For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

Solids, liquids and gases. In a solid like this brick, the particles are regularly arranged touching their neighbours and move only by vibrating. This explains why solids have a fixed shape. In a ...

Why can you stand on a glacier but not the ocean? The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal ...

Physicists are now watching matter behave in a way that defies everyday intuition, with atoms and even light itself arranging into structures that are rigid like a crystal yet able to flow like a ...

Researchers report that the way a tissue's cells are arranged can serve as a fingerprint for the tissue's 'phase' -- whether it is more like a solid, liquid, or gas. For example, tumors that are more ...

Scientists have discovered a new state of matter that isn't a solid, liquid, or gas. Researchers call this new type of material a 'corralled supercooled liquid'. Atoms in a liquid are normally like ...

Solid, liquid, gas … and something else? While most of us learn about just three states of matter in elementary school, physicists have discovered several exotic varieties that can exist under extreme ...