News & Comment

Two recent papers demonstrate optical waveguides consisting of ultrathin photonic crystals, which approach the lowest possible thickness for such devices.

The International Nuclear Physics Conference in Glasgow in July featured all areas of nuclear physics, an outreach programme and prizes for young scientists.

Each year millions of patients benefit from diagnostic services enabled by advances in medical imaging. However, some services rely on the supply of technetium-99m from an ageing nuclear infrastructure. Kevin Charlton discusses new technologies to secure a sustainable supply.

Detector technologies developed at CERN can produce stunning colour X-ray computed tomography images, but bringing them to hospitals is challenging.

In July, physicists met for the biannual European Physical Society High-Energy Physics conference and discussed exciting developments in their field.

Jose R. Alonso and colleagues describe technical advances that will allow the proposed IsoDAR (isotope decay at rest) cyclotron — being developed for neutrino physics research — to produce many medical isotopes more efficiently than existing cyclotrons can.

This month we talk about our figures and the lesser-known facts about how they are produced.

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.