What We're Reading

Two years of analyzing the polarized light from a galaxy’s giant black hole has given scientists a glimpse at how quasars might arise.

Creating Bose-Einstein condensates — and crashing them together — in microgravity could lead to physics breakthroughs, better spacecraft navigation and more.

Physicists aim to make practical materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance

László Lovász of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. will share this year’s Abel Prize — regarded as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel — for advances in understanding the foundations of what can and cannot be solved with computers.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 radio astronomy dishes perched high in the Chilean Andes, shut down on last March and has remained silent ever since. But ALMA managers announced that observations will resume this month, after a 6-month campaign of repairs and planning.

A gold ball just 2 millimeters wide, with a mass of about 90 milligrams, is now the smallest object to have its gravitational pull measured. Observations of that gold sphere tugging on another similarly sized sphere confirm that gravity behaves as expected even for extremely weak gravitational fields.

In newly published research supported by the Simons Collaboration on the Many Electron Problem, physicists at the University of Michigan have uncovered a promising way to overcome one of the major limitations of modern quantum simulation.

From studies of “geometric frustration,” scientists learn how paper folds under pressure.

The evidence mounts that bacteria can be effectively immortal.

Humans have sent their progeny across time and 300 million miles of space in search of long-lost relatives, ancient roots of a family tree that might be traced in the Red Planet’s soil.