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In the layered kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅, researchers have observed something that, until now, seemed almost impossible: robust quantum interference in the normal, non-superconducting state, persisting over distances of several micrometers. The interference is not the fragile single-particle kind seen in ultra-clean semiconductors at millikelvin temperatures. Instead, it behaves as if the entire stack of kagome […]

Author: Knut von Salzen, Senior Research Scientist, Marine Cloud Brightening Research Program, University of Washington Winter is setting in across the Northern Hemisphere, and with it, cold and cloudy winter days. Clouds play a vital role in the environment, providing rain but also reflecting sunlight before it reaches the Earth’s surface. But between 2003 and […]

There’s always a touch of melancholy when a chapter that has absorbed years of work comes to an end. In the case of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), those years amount to nearly 20—and now the telescope has completed its mission. Yet some endings are also important beginnings, opening new paths for the entire scientific […]

In the our last entry, we saw the weakness of Gabriel’s ‘inism’ (the belief that to exist has to be identical to ‘exist in something’) as the most important logical fault of his ontology. We also saw that his idea that ‘the world’ (in the sense of a super-entity comprising the totality of real beings) […]

When we think of atoms sitting on a surface, we tend to imagine them as fairly still, especially at very low temperatures (colder than liquid nitrogen, in fact). Yet in modern surface science we often discover the opposite: atoms can be surprisingly restless, gliding from place to place in ways that shape how materials grow […]

Authors: Jacob L. Bongers, Tom Austen Brown Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sydney and Charles Stanish, Exec. Director, Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment; Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida In 1931, geologist Robert Shippee and US Navy Lieutenant George R. Johnson led one of the first aerial photography expeditions […]

A new study has identified a surprising source of entropy in quantum timekeeping—the act of measurement itself. The researchers demonstrate that the energy cost of “reading” a quantum clock far outweighs the cost of running it, with implications for the design of future quantum technologies. Clocks, whether pendulums or atomic oscillators, rely on irreversible processes […]

Order on a molecular scale is difficult to control. The systems with highest possible order are crystals, formed by long arrays of repeating constituent components in all directions. The most familiar examples of crystals encountered in daily life are table salt and sucrose, the sugar in our kitchens. Every grain of table salt is a […]

Imagine a sheet of material so incredibly thin it’s just one atom thick, yet it can capture and guide light in ways that defy our everyday intuition. This isn’t science fiction—it’s graphene, a wonder material made from carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Now, picture slicing this sheet into tiny ribbons, arranging them in […]

Author: Gabriela Radulescu, Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool. Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets and other spacecraft, and use radio telescopes to take in radio waves emitted by objects […]