Volume 1 Issue 11, November 2019

Insects have mastered flight to a degree that scientists are only now starting to comprehend. Itai Cohen and colleagues discuss some of the outstanding challenges and opportunities for studying this fascinating and beautiful behaviour.

The fluid mechanics of active materials, built around the idea of living systems as condensed matter made of free-energy-consuming particles, gives insight into biology and opens new directions in physics. Sriram Ramaswamy discusses the history and future of the field.

In September, scientists gathered at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the institute, an event marked by a symposium discussing future prospects in cosmology, large-scale structure and galaxy formation.

The Optical Society’s Frontiers in Optics conference held in Washington DC, USA, this September brought together students and Nobel Laureates alike to discuss the wide-ranging fields of optics and photonics.

More than 1,700 planetary scientists from 52 countries gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, in September for the joint meeting of the Europlanet Society’s European Planetary Science Congress and the meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

The emergence of 2D magnetic materials presents a unique opportunity to study magnetism and spintronics devices in new regimes. This Review surveys the basic properties of these materials, methods to read and write their magnetic states, and emerging device concepts.

The partonic (quark and gluon) structure of protons and neutrons is modified in heavy nuclei. This Review surveys how studies of photon-induced interactions reveal the density distribution of partons in nuclei, thereby probing quantum chromodynamics in high-density environments.

An analogy between wave propagation in hydrodynamics and in optics has yielded new insights into the mechanisms leading to the formation of giant rogue waves on the ocean. We review experimental progress and field measurements in this area.

Random lasing, which exploits disorder to enhance stimulated emission, challenges the conventional descriptions of lasing. This Expert Recommendation describes experimental methods required to properly assess and demonstrate random lasing action.