Bacteria have multiple strategies to survive antibiotics: developing genetic resistance to the drugs; delaying their growth; or hiding in…

A century and a half ago, a Russian chemistry professor published a classification of all the known elements, organized by atomic weight. Today, the system that he created for his students — plus some updates and including about twice as many elements — is found in chemistry classrooms around the world.

Now known as the Periodic Table…

The first moments of life unfold with incredible precision. Now, using mathematical tools and the help of fruit flies, researchers at Princeton have uncovered new findings about the mechanisms behind this precision.

In a new study published in the journal Cell, the…

Want to create your own plasma? You can create and control a plasma from the comfort of your own device.

The Remote Glow Discharge Experiment (RGDX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) allows you to turn on a plasma and change the gas pressure, the voltage, and the strength of the electromagnets surrounding it from…

No physics lecture at PPPL up until recently has included electric guitar riffs by the lecturer, snippets from heavy metal bands, and a video clip from the movie “This Is Spinal Tap.” 

But that’s just what the audience got at the first of PPPL’s Ronald E. Hatcher Science on Saturday lecture series on Jan. 12. The guitar-playing…

Sudden bursts of heat that can damage the inner walls of tokamak fusion experiments are a hurdle that operators of the facilities must overcome. Such bursts, called “edge localized modes (ELMs),” occur in doughnut-shaped tokamak devices that house the hot, charged plasma that is used to replicate on Earth the power that drives the sun and other…

When it comes to green living, nobody does it better than plants. When plants convert light into fuel through photosynthesis, not a single particle of light is wasted. If we could unlock plants’ secrets, we might be able to perfect the design of light harvesting in solar cells.

Down a hallway in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), scientists study the workings of a machine in a room stuffed with wires and metal components. The researchers seek to explain the behavior of vast clouds of dust and other material that encircle stars and black holes and collapse to form planets…

Scientists seeking to bring the fusion reaction that powers the sun and stars to Earth must keep the superhot plasma free from disruptions. Now researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have discovered a process that can help to control the disruptions thought to be most dangerous.

Outside Eve Ostriker’s office door stretches the universe, dotted with orange galaxies against the black backdrop of space.

The mural lines the hallway in Princeton’s astrophysical…