The US Army Research Office and the National Security Agency (NSA) are together looking for some answers to their quantum physics questions on quantum computing and cryptography.

Scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our Sun using France's Corot space telescope. The technique, called "stellar seismology", is becoming increasingly popular among astronomers because the sounds give an indication of what is going on in the stars' interior.

Chinese scientists have proposed a theoretical "anti-cloak" that would partially cancel the effect of an invisibility cloak.

The first particles have been injected into the biggest atom smasher on the planet, marking the start of the countdown to probing the secrets of the universe. Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole.

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August. But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?

Our planet is not at risk from the world's most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded. The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.

A $205 million upgrade will allow a laser-wielding observatory to monitor tens of thousands of galaxies for mysterious gravitational waves. Leading investigators are confident that the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories) Project will be able for the first time to detect gravitational waves from neutron stars and black holes, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

An artificial black hole has been simulated in a laboratory by scientists using lasers at St Andrews University.

Intense light pulses were used to create an artificial event horizon - the defining feature of a black hole known as the "point of no return".

When the world's most powerful particle accelerator starts up later this year, exotic new particles may offer a glimpse of the existence and shapes of extra dimensions. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Berkeley say that the telltale signatures left by a new class of particles could distinguish between possible shapes of the extra spatial dimensions predicted by string theory.

Astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, two astronomers suggest, based on quantum theory.