Yekaterinburg is the capital and largest city, with 1.5 million people. For Russians, the Ural Mountains are closely associated with Pavel Bazhov's tales and known for folk crafts such as Kasli iron sculpture, Tagil painting, and copper embossing. Yekaterinburg is the birthplace of Russia’s iron and steel industry, taking advantage of the large iron deposits in the Ural mountains. The popular Silver Ring of the Urals tourist route starts here.

In the summer you can follow in the tracks of Yermak, climb relatively low Ural mountain peaks and look for boulders seemingly with human faces on them. You can head to the Gemstone Belt of the Ural mountains, which used to house emerald, amethyst and topaz mines. In the winter you can go ice fishing, ski and cross-country ski.

Sverdlovsk Oblast and Yekaterinburg are located near the center of Russia, at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and also the southern and northern parts of Russia. Winters are longer and colder than in western section of European Russia. Snowfalls can be heavy. Winter temperatures occasionally drop as low as - 40 degrees C (-40 degrees F) and the first snow usually falls in October. A heavy winter coat, long underwear and good boots are essential. Snow and ice make the sidewalks very slippery, so footwear with a good grip is important. Since the climate is very dry during the winter months, skin moisturizer plus lip balm are recommended. Be alert for mud on street surfaces when snow cover is melting (April-May). Patches of mud create slippery road conditions.

Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg (kilometer 1818 on the Trans-Siberian Railway) is the fourth largest city in Russia, with of 1.5 million and growth rate of about 12 percent, high for Russia. Located in the southern Ural mountains, it was founded by Peter the Great and named after his wife Catherine, it was used by the tsars as a summer retreat and is where tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed and President Boris Yeltsin lived most of his life and began his political career. The city is near the border between Europe and Asia.

Yekaterinburg (also spelled Ekaterinburg) is located on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains in the headwaters of the Iset and Pyshma Rivers. The Iset runs through the city center. Three ponds — Verkh-Isetsky, Gorodskoy and Nizhne-Isetsky — were created on it. Yekaterinburg has traditionally been a city of mining and was once the center of the mining industry of the Urals and Siberia. Yekaterinburg remains a major center of the Russian armaments industry and is sometimes called the "Pittsburgh of Russia.". A few ornate, pastel mansions and wide boulevards are reminders of the tsarist era. The city is large enough that it has its own Metro system but is characterized mostly by blocky Soviet-era apartment buildings. The city has advanced under President Vladimir Putin and is now one of the fastest growing places in Russia, a country otherwise characterized by population declines

Yekaterinburg is technically an Asian city as it lies 32 kilometers east of the continental divide between Europe and Asia. The unofficial capital of the Urals, a key region in the Russian heartland, it is second only to Moscow in terms of industrial production and capital of Sverdlovsk oblast. Among the important industries are ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, machine building and metalworking, chemical and petrochemicals, construction materials and medical, light and food industries. On top of being home of numerous heavy industries and mining concerns, Yekaterinburg is also a major center for industrial research and development and power engineering as well as home to numerous institutes of higher education, technical training, and scientific research. In addition, Yekaterinburg is the largest railway junction in Russia: the Trans-Siberian Railway passes through it, the southern, northern, western and eastern routes merge in the city.

Accommodation: There are two good and affordable hotels — the 3-star Emerald and Parus hotels — located close to the city's most popular landmarks and main transport interchanges in the center of Yekaterinburg. Room prices start at RUB 1,800 per night.

History of Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg was founded in 1723 by Peter the Great and named after his wife Catherine I. It was used by the tsars as a summer retreat but was mainly developed as metalworking and manufacturing center to take advantage of the large deposits of iron and other minerals in the Ural mountains. It is best known to Americans as the place where the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and near where American U-2 spy plane, piloted by Gary Powers, was shot down in 1960.

Peter the Great recognized the importance of the iron and copper-rich Urals region for Imperial Russia's industrial and military development. In November 1723, he ordered the construction of a fortress factory and an ironworks in the Iset River Valley, which required a dam for its operation. In its early years Yekaterinburg grew rich from gold and other minerals and later coal. The Yekaterinburg gold rush of 1745 created such a huge amount of wealth that one rich baron of that time hosted a wedding party that lasted a year. By the mid-18th century, metallurgical plants had sprung up across the Urals to cast cannons, swords, guns and other weapons to arm Russia’s expansionist ambitions. The Yekaterinburg mint produced most of Russia's coins. Explorations of the Trans-Baikal and Altai regions began here in the 18th century.

Iron, cast iron and copper were the main products. Even though Iron from the region went into the Eiffel Tower, the main plant in Yekaterinburg itself was shut down in 1808. The city still kept going through a mountain factory control system of the Urals. The first railway in the Urals was built here: in 1878, the Yekaterinburg-Perm railway branch connected the province's capital with the factories of the Middle Urals.

In the Soviet era the city was called Sverdlovsk (named after Yakov Sverdlov, the man who organized Nicholas II's execution). During the first five-year plans the city became industrial — old plants were reconstructed, new ones were built. The center of Yekaterinburg was formed to conform to the historical general plan of 1829 but was the layout was adjusted around plants and factories. In the Stalin era the city was a major gulag transhipment center. In World War II, many defense-related industries were moved here. It and the surrounding area were a center of the Soviet Union's military industrial complex. Soviet tanks, missiles and aircraft engines were made in the Urals. During the Cold War era, Yekaterinburg was a center of weapons-grade uranium enrichment and processing, warhead assembly and dismantlement. In 1979, 64 people died when anthrax leaked from a biological weapons facility. Yekaterinburg was a “Closed City” for 40 years during the Cold Soviet era and was not open to foreigners until 1991

In the early post-Soviet era, much like Pittsburgh in the 1970s, Yekaterinburg had a hard struggle d to cope with dramatic economic changes that have made its heavy industries uncompetitive on the world market. Huge defense plants struggled to survive and the city was notorious as an organized crime center in the 1990s, when its hometown boy Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia. By the 2000s, Yekaterinburg’s retail and service was taking off, the defense industry was reviving and it was attracting tech industries and investments related to the Urals’ natural resources. By the 2010s it was vying to host a world exhibition in 2020 (it lost, Dubai won) and it had McDonald’s, Subway, sushi restaurants, and Gucci, Chanel and Armani. There were Bentley and Ferrari dealerships but they closed down

Transportation in Yekaterinburg

Getting There: By Plane: Yekaterinburg is a three-hour flight from Moscow with prices starting at RUB 8,000, or a 3-hour flight from Saint Petersburg starting from RUB 9,422 (direct round-trip flight tickets for one adult passenger). There are also flights from Frankfurt, Istanbul, China and major cities in the former Soviet Union.

By Train: Yekaterinburg is a major stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Daily train service is available to Moscow and many other Russian cities.Yekaterinburg is a 32-hour train ride from Moscow (tickets RUB 8,380 and above) or a 36-hour train ride from Saint Petersburg (RUB 10,300 and above). The ticket prices are round trip for a berth in a sleeper compartment for one adult passenger). By Car: a car trip from Moscow to Yekateringburg is 1,787 kilometers long and takes about 18 hours. The road from Saint Petersburg is 2,294 kilometers and takes about 28 hours.

Regional Transport: The region's public transport includes buses and suburban electric trains. Regional trains provide transport to larger cities in the Ural region. Buses depart from Yekaterinburg’s two bus stations: the Southern Bus Station and the Northern Bus Station.

Regional Transport: According the to Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT): “Public transportation is well developed. Overcrowding is common. Fares are low. Service is efficient. Buses are the main form of public transport. Tram network is extensive. Fares are reasonable; service is regular. Trams are heavily used by residents, overcrowding is common. Purchase ticket after boarding. Metro runs from city center to Uralmash, an industrial area south of the city. Metro ends near the main railway station. Fares are inexpensive.

“Traffic is congested in city center. Getting around by car can be difficult. Route taxis (minivans) provide the fastest transport. They generally run on specific routes, but do not have specific stops. Drivers stop where passengers request. Route taxis can be hailed. Travel by bus or trolleybuses may be slow in rush hour. Trams are less affected by traffic jams. Trolley buses (electric buses) cannot run when temperatures drop below freezing.”

Entertainment, Sports and Recreation in Yekaterinburg

The performing arts in Yekaterinburg are first rate. The city has an excellent symphony orchestra, opera and ballet theater, and many other performing arts venues. Tickets are inexpensive. The Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater is lavishly designed and richly decorated building in the city center of Yekaterinburg. The theater was established in 1912 and building was designed by architect Vladimir Semyonov and inspired by the Vienna Opera House and the Theater of Opera and Ballet in Odessa.

Vaynera Street is a pedestrian only shopping street in city center with restaurants, cafes and some bars. But otherwise Yekaterinburg's nightlife options are limited. There are a handful of expensive Western-style restaurants and bars, none of them that great. Nightclubs serve the city's nouveau riche clientele. Its casinos have closed down. Some of them had links with organized crime. New dance clubs have sprung up that are popular with Yekaterinburg's more affluent youth.

Yekaterinburg's most popular spectator sports are hockey, basketball, and soccer. There are stadiums and arenas that host all three that have fairly cheap tickets. There is an indoor water park and lots of parks and green spaces. The Urals have many lakes, forests and mountains are great for hiking, boating, berry and mushroom hunting, swimming and fishing. Winter sports include cross-country skiing and ice skating. Winter lasts about six months and there’s usually plenty of snow. The nearby Ural Mountains however are not very high and the downhill skiing opportunities are limited..

Sights in Yekaterinburg

Sights in Yekaterinburg include the Museum of City Architecture and Ural Industry, with an old water tower and mineral collection with emeralds. malachite, tourmaline, jasper and other precious stone; Geological Alley, a small park with labeled samples of minerals found in the Urals region; the Ural Geology Museum, which houses an extensive collection of stones, gold and gems from the Urals; a monument marking the border between Europe and Asia; a memorial for gulag victims; and a graveyard with outlandish memorials for slain mafia members.

The Military History Museum houses the remains of the U-2 spy plane shot down in 1960 and locally made tanks and rocket launchers. The fine arts museum contains paintings by some of Russia's 19th-century masters. Also worth a look are the History an Local Studies Museum; the Political History and Youth Museum; and the University and Arboretum. Old wooden houses can be seen around Zatoutstovsya ulitsa and ulitsa Belinskogo. Around the city are wooded parks, lakes and quarries used to harvest a variety of minerals. Weiner Street is the main street of Yekaterinburg. Along it are lovely sculptures and 19th century architecture. Take a walk around the unique Literary Quarter

Plotinka is a local meeting spot, where you will often find street musicians performing. Plotinka can be described as the center of the city's center. This is where Yekaterinburg holds its biggest events: festivals, seasonal fairs, regional holiday celebrations, carnivals and musical fountain shows. There are many museums and open-air exhibitions on Plotinka. Plotinka is named after an actual dam of the city pond located nearby (“plotinka” means “a small dam” in Russian).In November 1723, Peter the Great ordered the construction of an ironworks in the Iset River Valley, which required a dam for its operation. “Iset” can be translated from Finnish as “abundant with fish”. This name was given to the river by the Mansi — the Finno-Ugric people dwelling on the eastern slope of the Northern Urals.

Vysotsky and Iset are skyscrapers that are 188.3 meters and 209 meters high, respectively. Fifty-story-high Iset has been described by locals as the world’s northernmost skyscraper. Before the construction of Iset, Vysotsky was the tallest building of Yekaterinburg and Russia (excluding Moscow). A popular vote has decided to name the skyscraper after the famous Soviet songwriter, singer and actor Vladimir Vysotsky. and the building was opened on November 25, 2011. There is a lookout at the top of the building, and the Vysotsky museum on its second floor. The annual “Vysotsky climb” (1137 steps) is held there, with a prize of RUB 100,000. While Vysotsky serves as an office building, Iset, owned by the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company, houses 225 premium residential apartments ranging from 80 to 490 square meters in size.

Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center

The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center (in the city center: ul. Yeltsina, 3) is a non-governmental organization named after the first president of the Russian Federation. The Museum of the First President of Russia as well as his archives are located in the Center. There is also a library, educational and children's centers, and exposition halls. Yeltsin lived most of his life and began his political career in Yekaterinburg. He was born in Butka about 200 kilometers east of Yekaterinburg.

The core of the Center is the Museum. Modern multimedia technologies help animate the documents, photos from the archives, and artifacts. The Yeltsin Museum holds collections of: propaganda posters, leaflets, and photos of the first years of the Soviet regime; portraits and portrait sculptures of members of Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of various years; U.S.S.R. government bonds and other items of the Soviet era; a copy of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in the “Novy Mir” magazine (#11, 1962); perestroika-era editions of books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and other authors; theater, concert, and cinema posters, programs, and tickets — in short, all of the artifacts of the perestroika era.

The Yeltsin Center opened in 2012. Inside you will also find an art gallery, a bookstore, a gift shop, a food court, concert stages and a theater. There are regular screenings of unique films that you will not find anywhere else. Also operating inside the center, is a scientific exploritorium for children. The center was designed by Boris Bernaskoni. Almost from the its very opening, the Yeltsin Center has been accused by members of different political entities of various ideological crimes. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00am to 9:00pm.

Where Nicholas II was Executed

On July, 17, 1918, during this reign of terror of the Russian Civil War, former-tsar Nicholas II, his wife, five children (the 13-year-old Alexis, 22-year-old Olga, 19-year-old Maria and 17-year-old Anastasia)the family physician, the cook, maid, and valet were shot to death by a Red Army firing squad in the cellar of the house they were staying at in Yekaterinburg.

Ipatiev House (near Church on the Blood, Ulitsa Libknekhta) was a merchant's house where Nicholas II and his family were executed. The house was demolished in 1977, on the orders of an up and coming communist politician named Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin later said that the destruction of the house was an "act of barbarism" and he had no choice because he had been ordered to do it by the Politburo,

The site is marked with s cross with the photos of the family members and cross bearing their names. A small wooden church was built at the site. It contains paintings of the family. For a while there were seven traditional wooden churches. Mass is given ay noon everyday in an open-air museum. The Church on the Blood — constructed to honor Nicholas II and his family — was built on the part of the site in 1991 and is now a major place of pilgrimage.

Nicholas and his family where killed during the Russian civil war. It is thought the Bolsheviks figured that Nicholas and his family gave the Whites figureheads to rally around and they were better of dead. Even though the death orders were signed Yakov Sverdlov, the assassination was personally ordered by Lenin, who wanted to get them out of sight and out of mind. Trotsky suggested a trial. Lenin nixed the idea, deciding something had to be done about the Romanovs before White troops approached Yekaterinburg. Trotsky later wrote: "The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of he punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing."

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Having read a lot about the end of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and servants, I wanted to see the place in Yekaterinburg where that event occurred. The gloomy quality of this quest depressed Sergei’s spirits, but he drove all over Yekaterinburg searching for the site nonetheless. Whenever he stopped and asked a pedestrian how to get to the house where Nicholas II was murdered, the reaction was a wince. Several people simply walked away. But eventually, after a lot of asking, Sergei found the location. It was on a low ridge near the edge of town, above railroad tracks and the Iset River. The house, known as the Ipatiev House, was no longer standing, and the basement where the actual killings happened had been filled in. I found the blankness of the place sinister and dizzying. It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

“The street next to the site is called Karl Liebknecht Street. A building near where the house used to be had a large green advertisement that said, in English, “LG—Digitally Yours.” On an adjoining lot, a small chapel kept the memory of the Tsar and his family; beneath a pedestal holding an Orthodox cross, peonies and pansies grew. The inscription on the pedestal read, “We go down on our knees, Russia, at the foot of the tsarist cross.”

Books: The Romanovs: The Final Chapter by Robert K. Massie (Random House, 1995); The Fall of the Romanovs by Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalëv (Yale, 1995);

See Separate Article END OF NICHOLAS II factsanddetails.com

Execution of Nicholas II

According to Robert Massie K. Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra, Nicholas II and his family were awakened from their bedrooms around midnight and taken to the basement. They were told they were to going to take some photographs of them and were told to stand behind a row of chairs.

Suddenly, a group of 11 Russians and Latvians, each with a revolver, burst into the room with orders to kill a specific person. Yakob Yurovsky, a member of the Soviet executive committee, reportedly shouted "your relatives are continuing to attack the Soviet Union.” After firing, bullets bouncing off gemstones hidden in the corsets of Alexandra and her daughters ricocheted around the room like "a shower of hail," the soldiers said. Those that were still breathing were killed with point black shots to the head.

The three sisters and the maid survived the first round thanks to their gems. They were pressed up against a wall and killed with a second round of bullets. The maid was the only one that survived. She was pursued by the executioners who stabbed her more than 30 times with their bayonets. The still writhing body of Alexis was made still by a kick to the head and two bullets in the ear delivered by Yurovsky himself.

Yurovsky wrote: "When the party entered I told the Romanovs that in view of the fact their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet had decided to shoot them. Nicholas turned his back to the detachment and faced his family. Then, as if collecting himself, he turned around, asking, 'What? What?'"

"[I] ordered the detachment to prepare. Its members had been previously instructed whom to shoot and to am directly at the heart to avoid much blood and to end more quickly. Nicholas said no more. he turned again to his family. The others shouted some incoherent exclamations. All this lasted a few seconds. Then commenced the shooting, which went on for two or three minutes. [I] killed Nicholas on the spot."

Nicholas II’s Initial Burial Site in Yekaterinburg

Ganina Yama Monastery (near the village of Koptyaki, 15 kilometers northwest of Yekaterinburg) stands near the three-meter-deep pit where some the remains of Nicholas II and his family were initially buried. The second burial site — where most of the remains were — is in a field known as Porosyonkov (56.9113628°N 60.4954326°E), seven kilometers from Ganina Yama.

On visiting Ganina Yama Monastery, one person posted in Trip Advisor: “We visited this set of churches in a pretty park with Konstantin from Ekaterinburg Guide Centre. He really brought it to life with his extensive knowledge of the history of the events surrounding their terrible end. The story is so moving so unless you speak Russian, it is best to come here with a guide or else you will have no idea of what is what.”

In 1991, the acid-burned remains of Nicholas II and his family were exhumed from a shallow roadside mass grave in a swampy area 12 miles northwest of Yekaterinburg. The remains had been found in 1979 by geologist and amateur archeologist Alexander Avdonin, who kept the location secret out of fear that they would be destroyed by Soviet authorities. The location was disclosed to a magazine by one his fellow discovers.

The original plan was to throw the Romanovs down a mine shaft and disposes of their remains with acid. They were thrown in a mine with some grenades but the mine didn't collapse. They were then carried by horse cart. The vats of acid fell off and broke. When the carriage carrying the bodies broke down it was decided the bury the bodies then and there. The remaining acid was poured on the bones, but most of it was soaked up the ground and the bones largely survived.

After this their pulses were then checked, their faces were crushed to make them unrecognizable and the bodies were wrapped in bed sheets loaded onto a truck. The "whole procedure," Yurovsky said took 20 minutes. One soldiers later bragged than he could "die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's -------."

The bodies were taken to a forest and stripped, burned with acid and gasoline, and thrown into abandoned mine shafts and buried under railroad ties near a country road near the village of Koptyaki. "The bodies were put in the hole," Yurovsky wrote, "and the faces and all the bodies, generally doused with sulfuric acid, both so they couldn't be recognized and prevent a stink from them rotting...We scattered it with branches and lime, put boards on top and drove over it several times—no traces of the hole remained.

Shortly afterwards, the government in Moscow announced that Nicholas II had been shot because of "a counterrevolutionary conspiracy." There was no immediate word on the other members of the family which gave rise to rumors that other members of the family had escaped. Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlov in honor of the man who signed the death orders.

For seven years the remains of Nicholas II, Alexandra, three of their daughters and four servants were stored in polyethylene bags on shelves in the old criminal morgue in Yekaterunburg. On July 17, 1998, Nicholas II and his family and servants who were murdered with him were buried Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg along with the other Romanov tsars, who have been buried there starting with Peter the Great. Nicholas II had a side chapel built for himself at the fortress in 1913 but was buried in a new crypt.

Near Yekaterinburg

Factory-Museum of Iron and Steel Metallurgy (in Niznhy Tagil 80 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg) a museum with old mining equipment made at the site of huge abandoned iron and steel factory. Officially known as the Factory-Museum of the History of the Development of Iron and Steel Metallurgy, it covers an area of 30 hectares and contains a factory founded by the Demidov family in 1725 that specialized mainly in the production of high-quality cast iron and steel. Later, the foundry was renamed after Valerian Kuybyshev, a prominent figure of the Communist Party.

The first Russian factory museum, the unusual museum demonstrates all stages of metallurgy and metal working. There is even a blast furnace and an open-hearth furnace. The display of factory equipment includes bridge crane from 1892) and rolling stock equipment from the 19th-20th centuries. In Niznhy Tagil contains some huge blocks of malachite and

Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha (180 kilometers east-northeast of Yekaterinburg) has an open air architecture museum with log buildings, a stone church and other pre-revolutionary architecture. The village is the creation of Ivan Samoilov, a local activist who loved his village so much he dedicated 40 years of his life to recreating it as the open-air museum of wooden architecture.

The stone Savior Church, a good example of Siberian baroque architecture. The interior and exterior of the church are exhibition spaces of design. The houses are very colorful. In tsarist times, rich villagers hired serfs to paint the walls of their wooden izbas (houses) bright colors. Old neglected buildings from the 17th to 19th centuries have been brought to Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha from all over the Urals. You will see the interior design of the houses and hear stories about traditions and customs of the Ural farmers.

Verkhoturye (330 kilometers road from Yekaterinburg) is the home a 400-year-old monastery that served as 16th century capital of the Urals. Verkhoturye is a small town on the Tura River knows as the Jerusalem of the Urals for its many holy places, churches and monasteries. The town's main landmark is its Kremlin — the smallest in Russia. Pilgrims visit the St. Nicholas Monastery to see the remains of St. Simeon of Verkhoturye, the patron saint of fishermen.

Ural Mountains

Ural Mountains are the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia and have been a crossroads of Russian history. Stretching from Kazakhstan to the fringes of the Arctic Kara Sea, the Urals lie almost exactly along the 60 degree meridian of longitude and extend for about 2,000 kilometers (1,300 miles) from north to south and varies in width from about 50 kilometers (30 miles) in the north and 160 kilometers (100 miles) the south. At kilometers 1777 on the Trans-Siberian Railway there is white obelisk with "Europe" carved in Russian on one side and "Asia" carved on the other.

The eastern side of the Urals contains a lot of granite and igneous rock. The western side is primarily sandstone and limestones. A number of precious stones can be found in the southern part of the Urals, including emeralds. malachite, tourmaline, jasper and aquamarines. The highest peaks are in the north. Mount Narodnaya is the highest of all but is only 1884 meters (6,184 feet) high. The northern Urals are covered in thick forests and home to relatively few people.

Like the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States, the Urals are very old mountains — with rocks and sediments that are hundreds of millions years old — that were one much taller than they are now and have been steadily eroded down over millions of years by weather and other natural processes to their current size. According to Encyclopedia Britannica: “The rock composition helps shape the topography: the high ranges and low, broad-topped ridges consist of quartzites, schists, and gabbro, all weather-resistant. Buttes are frequent, and there are north–south troughs of limestone, nearly all containing river valleys. Karst topography is highly developed on the western slopes of the Urals, with many caves, basins, and underground streams. The eastern slopes, on the other hand, have fewer karst formations; instead, rocky outliers rise above the flattened surfaces. Broad foothills, reduced to peneplain, adjoin the Central and Southern Urals on the east.

“The Urals date from the structural upheavals of the Hercynian orogeny (about 250 million years ago). About 280 million years ago there arose a high mountainous region, which was eroded to a peneplain. Alpine folding resulted in new mountains, the most marked upheaval being that of the Nether-Polar Urals...The western slope of the Urals is composed of middle Paleozoic sedimentary rocks (sandstones and limestones) that are about 350 million years old. In many places it descends in terraces to the Cis-Ural depression (west of the Urals), to which much of the eroded matter was carried during the late Paleozoic (about 300 million years ago). Found there are widespread karst (a starkly eroded limestone region) and gypsum, with large caverns and subterranean streams. On the eastern slope, volcanic layers alternate with sedimentary strata, all dating from middle Paleozoic times.”

Southern Urals

The southern Urals are characterized by grassy slopes and fertile valleys. The middle Urals are a rolling platform that barely rises above 300 meters (1,000 feet). This region is rich in minerals and has been heavily industrialized. This is where you can find Yekaterinburg (formally Sverdlovsk), the largest city in the Urals.

Most of the Southern Urals are is covered with forests, with 50 percent of that pine-woods, 44 percent birch woods, and the rest are deciduous aspen and alder forests. In the north, typical taiga forests are the norm. There are patches of herbal-poaceous steppes, northem sphagnous marshes and bushy steppes, light birch forests and shady riparian forests, tall-grass mountainous meadows, lowland ling marshes and stony placers with lichen stains. In some places there are no large areas of homogeneous forests, rather they are forests with numerous glades and meadows of different size.

In the Ilmensky Mountains Reserve in the Southern Urals, scientists counted 927 vascular plants (50 relicts, 23 endemic species), about 140 moss species, 483 algae species and 566 mushroom species. Among the species included into the Red Book of Russia are feather grass, downy-leaved feather grass, Zalessky feather grass, moccasin flower, ladies'-slipper, neottianthe cucullata, Baltic orchis, fen orchis, helmeted orchis, dark-winged orchis, Gelma sandwart, Krasheninnikov sandwart, Clare astragalus.

The fauna of the vertebrate animals in the Reserve includes 19 fish, 5 amphibian and 5 reptile. Among the 48 mammal species are elks, roe deer, boars, foxes, wolves, lynxes, badgers, common weasels, least weasels, forest ferrets, Siberian striped weasel, common marten, American mink. Squirrels, beavers, muskrats, hares, dibblers, moles, hedgehogs, voles are quite common, as well as chiropterans: pond bat, water bat, Brandt's bat, whiskered bat, northern bat, long-eared bat, parti-coloured bat, Nathusius' pipistrelle. The 174 bird bird species include white-tailed eagles, honey hawks, boreal owls, gnome owls, hawk owls, tawny owls, common scoters, cuckoos, wookcocks, common grouses, wood grouses, hazel grouses, common partridges, shrikes, goldenmountain thrushes, black- throated loons and others.

Activities and Places in the Ural Mountains

The Urals possess beautiful natural scenery that can be accessed from Yekaterinburg with a rent-a-car, hired taxi and tour. Travel agencies arrange rafting, kayaking and hiking trips. Hikes are available in the taiga forest and the Urals. Trips often include walks through the taiga to small lakes and hikes into the mountains and excursions to collect mushrooms and berries and climb in underground caves. Mellow rafting is offered in a relatively calm six kilometer section of the River Serga. In the winter visitor can enjoy cross-mountains skiing, downhill skiing, ice fishing, dog sledding, snow-shoeing and winter hiking through the forest to a cave covered with ice crystals.

Lake Shartash (10 kilometers from Yekaterinburg) is where the first Ural gold was found, setting in motion the Yekaterinburg gold rush of 1745, which created so much wealth one rich baron of that time hosted a wedding party that lasted a year. The area around Shartash Lake is a favorite picnic and barbecue spot of the locals. Getting There: by bus route No. 50, 054 or 54, with a transfer to suburban commuter bus route No. 112, 120 or 121 (the whole trip takes about an hour), or by car (10 kilometers drive from the city center, 40 minutes).

Revun Rapids (90 kilometers road from Yekaterinburg near Beklenishcheva village) is a popular white water rafting places On the nearby cliffs you can see the remains of a mysterious petroglyph from the Paleolithic period. Along the steep banks, you may notice the dark entrance of Smolinskaya Cave. There are legends of a sorceress who lived in there. The rocks at the riverside are suited for competitive rock climbers and beginners. Climbing hooks and rings are hammered into rocks. The most fun rafting is generally in May and June.

Olenii Ruchii National Park (100 kilometers west of Yekaterinburg) is the most popular nature park in Sverdlovsk Oblast and popular weekend getaway for Yekaterinburg residents. Visitors are attracted by the beautiful forests, the crystal clear Serga River and picturesque rocks caves. There are some easy hiking routes: the six-kilometer Lesser Ring and the 15-kilometer Greater Ring. Another route extends for 18 km and passes by the Mitkinsky Mine, which operated in the 18th-19th centuries. It's a kind of an open-air museum — you can still view mining an enrichment equipment here. There is also a genuine beaver dam nearby.

Among the other attractions at Olenii Ruchii are Druzhba (Friendship) Cave, with passages that extend for about 500 meters; Dyrovaty Kamen (Holed Stone), created over time by water of Serga River eroding rock; and Utoplennik (Drowned Man), where you can see “The Angel of Sole Hope”., created by the Swedish artist Lehna Edwall, who has placed seven angels figures in different parts of the world to “embrace the planet, protecting it from fear, despair, and disasters.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Federal Agency for Tourism of the Russian Federation (official Russia tourism website russiatourism.ru ), Russian government websites, UNESCO, Wikipedia, Lonely Planet guides, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Yomiuri Shimbun and various books and other publications.

Updated in September 2020

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