9 D Universe

Researchers in China have distributed device-independent quantum cryptographic keys over city-scale distances for the first time – a significant improvement compared to the previous record of a few hundred metres. Led by Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [...]

Todd McNutt is a radiation oncology physicist at Johns Hopkins University in the US and the co-founder of Oncospace, where he led the development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool that simultaneously accelerates radiation planning and elevates plan quality and consistency. The software, now rebranded as Plan AI and available from [...]

In his opening remarks to the 4th International Symposium on the History of Particle Physics, Chris Llewellyn Smith – who was a director-general of CERN in the 1990s – suggested participants should speak about “what’s not written in the journals”, including “mistakes, dead-ends and problems with getting funding”. Doing so, [...]

Attempts to understand quantum phase transitions in open systems usually rely on real‑time Lindbladian evolution, which tracks how a quantum state changes as it relaxes toward a steady state. This approach is powerful for studying decoherence, dissipation and long‑time behaviour, but it often fails to reveal the deeper structure of [...]

In the macroscopic world, we see irreversible processes everywhere, heat flowing from hot to cold, gases mixing, systems decaying. Yet at the microscopic level, quantum mechanics is perfectly reversible, with its equations running equally well forwards and backwards in time. How then, does irreversibility emerge from fundamentally reversible dynamics? A common [...]

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US have used visible light to both image and manipulate the domains of a chiral antiferromagnet (AFM). By “painting” complex patterns onto samples of cobalt niobium sulfite (Co1/3NbS2), they demonstrated that it is possible to control AFM domain formation and dynamics, [...]

Grey, ugly, dull. Concrete is not the most exciting material in the world. That is, until you start to think about its impact on our lives. Concrete is the second most consumed material on the planet after water. Humanity uses about 30 billion tonnes of the stuff every year, the [...]

For the first time, a much younger version of the sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble—called an "astrosphere"—completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star's surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot [...]

Our solar system hosts almost 900 known moons; more than 400 orbit the eight planets while the remaining orbit dwarf planets, asteroids, and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Of these, only a handful are targets for astrobiology and could potentially support life as we know it, including Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, [...]

Author(s): Philip BallIn response to changes in illumination, a swimming microorganism reverses the direction of its circular trajectory by tilting its flagella’s planes of motion.[Physics 19, 25] Published Fri Feb 20, 2026 [...]

Annual award honors early-career researchers for creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments. Eight MIT faculty and 22 additional MIT alumni are among 126 early-career researchers honored with 2026 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions, whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments [...]

New research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF-NCAR) has developed a new tool providing a first step toward the ability to forecast space weather weeks in advance, instead of just hours. This advance warning could allow agencies and industries to [...]

Author(s): Rachel BerkowitzNew modeling explains why smoke-filled vortices in the upper atmosphere have all been observed rotating in a single direction.[Physics 19, 23] Published Thu Feb 19, 2026 [...]