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Brilliant scientists of all ages should be able to thrive at universities. Mandatory retirement is, therefore, a form of age discrimination, but its removal or postponement can come at a cost to younger faculty members, as observed in Italy.
The study of the critical state of matter has brought us concepts such as universality and power laws. Looking at mixtures of complex molecules could help us to understand the transition from non-critical to critical behaviour.
Vortex structures have revealed a lot about the nature of three-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensates. They play an even bigger part in two-dimensional cold atomic gases and drive a fundamentally different phase transition.
Quantum mechanics can simulate a classical system evolving in (and towards) thermal equilibrium. This finding adds a further ingredient to the story of what problems a computer — classical or quantum — could possibly master.
Biological cells respond actively to the physical properties of their surroundings as well as to external mechanical forces — a coupling that is captured in a model of a cell as a contractile dipole, and shown to drive cell re-orientation.
We regularly get queries about the minutiae of Nature Physics format, but what we really care about is that the papers are clear and accessibly written.
Relativistic electrons in the outer Van Allen belt wreak havoc with satellites in geosynchronous orbit, but how they reach such high energies has been unclear. New data identify gyro-resonant wave–particle interactions as the culprit.