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Researchers continue to push toward superconductors that operate without extreme cooling, a goal that has driven physics research for decades. Despite incremental progress in materials science, truly practical, room-temperature superconductors that could be deployed at scale have not yet been achieved.
Scientists in China have developed a new aluminum-based material modeled on the microstructure of eggshells, aiming to better protect spacecraft from high-speed debris impacts. The work, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, builds on decades of research into how an egg's curved geometry gives it surprising rigidity despite its thinness and fragility.
CERN engineers announced at a Winterthur conference that the lab will shift over 2,200 machines from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian. The move stems from RHEL 9 and 10's newer compiler requirements, which drop support for older CPU architectures still used in many of CERN's embedded control systems.
A nonprofit called the Fermi Explorer Mission plans to launch a spacecraft toward the Alpha Centauri star system by the end of 2029, using a novel flight path calculated by an AI system built by physics lab PSI. The mission, though launched this decade, could take the probe as long as 80,000 years to reach its destination 4.4 light-years away. Separately, MIT Technology Review highlighted how AI models have rapidly improved at solving New York Times Connections puzzles, jumping from 18% accuracy in late 2024 to near-perfect scores by early 2025.
An essay dissects the common sci-fi trope of depicting wormholes as flat, circular portals with tunnel-like interiors resembling a hole dug by a worm. The author explains that this image stems from misreading two-dimensional diagrams of Einstein-Rosen bridges, which were never meant to represent how a real three-dimensional wormhole would actually appear to an observer.
An essay compares the universe to a massive, minified software file with no comments or source history, arguing that physicists effectively act as reverse engineers probing a running system they cannot inspect directly. It traces how Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein each uncovered hidden unifying rules beneath seemingly separate phenomena, and notes that quantum mechanics then complicated the picture by making particles behave differently depending on how they are observed.
In their book Time's Second Arrow, Robert Hazen and Michael Wong argue that alongside thermodynamics' entropy-driven decay, there exists a complementary natural principle that consistently pushes matter and systems toward greater order and complexity. They cite phenomena from element formation via nuclear fusion to biological evolution as recurring evidence of this ordering tendency across both living and non-living systems.
CERN is proceeding with a major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider intended to significantly increase the rate of particle collisions, giving physicists more data to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. This follows years in which the collider largely confirmed existing theoretical predictions without producing the unexpected results many researchers had hoped for.
The piece is a short fiction narrative told by an unnamed narrator recalling his childhood friend Aaron, a brilliant but unfocused classmate who chased fleeting obsessions instead of academics. Years later, after failing to finish school while his friends went to university, Aaron drifts to the margins of the group, working at a local pub where his old friends awkwardly avoid him.
Scientists led by James Quach have demonstrated a quantum battery that exploits 'superabsorption,' a collective quantum effect where molecules synchronize their energy absorption rather than acting independently. This causes the charging rate to increase as more molecules are added, defying the classical expectation that each unit absorbs energy at a fixed, independent rate.