Rachel Thomas

As your cereal tumbled into your bowl this morning, were you daydreaming of sand dunes or snowy mountains? It wouldn't be surprising given the drab grey skies outside. But now you have another excuse: the cereal, sand and snow can all be examples of granular flows.

Data from BICEP2 gathered in the South Pole reveals swirls in the CMB, the first image of gravitational waves and evidence for inflation.

The funeral of the great flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía this week reminded us of the mathematical and musical reasons we love flamenco.

David Sloan calculates how likely it is that our Universe exists. He explains to us how, and why the answer can help shape our theories of physics.

This year has seen a flurry of results as mathematicians hunt down the elusive proof of the twin prime conjecture. Will they get their wish for Christmas this year?

The 2013 Nobel prize in physics goes to Peter Higgs and François Englert for proposing the mechanism that gives things mass.

Is the Universe finite or infinite? Is there infinity inside a black hole? Is space infinitely divisible or is there a shortest length? We talk to philosophers and physicists to find out.

Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.

This is the second article in our four-part series exploring quantum electrodynamics. After successfully applying quantum mechanics to the electromagnetic field, physicists faced a problem of boundless proportions: every calculation they made returned infinity as the answer.

You may have heard of quantum theory and you probably know what a field is. But what is quantum field theory? This article traces the development of quantum electrodynamics in the first half of the 20th century. Hair raising difficulties, heroic struggle and illustrious characters — this story has it all!

This is the third article in our four-part series exploring quantum electrodynamics. After struggling with a theory plagued by unwieldy infinities an ingenious trick put QED back on track.

This is the last article in a four-part series exploring quantum electrodynamics. After a breakthrough that tamed QED in theory, the stick-like drawings known as Feynman diagrams, policed by a young Freeman Dyson, made the theory useable.