M. Karam Ouharou

Inscribed on an Italian family’s 15th century coat of arms and decorating an ancient Japanese shrine, the Borromean rings are symbolically potent. Remove one ring from the trio of linked circles and the other two fall apart. It’s only when all three are entwined that the structure holds. The rings have represented the concepts of unity, the Christian Holy Trinity and even certain exotic atomic nuclei. A rare variety, or isotope, of lithium has a nucleus that is made of three conjoined parts. Lithium-11’s nucleus is separated into a main cluster of protons and neutrons flanked by two neutrons, which form a halo around the core. Remove any one piece and the trio disbands, much like the Borromean rings. Not only that, lithium-11’s nucleus is enormous. With its wide halo, it is the same size as a lead nucleus, despite having nearly 200 fewer protons and neutrons. The discovery of lithium-11’s expansive halo in the mid-1980s shocked scientists, as did its Borromean nature. “There w...

Neutrinos are fundamental particles of the universe, meaning that they are not made up of any smaller components as far as we know. Scientists have been hunting neutrinos for years, and special detectors have confirmed their presence before.   It's thought that if physicists can learn more about them, they can answer some of the most pressing questions in physics—such as why we live in a universe of matter and not antimatter. But neutrinos are notoriously elusive. This is in part because they are incredibly small and light, with a mass hundreds of thousands of times less than that of an electron—which itself is hardly gigantic.     This means that they pass through almost everything they encounter. It's thought that trillions of them are passing through our bodies and out the other side every single second. We know that some neutrinos are created in the heart of the sun, and others should also be created when the LHC smashes particles together. But to date, sc...