How to Survive a Lightning Strike

There's a club open to people from all around the world, but you wouldn't want to join: The club is exclusively for people who've survived a lightning strike.

Lightning strikes kill about 24,000 people worldwide each year, and about 240,000 people are injured by lightning and survive.

Rare Particle Discovery Dims Hopes for Exotic Theories

Physicists have measured an extremely rare particle decay inside the world's largest atom smasher — a discovery that bolsters the leading model of particle physics and leaves little room for undiscovered particles beyond this theory.

Curiosity Rover Samples Air for a Taste of Mars History

It’s time to update the list of ingredients in Martian air.

In late 2012 NASA’s Curiosity rover drew air into its onboard laboratory and analyzed Mars’s atmospheric composition with a pair of spectrometers. The results of the investigation, published July 19 in Science, revise decades-old data on the makeup of Red Planet air and paint a broad picture of how the atmosphere has changed since the planet’s formation.