9 D Universe

Humanity has had a complicated relationship with machines and technology for centuries. While we created these inventions to make our lives easier, and have become heavily reliant upon them, we have often feared their impact on society. In her debut book, The Body Digital: a Brief History of Humans and Machines [...]

Genuine multipartite entanglement is the strongest form of entanglement, where every part of a quantum system is entangled with every other part. It plays a central role in advanced quantum tasks such as quantum metrology and quantum error correction. To detect this deep form of entanglement in practice, researchers often [...]

Acoustic waves are usually thought of as purely longitudinal, moving back and forth in the direction the wave is travelling and having no intrinsic rotation, therefore no spin (spin‑0). Recent work has shown that acoustic waves can in fact carry local spin‑like behaviour. However, until now, the total spin angular [...]

Quantum-entangled sensors placed over a kilometre apart could allow interferometric measurements of optical light with single photon sensitivity, experiments in the US suggest. While this proof-of-principle demonstration of a theoretical proposal first made in 2012 is not yet practically useful for astronomy, it marks a significant step forward in quantum [...]

Astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have used data from the project to make the largest, most accurate 3D map yet of the light emitted by excited hydrogen in the early universe, 9 billion to 11 billion years ago. This specific form of light, called Lyman alpha, [...]

The heads of university physics departments in the UK have published an open letter expressing their “deep concern” about funding changes announced late last year by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the umbrella organisation for the UK’s research councils. Addressed to science minister Patrick Vallance, the letter says the cuts are [...]

The Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed 540 times over the past 170 million years. Usually, these reversals are relatively speedy in geological terms, taking around 10,000 years to complete. Now, however, scientists in the US, France and Japan have found evidence of much slower reversals deep in Earth’s geophysical past. [...]

Fusion adopter Debbie Callahan is chief strategy officer at Focused Energy. (Courtesy: Focused Energy) With the world’s energy demands increasing, and our impact on the climate becoming ever clearer, the search is on for greener, cleaner energy production. That’s why research into fusion energy is undergoing something of a renaissance. Construction of [...]

Vol. 7079. The Sun and the Heliosphere Three-dimensional mapping of coronal magnetic field and plasma parameters in a solar flare by Tatyana Kaltman, Sijie Yu, Gregory D. Fleishman, Daniel F. Ryan 2026, A&A, 707, A158 The study presents reconstructed 3D maps of the magnetic field strength, Alfvén speed, and plasma beta in [...]

Yale junior Donglin Wu leads a new study showing that some of the biggest stars in the universe shed some of the smallest dust particles. It's fitting that Wu's first major scientific journal article as lead author focuses on stardust—tiny solid grains that form from stellar winds, drift into interstellar [...]

Author(s): David EhrensteinAn oil droplet within a watery fluid becomes nonspherical at certain temperatures—reversibly transforming from a hexagon to a six-pointed star.[Physics 19, 29] Published Fri Feb 27, 2026 [...]

Some of the universe's most extreme explosions leave behind almost no trace. The original explosion is unseen, but our observations can capture the long-lived echo it leaves behind as the shock front plows into its surrounding environment. In new research accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, we have discovered [...]

Reactions ranged from disappointment to enthusiasm On Feb. 18, MIT faculty gathered in Huntington Hall (10-250) for the first faculty meeting of 2026, where they discussed the recent proposal released by the Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP). The set of recommendations, made public on Feb. 5, outlines sweeping [...]

Author(s): Sophia ChenA group of physicists are developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source, from hardware to software[Physics 19, 24] Published Thu Feb 26, 2026 [...]