News & Comment

UNESCO has now formally adopted World Metrology Day as a UNESCO International Day to be observed on 20 May each year — the theme of 2024 is sustainability. Shanay Rab and Richard Brown take a look at its origin.

Thousands of Iranians study at German universities every year, but many struggle to integrate into German academia. Here, we offer some advice.

Bart Verberck uses the musical cent as a pretext to touch on some of the intricacies of musical tuning systems.

Eighty years on from the publication of Erwin Schrödinger’s interdisciplinary analysis on the origin of order in living organisms — What is Life? — we look at how physicists and biologists are approaching the topic today.

The time has come to consider appropriate guardrails to ensure quantum technology benefits humanity and the planet. With quantum development still in flux, the science community shares a responsibility in defining principles and practices.

Measuring air temperature is far from a trivial task, as Andrea Merlone, Graziano Coppa and Chiara Musacchio explain.

Computing is central to the enterprise of physics but few undergraduate physics courses include it in their curricula. Here we discuss why and how to integrate computing into physics education.

Injustices and oppression are pervasive in society, including education. An intersectional, equity-oriented approach can help remove systemic obstacles and improve the experience of marginalized people in physics education through decolonial and critical race lenses.

This month in Nature Physics, we publish a Focus issue that highlights the importance of physics education research.

Increasingly, physics graduates take jobs outside academia. Active teaching approaches lead to deeper conceptual understanding and a more varied skill set and are therefore more likely to prepare students for successful careers.

AI needs to develop more solid assumptions, falsifiable hypotheses, and rigorous experimentation.

Despite the essential support they provide to successful research projects, the contributions of laboratory technicians often remain undervalued. We take a moment to appreciate their efforts.

Adaptive optics allows scientists to correct for distortions of an image caused by the scattering of light. Anita Chandran illuminates the nature of the technique.

Mathematical proofs of black hole physics are becoming too complex even for specialists.

Quantum technologies change our notion of measurement. Chenyu Wang elaborates on how quantum squeezing enhances the precision of gravitational-wave interferometers.