Issues
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Cover Image
Cover Image
Cover: Einstein rings, such as the one that encircles galaxy NGC 6505, located near the center of the image, are examples of strong gravitational lensing, which occurs when light from a distant source is bent by a massive foreground object. For more on the ways astronomers learned how to identify gravitational lenses, turn to the article by Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan on page 30. (Image from ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li.)
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Search and Discovery
Up-conversion nanoparticles measure medium-sized forces in hard-to-reach places
Squeezing the tiny crystals can dramatically change their photophysics.
Water’s hydrogen bonds are seen like never before
With a new spectroscopy approach, researchers observed how charge redistributes through hydrogen bonds when water becomes acidic or basic.
Updates
Birdlike robot flies steady without a vertical tail
A pigeon-inspired design for mechanical flight uses avian-like movements to achieve autonomous, rudderless flight.
Baseball rubbing mud does, in fact, make balls grippier
Scientific analyses confirm long-held suspicions: Players can throw harder-to-hit pitches when the ball is covered with river sediment.
Squirting cucumber seeds go ballistic
A mechanics study reveals how the gourd uses fluid pressure and subtle shape changes in the days before ejection to maximize the dispersal of its offspring.
Atmospheric rivers bring anomalously high temperatures
Narrow bands of water vapor, long known for the torrential rains they deliver, also transport vast amounts of heat.
How Pluto got its biggest satellite
Pluto and Charon may have briefly merged before being bound in orbit. Other objects in the outer solar system may have assembled into binaries in a similar fashion.
Issues and Events
Japan accelerator pursues nanobeams to boost luminosity
Squeezing beams of electrons and positrons for the Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB facility proceeds with halting progress.
Researchers share computational tricks at unique Los Alamos conference
Scientists encompassing multiple disciplines and security clearance levels spent more than a month discussing how to efficiently capture both small- and large-scale phenomena in calculations.
Q&A: Historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey starts a museum
The founding director at Science Gallery Bengaluru in India aims to “bring science back into the culture.”
Women leave physics at a rate similar to that of men, bibliometric study suggests
Features
Learning to see gravitational lenses
In the 1970s and 1980s, iconoclastic astronomers used diagrams, computer models, and their own intuition to convince the community that they had observed celestial objects that noticeably bend background light.
Making qubits from magnetic molecules
Bottom-up synthesis of such molecules provides physicists with a rich playground to study newly discovered quantum effects and a means to store information at the scale of individual atoms.
France’s Oppenheimer
Frédéric Joliot-Curie was one of the first to conceive of the nuclear chain reaction. But the ardent advocate of nuclear disarmament paid a high price for his political convictions.
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Quick Study
As the world turns—irregularly
The length of the day varies by milliseconds over the course of weeks, years, and centuries. Conservation of angular momentum explains why.
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