Issues
Readers’ Forum
Search and Discovery
Liquid deuterium pressured into becoming metallic
The world’s strongest pulsed-power source takes a shot at an 80-year-old condensed-matter-physics problem.
Imaging a mouse’s brain through its skull
A modest change in the application of adaptive optics to light microscopy produces a dramatic increase in the field of view.
Powerful lasers mimic intergalactic plasmas in the lab
A scaled-down experiment provides a platform to study how magnetic fields evolve as galaxy clusters merge.
Issues and Events
Advanced gravitational-wave detectors open their ears
Ripples in spacetime and the violent events that cause them may become accessible for study by the end of the decade.
How many asteroids are out there, exactly?
The effort to find objects that might threaten Earth is far from complete, and NASA admits it won’t meet a 2020 congressional deadline to find the bigger ones.
Mechanical metamaterials roll off the 3D printing press
Researchers are exploring applications that extend beyond optical invisibility cloaks.
Articles
Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser
Thought experiments that long puzzled the thermodynamics community are now being performed in the lab—and they’re forging a deeper understanding of the second law.
Lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles
A new class of nanomaterials that convert near-IR radiation into tunable visible light has important implications for many fields of science and technology.
Climate change impacts: The growth of understanding
In this peculiar history, the main actors are committees and no seminal papers or scientific giants emerge. Seat-of-the-pants guesses made in the 1960s proved to be roughly correct, and the details are still being fleshed out today.
Books
Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military–Industrial Complex
New Products
Obituaries
Samuel Frederick Edwards
Val Logsdon Fitch
Harden Marsden McConnell
John Stewart Waugh
Quick Study
Photosynthetic fluorescence, from molecule to planet
A small fraction of light absorbed by leaves is reemitted as fluorescence. Studies of that process at both large and small scales will help scientists better understand global photosynthesis and its connection to climate.