News & Comment

How did the leopard get its spots? According to Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 children’s story, the leopard’s spots were created by fingerprints of an Ethiopian man. Fifty years later, Alan Turing laid the mathematical foundations of our understanding of leopard spots today.

Twenty years ago, the particle physics community launched Indico, an open-source software package for handling all aspects of meetings. This is brief guide to what Indico can do, and how the wider physics community could benefit from adopting it.

A paper in Journal of the Royal Society Interface reports the physics of how the structure of part of the ear of wheat contributes to fungal spores being agglomerated by the dew cycle.

Machine learning is no longer restricted to data analysis and is now increasingly being used in theory, experiment and simulation, that is, all traditional aspects of research. Does this perhaps signal the dawn of a new paradigm?

An article in Physical Reviews X shows that quantum correlations can enhance the expressivity of generative models, suggesting new ways to develop improved (quantum-inspired) classical machine learning methods.

A paper in Physical Review Letters uses experiments and simulations to understand the mechanical properties of bird nests.

Sonja Franke-Arnold discusses the first experimental generation of light with orbital angular momentum three decades ago and outlines the subsequent advances.

Over the past decade machine learning has made significant advances in approximating density functionals, but whether this signals the end of human-designed functionals remains to be seen.

Giulia Menichetti describes a deep learning pipeline designed to provide reliable binding predictions for poorly annotated proteins and ligands.

The development of time-resolved, multiscale and multi-modal X-ray imaging techniques at advanced light sources raises challenges on the data processing end — but image processing methods from other research areas will help.

Topological defects play an important role in biology, as shown by a growing body of evidence. Aleksandra Ardaševa and Amin Doostmohammadi survey the new research directions that are opening.

Wendong Wang introduces a new assembly method of ultraclean van der Waals heterostructures that completely avoids the use of polymers.

The neutron and the positron were both discovered in 1932. This month we look back at these discoveries and find that we have more in common with early 20th century physicists that one might suspect.

Sebastiaan Huber describes AiiDA, an open source system to manage complex workflows and heterogeneous data.

Sujung Kim describes how to use the time-resolved magneto-optic Kerr effect to probe magnon–phonon interactions.

40 years ago, the first atomic-resolution images using scanning tunnelling microscopy were seen.

Machine learning methods have proved powerful in particle physics, but without interpretability there is no guarantee the outcome of a learning algorithm is correct or robust. Christophe Grojean, Ayan Paul, Zhuoni Qian and Inga Strümke give an overview of how to introduce interpretability to methods commonly used in particle physics.

45 years after being coined, the quantum Zeno effect still holds surprises.

The first confirmed discovery of a planet outside our Solar System was announced 30 years ago. Since then, technical developments have enabled detection of thousands of exoplanets.

Breakfast is serious business — and involves a lot of physics. This month, we share with you our favourite breakfast-related physics papers.