Hear the word "antenna" and you might think about rabbit ears on the top of an old TV or the wire that picks up radio signals for a car. But an antenna can be much smaller – even invisible. No matter its shape or size, an antenna is crucial for communication, transmitting and receiving radio signals between devices. As portable electronics become increasingly common, antennas must, too. […]

The promise of wearables, functional fabrics, the Internet of Things, and their "next-generation" technological cohort seems tantalizingly within reach. But researchers in the field will tell you a prime reason for their delayed "arrival" is the problem of seamlessly integrating connection technology—namely, antennas—with shape-shifting and flexible "things." […]

Researchers have developed a light-based technique for measuring very weak magnetic fields, such as those produced when neurons fire in the brain. The inexpensive and compact sensors could offer an alternative to the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems currently used to map brain activity without the expensive cooling or electromagnetic shielding required by MRI machines. […]

Black holes form when stars die, allowing the matter in them to collapse into an extremely dense object from which not even light can escape. Astronomers theorize that massive black holes could also form at the birth of a galaxy, but so far nobody has been able to look far enough back in time to observe the conditions creating these direct collapse black holes (DCBH). […]

Matter is made of elementary particles, and the Standard Model of particle physics states that these particles occur in two families: leptons (such as electrons and neutrinos) and quarks (which make up protons and neutrons). Under the Standard Model, these two families are totally distinct, with different electric charges and quantum numbers, but have the same number of generations (see image below). […]