What We're Reading

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is aweing scientists and the public alike with its spectacular images of distant galaxies and its discoveries of dozens of new black holes. Yet JWST is also rewriting scientists’ understanding of objects on a slightly smaller, more relatable scale: how planets form from swirls of gas and dust around young stars.

Cells of different size classes all have a similar total mass, such that small, numerous cells such as red blood cells contribute the same amount to the body’s total mass as the largest cells, as reported by researchers in the September 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Until recently, gravitational waves could have been a figment of Einstein’s imagination. Before they were detected, these ripples in spacetime existed only in the physicist’s general theory of relativity, as far as scientists knew. Now, researchers have not one but two ways to detect the waves. And they’re on the hunt for more.

The current-carrying ability of so-called strange metals defies the known rules of electricity. Now Aavishkar Patel of the Flatiron Institute and his colleagues have an explanation for why.

What the hairiest problem in math can teach us about wind, antennas and nuclear fusion.

Magnetars possess magnetic fields that are trillions of times stronger than those of ordinary stars. Flatiron Institute astrophysicist Christopher White comments on the work being done to pin down possible pathways to a magnetar.

Strange metals have confounded physicists since their discovery 40 years ago, suggesting that a new fundamental theory is needed to understand how they work. Now, a new study led by Flatiron Scientists claims to offer just that.

As their colonies grow, bees and wasps eventually need to increase the size of the hexagonal cells that make up their nests. But it’s hard to efficiently combine hexagons of different sizes into a single continuous array. Both the honeybees and wasps have solved this problem by mixing in some pairs of five-sided and seven-sided cells, which bridge the gap between different sizes of the six-sided hexagons.

The discovery of ‘weak neutral currents’ at Europe’s particle-physics research centre CERN 50 years ago was a decisive step towards establishing the standard model of particle physics — a journey that continues to this day.

Physicists have three different definitions of mass, all thought to be equivalent. Measurements of the distance between Earth and the moon confirm that two of those masses are one and the same to higher precision than ever before, confirming one of the most basic foundations of physics: Newton’s third law of motion.