News & Comment

Fifteen years after its discovery, graphene is a serious business. The Graphene 2019 conference in June brought together academic and industrial researchers to discuss both applications and fundamental theory.

New approach based on catalysed crystal growth allowed synthesizing twisted nanowires of van der Waals materials and finely tune their topology.

Two recent papers demonstrate the importance of deformations for how particles pack and how their packed configurations slowly evolve.

Quantum information and string theory researchers met at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan for a 5-weeks long workshop to discuss the fascinating interface between their fields.

This month we publish our first Roadmap. Here is what readers, authors and referees need to know about this article type.

Three publications in Geophysical Research Letters describe details of the Martian climate, including global dust storms and polar ice caps.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mercury ion clock, the Deep-Space Atomic Clock, was launched on June 24 and will spend a year in orbit for stability testing.

In positron emission tomography, up to 40% of positron annihilation occurs through the production of positronium atoms in the patient’s body, whose decay could provide information about disease progression. New research is needed to take full advantage of this information.

New approach based on catalysed crystal growth allowed synthesizing twisted nanowires of van der Waals materials and fine tuning of their topology.

We recall Andrei Sakharov’s contributions to physics and his social and political activism and find that his ideas remain as relevant and inspiring today as 50 years ago.

Despite much effort, the question of whether the Navier–Stokes equations allow solutions that develop singularities in finite time remains unresolved. Terence Tao discusses the problem, and possible routes to a solution.

Ultrafast electron diffraction and ultrafast scanning transmission electron microscopy with nanoscale spatial resolution were demonstrated using unique high-brightness high-repetition rate electron scattering source.

The construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment, is now 60% complete. The challenges ahead are huge and the way to go is still long, but an extensive research effort is supporting the technological developments needed to make ITER a reality.

The Leidenfrost effect — in which droplets levitate above hot surfaces — is well-known, but the ultimate fate of the evaporating droplets is unexplored. New experiments show that droplets either fly away or explode, depending on their initial size and purity.

The percentage of women in post-graduate physics positions has stalled just below 20%. The most precipitous drop in women’s representation occurs between high school and university; however, women at all career stages struggle with ongoing cultural burdens and obstacles.

Women remain under-represented in science, and in particular in physics. Effective action to remedy this situation should be based on rigorous analysis of high-quality data.

The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has released images and data showing the dark shadow of the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 87. This release is the result of years of development in instrumentation and data processing.

Three studies in Nature Astronomy uncover unexpected atmospheric and geological phenomena on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Data show that apart from their prize-winning work, the careers of Nobel laureates follow the same patterns as those of the majority of scientists.

We examine the arguments for and against building the next big particle collider and explore the technologies for different future particle accelerator projects.