News & Comment

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

Calculations show that contrary to the commonly accepted idea, sound waves carry a tiny negative mass and create a gravitational field that is associated with it.

New experiments on swarms of Caenorhabditis elegans reveal that the worm can form a dynamical network that can be understood using active matter physics, and controlled using genetic manipulation.

How the mass of super-Earths affects mantle convection is a key question for understanding rocky exoplanet structure and thermal dynamics. New material models based on ab initio mineral calculations characterize convection, with implications for magnetism, planetary cooling, atmospheric composition and habitability.

New simulations of DNA suggest that its surprising flexibility on short length scales can be predicted from the crookedness of its structure.

In January, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) completed its 6-year-mission to map more than 300 million distant galaxies; however, the equally arduous task of analysing the data is just beginning.

Cosmological hydrodynamics simulations reveal the possible formation of supermassive stars within metal-free primordial gas haloes. These stars are thought to be the origin of supermassive black holes.

Two Nature Photonics papers report on microresonator laser frequency combs that enable spectrometer calibration with a precision high enough to potentially spot Earth-like planets in exo-planet searches.

Two robotic missions, one from China and one from India, will explore the southern lunar hemisphere, sending back a wealth of information about the surface and composition of the Moon, and perhaps even more.