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An illustration of a demon’s face.
explainers

How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists

By Jonathan O'Callaghan
April 22, 2021
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The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

Q&A

The New Historian of the Smash That Made the Himalayas

By Robin George Andrews
April 14, 2021
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About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.

Photo of radio telescopes at the Allen Telescope Array with a starry sky featuring the Milky Way in the background.
Quantized Columns

How Radio Astronomy Reveals the Universe

By Emily Levesque
April 13, 2021
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Radio waves, longer and less energetic than visible light, give astronomers access to some of the most obscure physics in the cosmos.

A sphere swirling with many small orbs around it.
particle physics

‘Last Hope’ Experiment Finds Evidence for Unknown Particles

By Natalie Wolchover
April 7, 2021
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Today’s long-anticipated announcement by Fermilab’s Muon g-2 team appears to solidify a tantalizing conflict between nature and theory. But a separate calculation, published at the same time, has clouded the picture.

planetary science

Iceland’s Eruptions Reveal the Hot History of Mars

By Robin George Andrews
April 6, 2021
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The new volcanic fissures are more otherworldly than they first appear.

Spheres representing black holes, with small ones on top, large ones on the bottom, and one midsize example in the middle.
astrophysics

Long-Missing Midsize Black Hole Flashes Into View

By Jonathan O'Callaghan
March 29, 2021
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Black holes seemed to come only in sizes small and XXL. A new search strategy has uncovered a black hole of “intermediate” mass, raising hopes of more to come.

Orange hills (polaritons) against a black background. Below each hill, an arrow points to an angular position on a circle.
explainers

The Near-Magical Mystery of Quasiparticles

By Thomas Lewton
March 24, 2021
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The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

Graphic of swirling vortex-like patterns called skyrmions.
condensed matter physics

A New Twist Reveals Superconductivity’s Secrets

By Charlie Wood
March 16, 2021
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An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect.

An illustration of an airplane with its contrails coming out in front of it.
quantum gravity

Quantum Mischief Rewrites the Laws of Cause and Effect

By Natalie Wolchover
March 11, 2021
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Spurred on by quantum experiments that scramble the ordering of causes and their effects, some physicists are figuring out how to abandon causality altogether.


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