Can you prove whether a large quantum system truly behaves according to the weird and wonderful rules of quantum mechanics—or if it just looks like it does? In a new study, physicists from Leiden, Beijing and Hangzhou found the answer to this question. You could call it a “quantum lie detector”: Bell’s test designed by […]
For more than a century, a well-known 18-electron rule has guided the field of organometallic chemistry. Now, researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), in collaboration with scientists from Germany, Russia, and Japan, have successfully synthesized a novel organometallic compound that challenges this longstanding principle. They have created a stable 20-electron derivative of […]
A new discovery of how bees use their flight movements to facilitate remarkably accurate learning and recognition of complex visual patterns could mark a major change in how next-generation AI is developed, according to a University of Sheffield study. By building a computational model—or a digital version of a bee’s brain—researchers have discovered how the […]
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have theoretically demonstrated that photons trapped inside an optical cavity carry detailed information about a material placed within it. By measuring the properties of the photons leaking out of the cavity, researchers can probe how an optical cavity modifies the properties […]
A team led by astronomers at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia (U.S.) have, for the first time, robustly detected semi-heavy water ice around a young sunlike star. The results strengthen the case that some of the water in our solar system formed before our sun and the […]
A team of astronomers led by Michael Janssen (Radboud University, The Netherlands) has trained a neural network with millions of synthetic black hole data sets. Based on the network and data from the Event Horizon Telescope, they now predict, among other things, that the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way is spinning […]
Kirigami is a traditional Japanese art form that entails cutting and folding paper (origami is just folding it) to produce complex three-dimensional (3D) structures or objects. Over the past decades, this creative practice has also been applied in the context of physics, engineering, and materials science research to create new materials, devices and even robotic […]
Biochemistry • Biology • Chemistry • Physics • Physiology • Plant biology
The light of someone’s life might not be just another person, but light in the literal sense. According to a recent study , every living system emits light without requiring external excitation due to a biological phenomenon known as ultraweak photon emission (UPE). In mice, UPE was linked to vitality as live mice emitted significantly […]
The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 1078 years to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 101100 years. The research by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael […]
When an object moves extremely fast—close to the speed of light—certain basic assumptions that we take for granted no longer apply. This is the central consequence of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The object then has a different length than when it is at rest, and time passes differently for the object than it […]