Stories by John Matson

A timely conversation with physicist Sean M. Carroll about how our one-way trip from the past to the future is entangled with entropy and the origin of the universe

Some experimental optical clocks are so precise that even a small change in elevation or velocity makes them register the passage of time differently

The bonanza in spotting Pluto's peers nears its end

Imported seasonings are rife with all sorts of extras

Additional resources for Advances articles in the February 2014 issue

Particle accelerators make possible the ancient alchemist’s dream—but at a steep cost

The massive annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience brought together tens of thousands of researchers exploring the workings of mind and brain

Researchers are forecasting which memes will spread far and wide

An oddball cometlike asteroid could explain how rocky bodies develop wispy comet tails—or just add more confusion

A gigantic star in the Whirlpool galaxy has vanished, solving a supernova mystery

The list of known exoplanets is growing so long, so fast, that it is becoming difficult to properly appreciate the new discoveries. For those of us who grew up when our solar system accounted for the only nine worlds known in the entire universe, how are we to grasp the fact that astronomers now discover [...]

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

Low-carbon power depends on climate-unfriendly metals

What once appeared to be an unremarkable star among billions in the Whirlpool Galaxy has vanished in a brilliant supernova

For more than nine years, NASA’s Cassini probe has orbited Saturn, examining its rings and moons in unprecedented detail and sending back images of things and places humans had never seen.

Early data from the rover teases out new details of Mars’s atmosphere and how it changed over billions of years

A new telescope array reveals a gas cloud forming a star perhaps 100 times as massive as the sun

The star Tau Boo’s magnetic cycle is at least 10 times faster than the sun’s

Supernova dust fell to Earth in Antarctic meteorites

A new mathematical model describes the complex evolution of bubbly foams

The first physics results from MINERvA shed light on subtle nuclear behavior