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A team of scientists who last year suggested neutrinos could travel faster than light conceded Friday that Einstein was right and the sub-atomic particles are -- like everything else -- bound by the universe's speed limit.

A clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe – is the goal of research being reported this week by scientists from three different institutions. To be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion.

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer opens a gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Finding evidence for dark matter – the unknown substance that theoretically makes up 23% of the universe – has been one of the biggest challenges in modern cosmology. Several experiments are underway to detect dark matter candidates known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as they travel through the Earth.

After the furies of birth, the mature cosmos now evolves more slowly.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists in Italy have discovered the first evidence of a rare nucleus that doesn’t exist in nature and lives for just 10-10 seconds before decaying.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gamow-gravity There's nothing like a nasty cold to make you appreciate good health. The same goes for the state of the universe: Tweaking just one of the fundamental physical laws or constants, normally perfectly "fine-tuned" at the right values to allow stars, planets, atoms and life as we know it to flourish, could turn things very different -- quite unpleasantly so. Imagining such a "bizarro" universe may heighten your appreciation for the norm.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The hidden side of the universe is now a bit more illuminated thanks to the largest map yet of dark matter , the strange substance thought to inhabit much of space. [More]

British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe but he has left one mystery unsolved: How he has managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A trio of Japanese physicists have applied a reformulation of string theory, called IIB, whereby matrices are used to describe the properties of the physical universe, on a supercomputer, to effectively show that the universe spontaneously ballooned in three directions, leaving the other six dimensions tightly wrapped, as string theory has predicted all along.

Dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up about 80 percent of matter in the universe, has become even more inscrutable.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Why there is stuff in the universe—more properly, why there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter—is one of the long-standing mysteries of cosmology. A team of researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has just concluded a 10-year-long study of the fate of neutrons in an attempt to resolve the question, the most sensitive such measurement ever made.

Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

A remarkable finding of the early 21st century, that kind of sits alongside the Nobel prize winning discovery of the universe’s accelerating expansion, is the finding that the universe is geometrically flat.