News & Comment

Discovery of a distinct class of plasma vortex at the cusps of the Earth's magnetosphere provides new insight into the nature of turbulence in magnetized plasmas.

A new record has been set for the acceleration of particles in a plasma wakefield — an energy gain of more than 2.7 GeV in a 10-cm-long device.

Quantum physics is full of counterintuitive twists, but a proposed concept in quantum information theory could help to relieve some of the perplexities.

Honeybees can be trained to locate landmines with an accuracy of better than 97.5%. Tracking them with laser-based radar could provide a fast and effective means of clearing the world’s minefields.

The orbits of extrasolar planets have greater eccentricities than those of Solar System planets. Could this be attributed to the effects of stellar jets and winds?

Numerical models are offering fresh insight into flame physics, and are set to become much more than just a supplement to theory and experiment.

Neutrinos originating from inside the Earth have at last been detected — a landmark discovery that will lead to a deeper understanding of the radioactive make-up of our planet, and of its overall heat budget.

Apart from applications, branched nanostructures can also be used to explore fundamental issues such as the wave–particle duality of electrons. In a tetrapod transistor, an electron appears to be true to its nature.

Juggling microparticles with optical tweezers can create three-dimensional quasicrystals with tuneable photonic bandgaps.

Combing through the data from the explosion of a neutron star, astrophysicists have found X-ray oscillations that could provide the first direct clues to the inner workings of these mysterious stellar objects.

New developments in the field of laser physics could at last make extreme ultraviolet wavelengths accessible for high-precision spectroscopy.

Components installed for the ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider report their first signals — not yet the Higgs boson, but the tell-tale tracks of cosmic muons.

Complementary signatures of inflation that could be found in the cosmic background radiation and through the direct detection of gravitational waves would pinpoint how the early Universe evolved.

Light transmitted by an optical cavity containing a trapped atom shows a certain selfishness — one photon prevents another from entering the cavity.

The question of what material or structure could withstand the intense radiation in a fusion reactor is just one of the challenges to be faced on the road to fusion-based energy production. The answer could be a wall of liquid lithium.