What We're Reading

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.

The vivid view of “sun-like” stars in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex 390 light years away, released to mark the first year of operation of the James Webb space telescope, is the first time researchers have been able to see the area in fine detail, minus the distraction of foreground stars.

After 15 years of painstaking observations, a team of researchers — including Chiara Mingarelli, who worked on the new findings while at the Flatiron Institute — has listened in on the ripples of gravitational waves that perpetually course throughout the Universe for the first time.

By modifying the blueprint of life, researchers are endowing proteins with chemistries they’ve never had before.

Bold new simulations suggest the James Webb Space Telescope might be able to distinguish between competing dark matter models by studying primordial dwarf galaxies.

Physicists have now turned to quantum effects to split phonons, the smallest bits of sound, researchers reported recently.

With their intrinsic ability to consider many possibilities at once, quantum computers do not have to be very large to tackle certain prickly problems of computation. Recently, IBM researchers announced that they had devised a method to manage the unreliability in a way that would lead to reliable, useful answers.