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Imaginary numbers first appeared in the 16th century as a mathematical invention, introduced to solve equations that real numbers could not. As the name implies, many treated them as kind of trick to get results, rather than an underlying truth about the nature of reality. Although highly controversial at the time, these numbers are now ubiquitous […] The post Real-number quantum theory can be more wrong than you thought appeared first on Physics World.

“ ‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence — Scientists are battling over whether supposedly simple organisms should be considered ‘intelligent’. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place within it”. So says the headline of a report by Samanth Subramanian, […]

An unexpected material comes to the rescue of 2D material transfer The post Cling film helps stamp two-dimensional materials onto patterned surfaces appeared first on Physics World.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become a powerful tool for determining the structures of proteins, viruses and molecular complexes at near-atomic resolution. However, achievable resolution is fundamentally limited by the Nyquist sampling frequency, which is determined by detector pixel size and microscope magnification. Once this physical limit is reached, researchers typically must recollect data at higher magnification, requiring additional microscope time, increased storage capacity and often fewer particles per image.

Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole. The few that don't have had theirs ejected during a galactic collision. That's because galaxies and their black holes have formed hand in hand. There is still some debate as to whether galaxies formed around the seeds of supermassive black holes or the other way around, but there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that the two evolve together.

Helium—the lightest atom that can be laser-cooled and controlled—powers a new design for high-powered, stable quantum computers.

Mathematicians at OpenAI showed that the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids flow, can sometimes “blow up.” But the massive result is not without controversy. The post AI Has Solved One of Math’s $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In 2022 researchers detected a very odd photon from an enormous gamma-ray burst that should have been destroyed on its way to Earth

Active black holes are easy to detect. Their superheated accretion disks emit bright X-rays, and the jets streaming from their poles are easily seen at visible and radio wavelengths. But most stellar-mass black holes are inactive. They either drift through the galaxy alone or orbit a companion star without consuming its material. We can't observe inactive black holes directly. We can only observe their effects on nearby objects. We currently know of three such black holes thanks to the Gaia spacecraft.

We know the universe is constantly expanding. We also know that gravitationally bound objects, such as solar systems and black holes, seem to be immune to that expansion. But a new paper by theoretical physicists Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi challenges that assumption. They suggest that black holes can't just ignore the expanding universe around them. Instead, they have to expand along with it. Their paper is posted to the arXiv preprint server.

New observations find that a few supermassive black holes are unexpectedly large given the size of their galaxies. This suggests the connection between black holes and galaxies isn't as strong as we thought.

For decades, physicists have worked to prove the strange predictions of quantum mechanics with real experiments. As quantum computers have grown more powerful, researchers have devised increasingly sophisticated ways to test whether these machines are truly harnessing quantum effects—but every method so far has run into limits.

Superfluid helium could offer a new way to tackle one of the biggest challenges in scaling up quantum computers, say researchers from the University of Surrey. The research team has introduced a conceptual design for a new type of qubit that could be much less vulnerable to errors.

A more realistic quantum model has revealed evidence that strange, nearly immobile quasiparticles called fractons could exist in solid materials. Their inability to move freely could make them promising building blocks for unusually robust quantum information storage.

Physicists have directly observed a long-predicted quantum effect of gravity, putting one of Einstein’s foundational ideas to a striking new test. Using ultracold atoms, researchers split an atom’s quantum wave so that one part was held in place while the other fell freely under gravity, then reunited the two to measure the tiny difference that emerged.

How did a photon survive a journey of more than 2 billion light-years when, according to known physics, it should have been absorbed long before reaching Earth? This is the question at the heart of a new study by Giorgio Galanti (INAF) and Marco Roncadelli (INFN), accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

Heavy particle could be dominated by gluons The post Missing decay at BESIII points to long-sought glueball appeared first on Physics World.

The most comprehensive catalog of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe's accelerating expansion. Researchers at The University of Queensland's School of Mathematics and Physics have led a global effort to compile a dataset containing information on 2,884 Type Ia supernovae used to measure cosmic distances.

Scientists have spotted the first hints that Einstein's formulation of gravity operates in the quantum realm.

Neutrinos are pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars, and our bodies by the trillions each second. The elementary particles are often described as “ghostly” due to their near-zero mass and their elusive nature, as they have very little interaction with normal matter. Since their discovery in 1956, neutrinos have continued to surprise physicists with their unexpected properties and behaviors. For instance, the particles come in multiple “flavors” and can morph from one to the other. Neutrinos may also be their own anti-particle. And their extremely weak interactions make them close to impossible to detect. Last year, scientists seemed to add...

A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 times the mass of the sun. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 18.

We know the universe is constantly expanding. We also know that gravitationally bound objects, such as solar systems and black holes, seem to be immune to that expansion. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by theoretical physicists Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi challenges that assumption. They suggest that black holes can’t just ignore the expanding universe around them. Instead they have to expand along with it.

Using a crystal as an atomic-scale interferometer enables direct visualization of local atomic arrangements The post Researchers shrink double-slit experiment to atomic scale appeared first on Physics World.

Jesse Han is becoming good at winning unusual awards. In 2017 he traveled to Harvard University, to receive the 2017 Ig Nobel Fluid Dynamics Prize, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. [His research on that was published in  study called […]

We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the planetary structure that produces auroras also have organized chemical reactions on early Earth?

By Alius Noreika Key takeaways The claim, and the answer that arrived two weeks later Jay Gambetta, director of

Physicists at the BESIII Collaboration have breathed new life into a decades-old test of one of the Standard Model's most important ideas, using a technique that had gone almost untouched by experimenters for 35 years.

Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a way to make plasma more effective for its wide-ranging uses, from antimicrobial applications to surface conditioning in the semiconductor industry. They mapped the production of atomic oxygen, a key ingredient of oxygen plasma, while a high voltage was applied across oxygen gas.

Gaia has discovered three stellar mass black holes, each with a small stellar companion. For two of these systems the companions orbit closer that we would expect. Just how these systems form is a bit of a mysteries, but there are clues.

Tiny, soft polymer particles—known as microgels—can help to stabilize extremely thin liquid jets. How this works is the finding of a study led by researchers at TU Darmstadt, which has been published in Nature Communications. The findings could be of interest for the development of needle-free medical injection systems.

Current gravitational-wave observatories aren't sensitive enough to capture the gravitational waves of binary stars. They can only see the gravitational chirps of black holes just as they are merging. But that will change as more sensitive instruments are developed. Recently, a team of astronomers discovered a binary white dwarf system that could be a good target for advanced gravitational-wave observatories.

Donald Trump claims to have ended eight wars, sparking criticism. His focus on a Nobel Peace Prize overshadows ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace efforts, raising questions about his priorities.

American Regent recalls Epinephrine Injection vials due to contamination with glass and plastic particles, posing serious health risks. No harm reported yet, but users are advised to stop use immediately.

When two black holes crash together and merge, the newly formed black hole rings like a bell, sending out gravitational waves with specific frequencies that fade over time. This brief, fading pattern of waves is called ringdown, and it may hold secrets about what is hiding around black holes.

Two superconducting qubits, a metre of cable apart, have been driven into an entangled state not in spite of their environment, but by it The post Noise that entangles may accelerate the dawn of quantum technologies appeared first on Physics World.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without electrical resistance when cooled below a specific critical temperature. These materials have proved promising for the development of various technologies, including medical imaging instruments, particle accelerators, ultrasensitive detectors and quantum processors.

Lancaster University researchers are spearheading a major new European research initiative that aims to redefine how artificial intelligence

Future gravitational wave observatories will be able to see the gravitational waves of close-orbiting binary stars. A newly studied white dwarf system could be one of the first systems we observe.

As the electronics in our technology keep shrinking, traditional silicon-based chips are approaching their fundamental physical limits. Yet the wires connecting them might be able to shrink beyond conventional dimensions, as scientists have created one of the longest single-atom copper chains to date that could serve as molecular wires.

Princeton researchers have tested an AI system that can monitor and control fusion plasma in milliseconds, reacting far faster than a human operator. In one experiment, it predicted a damaging instability about 200 milliseconds before it appeared and adjusted the plasma to stop it from forming.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. The lighter the black hole, the faster it evaporates.

Scientists have uncovered an unusual form of electron behavior in zirconium pentatelluride, a quantum material that can act as both an insulator and a conductor. Under temperatures near absolute zero and magnetic fields reaching 60 tesla, electrons produced quantum oscillations that continued even after conventional physics predicted they should disappear.

A joint research team from NIMS and the University of Tokyo has developed a new composite in which three-dimensional nano-interfaces are distributed throughout the material by coating the surfaces of magnetic-insulator powders with a metal and sintering them. Using this structure, the team succeeded in observing thermoelectric conversion driven by spins in an insulator, a phenomenon previously observed only at nanoscale thin-film interfaces, in a macroscale material.

In recent years, scientists have developed methods to measure a cell's transcriptome, or all the RNA produced by a cell, to study the cell's identity and genetic activity. However, these methods rely on killing the cell to access the bits of RNA within and offer only a one-time snapshot.

In a new Nature Communications study, researchers developed a universal scaling framework for the strength of granular asteroids, showing that their tensile strength can be predicted from the size and shape of their constituent particles.

Detecting radiation is key to technologies ranging from particle accelerators and scientific instruments to medical imaging and security screening. But current detectors must often make trade-offs, providing signals that are strong but slow or fast but weak. The trade-off between signal strength and speed can limit precision detection.

NASA says asteroid Apophis will skim closer than many satellites on Friday 13 April 2029, a rare flyby that is safe but expected to alter the rock's spin.

Author(s): Ryan WilkinsonA precisely engineered material interface can host the spin currents needed for practical spin-based electronics. [Physics 19, s108] Published Thu Sep 03, 2026

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners were introduced at the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 3, 2026

A flash detected by the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector in South Dakota intrigues physicists, offering a potential hint of dark matter, though alternative explanations remain possible.

Babies smell wonderful—at least to their parents. An international research team of Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska investigated why teenagers lose this special olfactory advantage and has now been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for the research.

Cross-disciplinary research at Perimeter Institute and University of Maryland shows that dark photons could be lurking in more places than previously thought.

Physicists have proven a 100-year-old prediction of relativity by showing that Einstein's equivalence principle holds at quantum scales.

A new study has demonstrated that it is possible to make a network of atoms and photons that could improve how artificial intelligence stores and recalls memories. This network, called a quantum-optical spin glass, works as an associative memory, a form of AI that enables the recall of full memories from partial information—much like how humans can recognize a person's face in a blurred photograph.

Japanese scientist Hideki Shirakawa, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering and developing conductive polymers, has died. He was 90.

Research means asking questions of the universe. For centuries, clever minds have advanced science by devising ingenious experiments designed so their results reveal something about the laws of nature as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

A team of Korean researchers has become the first in the world to identify the origin of the "beating" signal that has long been a major obstacle to interpreting quantum signals in topological insulator (TI) nanowires. Their analysis confirmed that the beating arises when two different quantum oscillations overlap: one created by topological electronic states on the surface and the other by ordinary electronic states inside the nanowire. This achievement provides a key criterion for interpreting the signals of topological quantum devices and realizing desired electronic states.

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Researchers from MIT have designed a new qubit architecture that enables qubits to interact with each other much more quickly while remaining very stable. This advance could someday help scientists build practical quantum computers that can run long, complex algorithms with high accuracy.

The hidden world of quantum mechanics exists at scales many orders of magnitude smaller than living organisms, yet scientists have long theorized that quantum effects play an important role in biology. Birds' ability to sense magnetic fields during migration is one of the best-known mysteries in this field, with leading theories suggesting that this sensing could be achieved by exploiting quantum entanglement.

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime created when pairs of black holes spiral into each other and eventually merge. But if this ripple has been warped by another massive object on its way to Earth, a new analysis suggests that these black holes might appear far larger than they really are.

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Efficient heat management in solids is key to advancing the next generation of electronics. However, wavelike heat movement

Sensitive new measurements suggest that monitoring can continue even when reactors are offline The post Antineutrino detector could monitor spent nuclear fuel for clandestine activity appeared first on Physics World.

Chemical reactions at surfaces play a central role in many processes, including catalysis and materials synthesis. It is well known that the outcome of these reactions is influenced by the translational, vibrational and rotational motions of atoms and molecules. Now, a study shows that electron spin, another fundamental property of matter, also influences how chemical reactions at surfaces unfold.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers developed an artificial intelligence system that can manipulate individual molecules to build custom materials with atomic precision.

New nanostructure could be used to make lasers that work in the terahertz frequency range The post Plasmonic metamaterial makes a photonic time crystal appeared first on Physics World.

TODAY, Thursday, Sept 3, at 7 pm (CEST): The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Ten new prizes will be awarded for things that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The webcast will be available here and on our Youtube channel: The 2026 ceremony will be also webcast in a separate stream in Japanese (thanks to NIKONIKO/Dwango).

Author(s): Ana Maria Rey, James K. Thompson, and Haoqing ZhangTwo studies find that fundamental quantum constraints rule out a previously proposed neutrino-laser scheme. [Physics 19, 120] Published Wed Sep 02, 2026

Author(s): Yu-Kun Lu, Hanzhen Lin (林翰桢), and Wolfgang KetterleTwo studies find that fundamental quantum constraints rule out a previously proposed neutrino-laser scheme. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 101804] Published Wed Sep 02, 2026

Researchers at UCSB and UT Austin have determined that a galactic merger kicked a supermassive black hole into intergalactic space.

Inside some fusion energy systems, particles hotter than the core of the sun can become unruly in a few thousandths of a second, far faster than any human operator can react. A new software framework developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University hands those split-second decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), while keeping the machine safe and humans firmly in charge of the goals.

Imagine a construction site where the bricks are individual molecules and the "cranes" are microscopic needles so sharp they can feel a single atom. For decades, building at this scale was a laborious, time-consuming task where a single human error could damage the delicate tools.

Researchers at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures have, for the first time, identified a model cell line for a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). "The KOPM-88 cell line is, to date, the first and only known cell line worldwide to carry the KMT2A::SEPTIN6 fusion gene," explains Dr. Stefan Nagel, head of the Molecular Genetics research group in the Department of Human and Animal Cell Cultures at the DSMZ. "Thus, cancer research now has an urgently needed model system to specifically investigate this aggressive subtype of leukemia and develop novel therapeutic approaches." The work is published in the journal Cells.

An international team including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Sir Roger Penrose has observed a long-predicted effect of gravity on a falling quantum object for the first time. The result shows that a fundamental principle at the heart of Einstein's theory of gravity remains consistent with the behavior of matter in the quantum world. The study, led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Ulm and the University of Oxford, was published today (Sept. 2) in Science Advances.

Neutrinos are pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars and our bodies by the trillions each second. The elementary particles are often described as "ghostly" for their near-zero mass and elusive nature, as they have very little interaction with normal matter.

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A 2D magnetic material exhibits a charge-ordered state in which electrons move collectively and unusually slowly while maintaining quantum coherence The post Two-dimensional material shows promise for long-term memory, thanks to slow electrons appeared first on Physics World.

TOMORROW, Thursday, September 3, 2026: The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. and webcast and watch parties.

In the last decade, scientists have shown that fusion energy can work, as a physical process. Next question:

A new Quantum Monte Carlo method reveals distinct entanglement signatures of different quantum critical points The post Probing quantum critical points appeared first on Physics World.

A search for one mysterious particle unexpectedly revealed evidence for two different structures that may belong to the bizarre family of exotic subatomic particles known as XYZ states. The findings could help physicists uncover new ways that quarks and gluons combine to create matter.

Nicki Minaj joins a celebrity panel for a White House-linked pitch night, awarding $1 million to five US firms. The event, hosted by Dean Cain, highlights American enterprise.

Extreme quasars near the dawn of time are giving astrophysicists clues to the formation of supermassive black holes.

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Hawking radiation causes black holes to eventually evaporate. This is because particle pairs are spontaneously created near the event horizon (the position of the last ray of light that can escape the black hole's gravitational pull). A particle and its antiparticle are created for a brief moment and disappear immediately afterward. But sometimes a particle falls into the black hole, allowing the other particle to escape: This is Hawking radiation. According to Stephen Hawking, this would ultimately mean that no black holes would remain in the universe.

Every second, tens of billions of neutrinos produced by nuclear fusion in the sun pass through every square centimeter of Earth—and through our bodies—almost without interacting. Although they are among the most abundant particles emitted by the sun, their extremely weak interactions make detecting these elusive particles one of the greatest experimental challenges in particle physics. A number of specialized neutrino detectors are in operation around the world, exploiting the unique properties of neutrinos to investigate astrophysical phenomena.

Researchers at Constructor University and Constructor Labs have developed BiteNetI, a deep-learning model that locates the binding sites of 14 biologically important ion types directly in three-dimensional protein structures. The model needs only several seconds per structure and reaches two- to threefold higher accuracy than most existing predictors, including Google DeepMind's AlphaFold 3. The study, authored by Igor Kozlovskii and Petr Popov, has been published in the journal Communications Biology. The tool provides an open-access platform that could help accelerate drug discovery and the understanding of protein function.

A research group in Japan has demonstrated a world-record 10-channel multiplexed quantum photonic interface based on an integrated waveguide array, a key technology for optically interconnecting multiple quantum computers. The study is published in the journal Optica.

Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes.

For generations, textbooks have taught that a cell’s energy simply drifts to wherever it is needed. New research

Her mapping of the ribosome, which led to new designs for antibiotics, faced years of derision, as many scientists saw it as a dead-end effort.

Shadowy dark matter has eluded scientists for decades. The LZ experiment may have spotted one particle, called a WIMP, but more data is needed to check.

By combining roughly two decades of observations from NASA's Swift X-ray Telescope with radio monitoring, astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Perseus Cluster suddenly flaring in X-rays, and about 300 days later, its powerful radio emission flared too. Their paper describing the connection between this black hole's accretion disk and the jets it launches was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 13 and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Diffraqtion, an MIT and University of Maryland spinout building quantum camera platforms for defense and space sensing, has secured strategic investments from Lockheed Martin Ventures and Presidio Ventures, the venture capital arm of Sumitomo Corporation. The latest financing brings the company's raised total for its pre-seed round to more than $10 million. Diffraqtion's cameras draw on quantum estimation theory rather than quantum compute, without using qubits or cryogenics. The cameras resolve detail below the diffraction limit; by sorting incoming light by its shape rather than its brightness, according to the company, the imaging technology measures information that conventional cameras discard. This reduces the aperture and...