View the tip of a snapped towel (which moves faster than the speed of sound), then take a look at a bursting water balloon, a collapsing water drop, a tennis ball in mid-collision with a racket, and many other amazing images in this gallery of high-speed photos snapped by high school students.Sorry! This Web site is no longer available.

By creating peculiar atomic nuclei that contain not just protons and neutrons but also pairs of rare nuclear particles with so-called strange quarks inside, researchers are shedding new light on the fundamental structure of matter and how it behaves under extreme conditions, as in neutron stars. (p. 116)

A new method of manipulating magnetic signals makes it possible to gather useful information about a chemical sample—or perhaps one day a person—without often-claustrophobic confinement inside a magnetic coil. (p. 73)

The discovery of a disparity in decays of subatomic particles known as B mesons and anti-B mesons sheds light on how matter and antimatter differ but deepens the mystery of why matter predominates in the universe today. (p. 20)