Quantum physicists have set a new record for collecting a persistent group of entangled atoms together, getting 15 trillion atoms to co-exist in a “hot and messy” cloud of gas.   Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon at the heart of quantum physics, where two particles can mysteriously influence each other, no matter what the distance

Quantum entanglement – that strange but potentially hugely useful quantum phenomenon where two particles are inextricably linked across space and time – could play a major role in future radar technology.   In 2008, an engineer from MIT devised a way to use the features of entanglement to illuminate objects while using barely any photons.

Every time tabloids and social media dramatically mishandle a science news story, the urge to unplug the internet and plug it back in again is excruciatingly strong. If you’ve heard the recent claim that NASA detected a parallel universe (!) in Antarctica (!) where time runs backwards (!!), we’re glad you’ve now clicked on this

Graphene has already proven itself to be a weird and wonderful material in many different ways, but its properties get even more unusual and exotic when it’s twisted – and two new studies have given scientists a much closer look at this intriguing phenomenon.   When two sheets of graphene are put together at slightly

A team of research physicists at Princeton University may have found a new way to control fusion reactions inside doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors — an incremental step towards making fusion energy, the ‘holy grail of energy production’, a reality.   Many fusion reactors today use light elements in the form of plasma as fuel. The problem is

As far as we know, liquid metal robots from the future have yet to show up. But new research into alloys and lattice materials shows how liquid metal shapes can be deformed and reformed using heat.   Researchers have developed a method of wrapping Field’s alloy – a mixture of bismuth, indium and tin – in a

Scientists have found evidence that a fundamental physical constant used to measure electromagnetism between charged particles can in fact be rather inconstant, according to measurements taken from a quasar some 13 billion light-years away.   Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces that knit everything in our Universe together, alongside gravity, weak nuclear force,

Stephen Wolfram is a cult figure in programming and mathematics. He is the brains behind Wolfram Alpha, a website that tries to answer questions by using algorithms to sift through a massive database of information. He is also responsible for Mathematica, a computer system used by scientists the world over.   Last week, Wolfram launched

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Prince Rupert’s drop, this weird, scientific enigma is a seemingly simple glass object created by dripping molten glass into very cold water.   That process creates all kinds of crazy physical properties, which we’ll go into later, but the end result is a teardrop-shaped piece of

Scientists have found a new way to structure carbon at the nanoscale, making a material that’s superior to diamond on the strength-to-density ratio. While the tiny carbon lattice has been fabricated and tested in the lab, it’s a very long way off practical use. But this new approach could help us build stronger and lighter

Our planet is constantly bathed in the winds coming off the blistering sphere at the centre of our Solar System. But even though the Sun itself is so ridiculously hot, once the solar winds reach Earth, they are hotter than they should be – and we might finally know why.   We know that particles

We’re all here only because reality is an imperfect reflection of itself. Thanks to a flaw in the symmetry of nature, plenty of material was available to clump into the billions of galaxies we now see in the Universe.   Nearly a decade’s worth of data produced by the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) particle physics

Eight years after he first shared it online, Kyoto University mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki’s controversial, 600-page proof for a profound mathematical conjecture has been approved for publication in an academic journal.   But there’s a twist: academic mathematicians around the world didn’t believe that Mochizuki solved the problem, known as the “abc conjecture,” back then, Nature

Physicists have conducted the most high-energy test of the speed of light yet, and found that it is still constant, everywhere in the Universe, even in gamma rays spewed out of sources such as exploding stars.   This means that, even at the highest energies we can detect, one of the pillars of Albert Einstein’s

Adding pellets of Mentos mint candy to carbonated beverages has been a science fair staple for years. While most ten-year-olds can tell you why it spews up a geyser of foam, certain microscopic features of the reaction haven’t been so easy to figure out.   A chemistry professor at Spring Arbor University in the US

If building a super-secure, super-smart ‘quantum internet’ is ever going to be possible, then quantum-entangled photons are likely to be essential in building it – and scientists just figured out a very useful new way of generating them.   Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon where two particles (such as photons) get linked together, irrespective of

As life starts, the crazy whirl begins. That’s not poetry or philosophy. It’s science. Once an egg is fertilised, billions of proteins ripple out across its surface, unleashing a dizzying cascade of swirling patterns. These spiralling arcs aren’t for show, though; the phenomenon may be pretty, but it’s also a fundamental part of nascent cell

Most of the laws of physics don’t care which direction time is travelling. Forwards, backwards… either way, the laws work exactly the same. Newtonian physics, general relativity – time is irrelevant to the mathematics: This is called time-reversal symmetry.   In the real Universe, things get a bit messier. And now a team of scientists

One of the key challenges of getting quantum computing working in a practical and useful way is to do with temperature – being able to put together a machine that doesn’t need ultra-low, laboratory-maintained temperatures to stay stable enough to operate.   Now scientists have found a new technique to get qubits, the basic building

The shape of the earliest building blocks of life dating back as far as 3.5 billion years ago may have been identified, due to a new effort to envisage the molecular arrangements of the planet’s very first proteins.   Using computer modelling to simulate the configuration of ancient molecules that no longer exist on Earth,

In the heart of a galaxy cluster 200 million light-years away, astronomers have failed to detect hypothetical particles called axions. This places new constraints on how we believe these particles work – but it also has pretty major implications for string theory, and the development of a Theory of Everything that describes how the physical

Nearly 60 years ago, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Nicolaas Bloembergen predicted an exciting new phenomenon called nuclear electric resonance. But no one has been able to demonstrate it in action – until now.   Actual evidence of nuclear electric resonance has now been discovered by accident in a lab at the University of New South Wales

Well, those crazy chemistry cats have done it. Nearly 200 years after the molecule was discovered by Michael Faraday, researchers have finally revealed the complex electronic structure of benzene.   This not only settles a debate that has been raging since the 1930s, this step has important implications for the future development of opto-electronic materials,

Back in 1966, Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka came up with the idea of an unusual new mechanism that could cause ferromagnetism – the phenomeon that powers magnets as we know them.   His idea made sense theoretically, but it’s never been observed in natural materials. Now, we have our first signs of it happening in the

Before it’s observed, an electron is a hot mess of possibility. Just like the metaphorical Schrödinger’s cat, it’s only once we lift the lid from its metaphorical box and take a good, close look that an electron settles on a clear position around an atom.   We’ve now had a closer look at exactly how

Scientists have used super high-speed cameras to capture the moment liquid droplets combine together, providing a unique, preternatural glimpse of fluid dynamics the human eye can’t observe on its own.   Using an experimental setup involving two synchronised high-speed cameras – one shooting from the side, and the other looking upwards (courtesy of a mirror

Scientists have observed a new state of electronic matter on the quantum scale, one that forms when electrons clump together in transit, and it could advance our understanding and application of quantum physics.   Movement is key to this new quantum state. When electric current is applied to semiconductors or metals, the electrons inside usually

To understand how atoms unite to turn into molecules, we need to catch them in action. But to do that, physicists must force atoms to pause long enough for their exchanges to be recorded. That’s no easy task, and one physicists from the University of Otago have only just recently achieved.   Until now, the

Scientists have managed to get two quantum memories entangled over 50 kilometres (31 miles) of fibre optic cables, almost 40 times the previous record. This achievement makes the idea of a super-fast, super-secure quantum internet a much more plausible one.   Quantum communication relies on quantum entanglement, or what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’:

In the latest viral challenge to overtake Twitter, people are balancing brooms upright in order to demonstrate a supposed unique gravitational pull taking place on February 10. However, the tweet igniting the #BroomChallenge – which claimed that NASA provided the scientific basis for the balancing act – has proven to be a hoax.   “Okay

Newly created artificial atoms on a silicon chip could become the new basis for quantum computing. Engineers in Australia have found a way to make these artificial atoms more stable, which in turn could produce more consistent quantum bits, or qubits – the basic units of information in a quantum system.   The research builds

Diamond is one of the hardest materials on the planet, but scientists have found a new way of getting it to bend and deform – and the key to these processes is to work at the tiniest possible scales.   By beaming an electric field at diamond nanoneedles just 20 nanometres in length (about 10,000

With the right patience and finesse, you can get soap bubbles to grow to enormous sizes. At their most gigantic, with surface areas approaching 100 metres squared (over 1,000 square feet), these globules can get large enough to hold entire cars within their fragile grasp.   Stretched out to extreme lengths, a bubble’s microscopically thin

Life as we know it wouldn’t exist without it, but compared to other liquids, water is just a freaking weirdo. And, as it now turns out, it’s even weirder than we thought. Scientists in Japan have demonstrated that water has not one, but two different molecular structures when in its liquid state – one tetrahedral

We know that the realm of quantum physics is science operating at a mind-bogglingly small scale, thus watching quantum interactions happen is always exciting. Now, physicists have managed to observe billions upon billions of entangled electrons passing through a metal film.   The film is a mix of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon, and is what’s

Scientists have created the fastest spinning object ever made, taking them a big step closer to being able to measure the mysterious quantum forces at play inside ‘nothingness’.   The record-breaking object in question is a tiny piece of silica, capable of whipping around billions of times per second – creating sufficient sensitivity that the

When physicists detected signals of high-energy neutrinos coming from a rather unlikely direction in the cosmos, they naturally went looking for a powerful source that might explain it.   An intense examination of the most likely origins of these more reactive forms of ‘ghost’ particles has now come up empty-handed, opening the way for more

It might look like any old 18-carat nugget of gold, but it hides a secret. Produced in the lab, this shiny disc weighs just a fraction of what it should, and has other interesting properties to boot.    Unlike a typical chunk of the bright metal, here the gold nanocrystals are held together with a

Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are incredibly useful – and usually incredibly huge – instruments for studying some of the fundamentals of particle physics. But now scientists have managed to squeeze one on to a silicon chip.   It’s nowhere near as powerful as the bigger versions, as you might expect, but the

Nothing lasts forever. Humans, planets, stars, galaxies, maybe even the Universe itself, everything has an expiration date. But things in the quantum realm don’t always follow the rules. Scientists have found that quasiparticles in quantum systems could be effectively immortal.   That doesn’t mean they don’t decay, which is reassuring. But once these quasiparticles have

As 2019 winds to a close, the journey towards fully realised quantum computing continues: physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.   Put simply, this breakthrough means that information was passed between the chips not by physical electronic connections, but through quantum entanglement – by linking

Earlier this year, we celebrated a first in the field of quantum physics: scientists were able to ‘teleport’ a qutrit, or a piece of quantum information based on three states, opening up a whole host of new possibilities for quantum computing and communication.   Up until then, quantum teleportation had only been managed with qubits, albeit

When it comes to data transfer and computing, the faster we can shift electrons and conduct electricity the better – and scientists have just been able to transport electrons at sub-femtosecond speeds (less than one quadrillionth of a second) in an experimental setup.   The trick is manipulating the electrons with light waves that are

A unique material that appears to decouple an object’s temperature from the amount of thermal radiation it produces could provide a new way of hiding from infrared cameras (not to mention bloodthirsty aliens equipped with infrared vision).   Thermal radiation is emitted by basically everything with a temperature above absolute zero, and the hotter things

Quantum physics has up-ended classical physics again, this time enabling heat to transfer across empty space without any of the atoms or molecules that would usually be needed for such a push.   The research taps into a particular bit of quantum weirdness known as the Casimir effect: the idea that empty space isn’t really

Everything in our Universe is held together or pushed apart by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists think they’ve spotted the actions of a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom.   It’s not the first time researchers claim to have caught a glimpse of it, either. A few years

We can use just about any part of the electromagnetic spectrum to make a laser – from long-wave microwaves to bursts of highly powerful X-rays. The only ones we’ve had trouble with have been the ultra-short wavelengths making up the gamma ray part of the spectrum. Now, that might be set to change.   A

There’s some irony in the fact that the darkest objects in the sky – black holes – can be responsible for some of the Universe’s brightest light. Simulations of the magnetic fields surrounding black holes and neutron stars have now provided new insights into their astonishing brilliance.   Astrophysicists from Columbia University in New York