Diana Kwon

Diana Kwon is a freelance science writer.

Underneath the vast, frozen landscape of the South Pole lies IceCube, a gigantic observatory dedicated to finding ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos stream through Earth from all directions, but they are lightweight, abundant and hardly interact with their surroundings. A forthcoming upgrade to the IceCube detector will provide deeper insights into the elusive particles.

For the last three decades, physicists have patiently waited for the next nearby supernova. Luckily, waiting is no longer the only option.
With an upgrade to the Super-Kamiokande detector, neutrino physicists will gain access to the supernovae of the past.

When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.

The Big Bang Science Fair brings science communication and outreach to an arts festival in Rhode Island. The event is filled with presentations, workshops and hands-on activities covering a wide range of scientific disciplines. It makes its second appearance later this month.

By developing clever theories and conducting experiments with particle colliders, telescopes and satellites, physicists have been able to wind the film of the universe back billions of years—and glimpse the details of the very first moments in the history of our cosmic home. Take a (brief) journey through the early history of our cosmos.

Growing up in South Africa, the first language that science writer Sibusiso Biyela learned was Zulu, the most common mother tongue in the country. But the scientific content he consumed as a child—movies, cartoons and documentaries—was in English. Biyela aims to bring science back to South Africa’s Zulu communities.

The building boom

These international projects, selected during the process to plan the future of U.S. particle physics, are all set to come online within the next 10 years.