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A paper in Nature Communications reports experiments and simulations of spherical particles that help show how finite numbers of spheres pack in practice.
Women and people of colour are underrepresented in physics in many parts of the world, to the detriment of the field. How do academics’ beliefs about the role of ‘brilliance’ in career success contribute to these representation gaps, and what can be done to address them?
Complex biological, social and engineering systems operate through intricate connectivity patterns. Understanding their robustness and resilience against disturbances is crucial for applications. This Review addresses systemic breakdown, cascading failures and potential interventions, highlighting the importance of research at the crossroad of statistical physics and machine learning.
In 2023, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory discovered high-energy neutrinos from the Milky Way, an important clue towards understanding the origin of high-energy cosmic rays.
This Review categorizes the physics of many different light-based 3D printing modalities and expounds on the light–matter interactions required for the creation of (multi-)material 3D structures. An outlook is provided regarding key printing performance parameters and future directions.
Advances in superheavy element studies providing insight into the nuclear and atomic structure and the chemical behaviour of these exotic short-lived systems will help push to the limit of the periodic table of elements and revise the concept of the island of stability.
Beyond in vivo models, stem cell-based in vitro models and theoretical models of morphogenesis have been constructed to recapitulate morphogenetic events during embryo development with heightened quantitative specificity. This Review discusses the accomplishments, challenges and opportunities of these models in promoting knowledge of mammalian development, including human development.
Quantum learning theory is a new and very active area of research at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. This Perspective surveys the progress in this field, highlighting a number of exciting open questions.
Environmental concerns and rising energy costs are causing leadership of accelerator facilities to consider the impact of the magnets used. How do permanent magnets — which don’t use electricity to operate — stack up?
Reproducibility is known to be one of the biggest issues facing science today — but what is less discussed is its connection to science’s environmental impact, as experiments that aren’t replicable still consume resources. Joanna Marshall-Cook and Martin Farley describe processes that can both improve sustainability in science and help tackle the reproducibility crisis.
Vertebrate hearing uses mechanosensory cells operating near an oscillatory instability. Physics reveals how this mechanism might have evolved from ‘chance and necessity’.
Understanding vortex pinning in high-temperature superconducting materials is crucial to optimizing their properties. This Technical Review analyses the impact of growth method on vortex microstructure.
More than half the world’s population lives in cities, which are hotter than rural areas. Jan Carmeliet and Dominique Derome explain what physics modelling can show about how cities get hot, and how to cool them.
Non-Hermitian acoustic resonances in open systems provide a versatile platform to manipulate sound–matter interaction. This Review article surveys the fundamental physics of various acoustic resonances and their uses in realizing different acoustic wave-based applications.
Verification efforts of density-functional theory (DFT) calculations are of crucial importance to evaluate the reliability of simulation results. In this Expert Recommendation, we suggest metrics for DFT verification, illustrating them with an all-electron reference dataset of 960 equations of state covering the whole periodic table (hydrogen to curium) and discuss the importance of improving pseudopotential codes.
