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So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, most exist on their own.

Ants live in highly organized colonies and cooperate daily to tackle a wide range of problems. Their striking group behaviors have fascinated biologists for centuries and even inspired the development of various artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Experiment suggests the environment matters when deuterium fuses The post Nuclear fusion persists at ultralow energies inside metal foils appeared first on Physics World.

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The coordinated electrical signals governing neural networks are fast, faint, and notoriously hard to capture in living tissue. The electrical activity occurring across the immense, interconnected networks in the human brain happens so quickly that existing imaging tools struggle to keep pace with it. Genetically encoded voltage indicators (GEVIs) — fluorescent sensors embedded in brain cell membranes that directly measure electrical activity in the cells — can resolve neuronal spiking activity with high spatiotemporal resolution, within genetically specific populations. However, GEVIs cannot be efficiently scaled to large neuronal populations. Also, signals deep in living brain tissue are difficult for GEVIs to...

Researchers in the lab of Sam Peng, the Pfizer Inc.–Gerald Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed a super-resolution imaging technology. It allows scientists to visualize molecular structures with angstrom-level localization precision—three orders of magnitude beyond the nanometer-scale limits of standard fluorescent dyes—while simplifying the imaging process.

Scientists have identified LHAASO J1912+1014u as a cosmic accelerator that can push protons beyond one quadrillion electron volts. The finding may help reveal where the Milky Way’s most energetic cosmic rays come from and how they influence the galaxy.

Researchers at Technical University of Darmstadt and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research have succeeded for the first time in decelerating highly charged ions from the GSI accelerator to low energies and subsequently storing them in a Penning trap. They were also successful in performing the first electron cooling of highly charged ions in such a trap. The results have been published in Physical Review X (PRX).

Scientists discovered unusually high water-vapor supersaturation inside deep tropical clouds, creating conditions in which tiny aerosol particles could intensify storm updrafts. The finding suggests earlier studies may have missed the effect because they were looking in the wrong types of clouds.

Physicists have uncovered a surprising limit to electrical resistance caused by particles colliding. Using ultracold potassium atoms trapped in a grid of light, researchers created a highly controlled stand-in for electrons moving through a solid. As collisions became more frequent and intense, resistance initially rose, but eventually hit a ceiling and stopped increasing.

Scientists traced a mysterious surge of low-energy gamma rays from zinc-70 to magnetic changes occurring inside its nucleus. The breakthrough could improve models of how stars, supernovae, and neutron star mergers create heavy elements.

Primordial black holes may occasionally pass through white dwarf stars and trigger enormous Type Ia supernova explosions. Researchers found that these events could explain chemical patterns seen in supernova remnants, nearby explosions, and stars across the Milky Way.

A black hole observed during a dramatic 2023 eruption did not simply devour gas from its nearby companion star. It also expelled large amounts of material through powerful jets and winds, even after the outburst had nearly faded. The results suggest black holes may continue reshaping their surroundings long after their brightest fireworks end.

Scientists have built the first all-optical photonic time crystal, allowing them to reshape the behavior of terahertz light at extraordinary speeds. The breakthrough could open the door to ultrafast computing, smarter communication systems, advanced imaging, and a new generation of highly tunable lasers.

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for "quantum advantage"—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations.

Our sun constantly releases a stream of high-speed charged particles, known as the solar wind. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a strong global magnetic field to shield its atmosphere from this flow. As a result, the solar wind can interact directly with Mars' upper atmosphere and gradually strip atmospheric particles into space.

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Astronomers found seven rare quasar gravitational lens candidates using AI, providing a powerful new tool for studying black hole and galaxy evolution.

There are a number of things in the Universe that could wipe out life as we know it, but — for now, and for Earth — a blast from our galaxy's supermassive black hole isn't one of them. That's not to say that Sagittarius A* doesn't pose a danger. If it wakes up someday and blasts out a strong wind, that definitely could affect Earth. It could well have powered a quasar in the past, and could do so again.

Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have discovered a new type of quantum light emitter in diamonds that could help overcome a number of challenges facing quantum technologies.

The energy system of the future will require sustainable catalysts that, for example, enable the efficient production of green hydrogen. Materials consisting of mixtures of five chemical elements show great promise for enabling ideal catalysts in the future.

As materials become thinner – now reaching a thickness of single atoms – it has become ever more

In mathematics and getting dressed, some processes are commutative, while others are noncommutative. Commutative means the order doesn't matter (3 + 2 is the same as 2 + 3, and it doesn't matter which sock goes on first). Noncommutative means the order does matter.

Semiconductor spin qubits are one of the most promising building blocks for future quantum computers, but turning them into a working, large-scale quantum computer has so far proven difficult. For now, two big questions remain open: how to connect qubits that aren't sitting right next to each other, and how to control huge numbers of them without an unmanageable tangle of wiring.

Using IBM's quantum computer, scientists say they have shown in three different experiments that quantum computers can outpace classical machines in useful computations.

Author(s): Charles DaySupercomputer simulations reveal how turbulence supports a Goldilocks regime for operating a fusion reactor. [Physics 19, s95] Published Thu Jul 30, 2026

The formation and evolution of individual stars in a galaxy shape the evolution of the galaxy itself. Stars and stellar remnants make up the vast majority of a galaxy's mass, so it's not surprising that the stellar population affects the evolution of galaxies. In the Milky Way's disk and bulge, stars and dead stars make up about 85% of the baryonic mass.

Researchers 3D-nanoprinted hollow-core Photonic Scaffolds with up to 80% cladding openness, with models predicting attenuation at or below 1 dB/mm at that openness and experiments measuring sub-1 dB/mm losses at 68% openness. The waveguides supported dye diffusion in about 34 seconds, a 1.4 nL effective interaction volume, and quantum-dot emission with output photon statistics consistent with single-photon emission after transmission.

An international team of researchers from École Polytechnique, Collège de France and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has achieved a world first: the experimental realization of an all-optical photonic time crystal (PTC), a material whose optical properties can be strongly and periodically modulated over ultrafast timescales.

There's a nice kind of irony buried in this story: One of the most sensitive instruments ever built, capable of measuring distortions smaller than the width of a proton, has been quietly held back by something as mundane as heat. And the fix, it turns out, is not some exotic new sensor but a thermal camera you could genuinely buy off the shelf.

Quantum fluctuations influence direction-dependent electrical transport in chiral magnets, researchers from Science Tokyo report. In chiral magnetic systems, electric current flows differently depending on its direction, but the role of quantum effects in this behavior has remained unclear. Through theoretical analysis, the researchers showed that chiral magnetic systems exhibit logarithmic temperature dependence at low temperatures, offering new insights into electron transport in magnetic materials. These findings are expected to play a crucial role in spintronics.

Large-scale quantum communication networks require both reliable quantum memories and coherent single-photon sources that can exchange quantum information efficiently. A coherent source of single photons with narrow linewidth, high brightness, spectral uniformity and compatibility with quantum memories is necessary. While a variety of single-photon sources, such as quantum dots (QDs) and atoms in warm vapor cells, have been developed in recent years, each has inherent limitations, making a scalable and functional quantum network challenging to achieve.

Black holes are often portrayed as cosmic gluttons that swallow everything that comes too close. But new observations of a dramatic black hole outburst—led by Warwick Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Noel Castro Segura—suggest the reality is much messier.

Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn't stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could've triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable.

For years, researchers have tried to harness the "twist" of light to transmit data. This property describes how light spirals as it travels forward, and because it can be molded into a virtually infinite number of different twists, it provides a massive, promising alphabet for high-capacity communication.

A new study in Nature Communications has established a link between the Riemann Hypothesis and dynamical phase transitions in engineered quantum systems, demonstrating the effect on a quantum processor.

Where do gold, platinum and uranium come from? This question has fascinated astrophysicists and nuclear physicists for decades. A research team from Technische Universität Darmstadt has now taken an important step toward understanding the origin of heavy elements. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

Author(s): Kaiyu Zhang, Wladimir Zholobenko, Andreas Stegmeir, Michael Faitsch, Konrad Eder, Christoph Pitzal, Frank Jenko, and ASDEX Upgrade TeamSupercomputer simulations reveal how turbulence supports a Goldilocks regime for operating a fusion reactor. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 055102] Published Thu Jul 30, 2026

A collaborative research group led by Hiroshi Daimon, a specially appointed research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, has developed an "atom-holography microscope" capable of directly observing three-dimensional atomic arrangements in nanoscale regions by combining the electron beam of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with CoDELMA, a newly developed two-dimensional display-type analyzer.

Ultrafast X-rays revealed how a molecule converts absorbed light into motion in just trillionths of a second. Individual atoms recorded different stages of the process, opening a powerful new window into light-driven chemistry.

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet orbiting a faraway star, the analogy they most commonly use is trying to spot a firefly next to a massive searchlight. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim—usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star.

Bose–Einstein condensates are states of matter that form when particles called bosons are cooled to temperatures that are only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (i.e., 0 Kelvin [-460°F]). In these states, particles occupy the same quantum state and exhibit interesting collective behaviors, essentially behaving as if they were a single "super-particle."

A team of researchers have found a surprisingly simple way to boost the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. It’s surprisingly simple to, just point an ordinary thermal imaging camera at the mirrors themselves. The technique could improve LIGO's next upgrade by up to 31%, letting it detect neutron star collisions tens of millions of light years farther away, and is already being built into the design of its planned successor, Cosmic Explorer.

The German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is funding a hub for laser fusion. With sites in Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse, the hub unites industry and academia/research around a central aim: to construct a commercial laser fusion power plant in Germany. In tandem with fusion companies Marvel Fusion and Focused Energy, the hub is to be led by the IFE Innovation Network e.V., an association yet to be formally established. The companies will serve as hub co-founders and co-shareholders, and are developing the campus together with European XFEL, DESY, the University of Hamburg, Kiel University, the University of Rostock, along with a broad network of additional scientific and industrial partners and...

Researchers in City College of New York physicist Vinod M. Menon’s Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) have outlined

A varied group of investors has provided Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) with another $1 billion in equity financing, with the company on July 30 saying the funding supports the group's continuing work toward operating a commercial fusion energy power plant. The post Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises Another $1 Billion as Work on Commercial Power Plant Continues appeared first on POWER Magazine.

Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people's injuries.

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet that is orbiting a far away star, the analogy they most commonly go with is trying to spot a fireflight next to a massive search light. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim - usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star. Understandably, that makes them very difficult to see. But a new paper from Hyunsoo Choi of Hanyang University in South Korea and his co-authors, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a theoretical solution - use a mix of smart computer algorithms and quantum physics.

Nanoplastics—plastic particles smaller than one micrometer—are generated through the degradation and abrasion of plastic products and are increasingly detected in food, drinking water, air and biological tissues. Although the presence of plastic particles in animals and humans is well-established, determining how nanoplastics are distributed within complex organs, such as the brain, remains challenging.

Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has been a puzzling scientific endeavor.

Most electronic memory storage devices require the ability to trap large numbers of electrons for each bit of memory. In an ideal world, however, it would take only one electron. This would reduce space requirements and power consumption for devices. Now, a team in China has realized this goal with an ultrathin device capable of minimizing the stray capacitance that plagued earlier attempts. The new study, published in Science, describes how this novel device has overcome challenges in implementing the single-electron design.

For decades, scientists have largely relied on painstaking trial and error to coax proteins into crystalline forms. Crystallization enables scientists to determine the molecular structures of proteins, which can provide a blueprint for designing drugs, engineering enzymes and understanding disease.

Astronomers want to know how universal the initial mass fraction (IMF) of galaxies is. To do they that, they need to discern binary stars in other galaxies, a difficult task. Researchers used the JWST to study the Small Magellanic Cloud and determine how many binary stars are there, since they can confuse measurements of the IMF.

Giant black holes adrift in deep space are normally invisible—unless they’re dining on stars

New calculations seem to have put a 25-year-old particle physics puzzle to rest. But they’ve also created a clash with other experimental results. The post Physicists Solve a Big Quantum Mystery. Now, Old Results Don’t Add Up. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Electronic motion sets the stage for virtually every light-induced process in nature, from the first step of a chemical reaction to the flow of charge in a solid. Yet these processes unfold so rapidly that they can be observed only with flashes of light lasting a few hundred attoseconds—billionths of a billionth of a second.

Leron Borsten and Shanti Pise report from a week-long event that sought to teach quantum physics to teenagers The post Can a 16-year-old really understand quantum teleportation? appeared first on Physics World.

A team of researchers has discovered that winds generated by supermassive black holes are 100 times more powerful than previously thought, carrying energy across distances of approximately 300,000 light-years. The discovery demonstrates that these explosive winds affect the vast expanse of space beyond the galaxies they inhabit.

How to watch "Expedition X: Atomic Sharks" online, as Phil Torres and Heather Amaro investigate the effects of nuclear fallout on the Marshall Islands' waters.

Quantum technologies are devices and systems that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics and could perform tasks that are difficult or impossible to tackle using their classical counterparts. These technologies process and store information using qubits (i.e., quantum bits), which can exist in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously.

A shape that captured worldwide attention for solving a decades-old mathematical puzzle has returned to the spotlight. While the shape's properties allowed it to solve previous puzzles, little is known about its other associated properties, creating opportunities for further discovery. These unexplored properties may also help solve new physics mysteries, such as how to twist light into striking chiral patterns.

Cross calibration combines data from 25 satellites The post GPS particle detectors track space radiation over two decades appeared first on Physics World.

CERN’s ALPHA collaboration pins down the ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen within four parts per million The post Matter-antimatter symmetry measurement sets new precision record appeared first on Physics World.

Nuclear symmetry violations could show up in molecules containing pear-shaped radium nuclei The post Cold radioactive molecules offer a tabletop route to new physics appeared first on Physics World.

By reshaping quasicrystals with carefully designed defects, researchers can create and control stable twisting beams of light in new ways. The post A new way to trap and twist light inside quasicrystals appeared first on Physics World.

Author(s): Charles DayA technique for determining the magnetic structure of materials gets a theoretical makeover that can cope with nonrandom, temporally correlated fluctuations. [Physics 19, s96] Published Tue Jul 28, 2026

Author(s): Samuel JarmanA new AI-powered event-processing algorithm is being readied to cope with the torrent of data that will stream from the Large Hadron Collider upgrade. [Physics 19, 107] Published Tue Jul 28, 2026

What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But, when they occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It's an eerie-looking process. The star gets "spaghettified" — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star which eventually forms a disk around the black hole.

Spin waves (SWs), or magnons, are collective excitations of magnetization in magnetic materials arising from electron spins. They have attracted considerable attention as information carriers and have shown promise in logic circuits, memory devices and physical neural networks. Among the emerging platforms for manipulating SWs are magnonic crystals (MCs), engineered magnetic materials with periodic structures designed to control magnon propagation. These periodic structures give rise to magnonic band structures and mode profiles, much like semiconductor crystals control electron transport.

Physicists, mathematicians and philosophers have been exploring the possibility of going forward to the future or back to the past

A new quantum sensing technique could enable measurements of single protein structures and other important molecules, with potential applications in drug discovery and structural biology. A research team from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo developed a new method that uses a single molecule as a quantum sensor. Quantum sensors use unique properties of quantum mechanics to make ultra-precise measurements that traditional sensors cannot achieve.

Quantum computers process information in a fundamentally different way from conventional computers, using quantum bits, or qubits, that can exist in multiple states at once. This could allow them to tackle problems beyond the reach of today's machines, from simulating new materials to optimizing complex systems.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have revealed how intense electronic excitation can trigger rapid structural changes in metals—without heating the atomic lattice—offering new insight into ultrafast materials behavior.

Scientists have created an “electron lighthouse” that uses laser light to launch and steer electrons through a semiconductor without an applied electrical field. The quantum effect could eventually improve optical sensors, communications, imaging, and information storage.

NASA’s Swift Observatory observed a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star more than 30,000 light-years from the center of a distant galaxy. The extraordinary flare briefly outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet light and revealed a black hole about a million times the Sun’s mass.

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system, boasting hundreds of active volcanoes that spew molten lava into space. This activity results from a process called tidal heating, in which Jupiter's massive gravity constantly stretches and compresses the much smaller moon during its noncircular orbit.

Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced when massive objects in the cosmos accelerate or collide. By detecting these waves, astrophysicists can study various cosmic events, including black hole mergers, neutron star collisions and the early evolution of the universe.

If you’d like some warm nostalgia, look back to the year before the Covid pandemic arrived. Here are some accolades from home institutions of some of the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize winners. Centre for Quantum Technologies [Singapore]: Cockroaches win award for quantum researchers The application of an advanced quantum technology to cockroaches has won an […]

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers led by Université de Montréal professor Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo have captured

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system, boasting hundreds of active volcanoes spewing molten lava into space. This occurs from a process called tidal heating where Jupiter’s massive gravity constantly stretches and compresses the much smaller moon during the latter’s non-circular orbit. However, a lesser-known fact is that Io’s volcanic gases fuel Jupiter’s aurorae by traveling along Jupiter’s magnetic field lines, resulting in Jupiter’s bright aurorae observed by spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes. But what if this same phenomenon could be used to detect Io-like exomoons, also called exo-Ios, orbiting Jupiter-like exoplanets?

Author(s): Xin Qiao and Xiao-Bo ZhangA ring of optical fiber can be made to host phenomena that originated in the realm of high-energy physics. [Physics 19, 89] Published Mon Jul 27, 2026

Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), the Technical University of Darmstadt, Sapienza University in Rome and the University of Camerino (both in Italy) have calculated the fundamental laws of thermodynamics for a gas composed of spinning particles. In the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they demonstrate that the pressure of this gas is similar to that of a normal gas but at an elevated temperature. In addition, localized surface currents arise that can be used for targeted particle transport.