China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 are conducting proximity operations for a second time high above the Earth as a precursor to an expected on-orbit refueling test.
What is the British Royal Regalia? Learn more about the British Crown Jewels and how they are replaced medieval renditions after anti-monarchists destroyed them.
Learn more about the Neanderthal remains uncovered in Shanidar Cave, and how evidence, such as flower seeds, could indicate that Neanderthals buried their dead.
The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace’s second failed […]
New observations support the idea that hot, diffuse threads of gas called cosmic filaments connect clusters of galaxies across the cosmos. That is the conclusion of Konstantinos Migkas at Leiden University and colleagues who say that their study strengthens the idea that much of the normal matter in the universe resides in these structures.
About 5% of the universe’s mass–energy content appears to be baryonic matter – the familiar nuclei and particles that make up atoms and molecules. The rest is believed to be dark energy and dark matter, which are both hypothetical entities. Although they know what baryonic matter is, astronomers have a poor understanding of where much of it is distributed in the universe.
Combining the Standard Model of cosmology with the rigid constraints enforced by observations of cosmic microwave background radiation tells us that structures including stars, black holes, and gas clouds account for around 60% of baryonic matter in the universe. This leaves 40% of baryonic matter unaccounted for.
Previously, cosmologists have argued that this discrepancy could point to a fundamental error in the Standard Model. Recently, however, a growing body of evidence suggests that this matter could be found in vast yet elusive structures, hidden deep within intergalactic space.
On a WHIM
“Large-scale structure simulations of the universe tell us this material should reside within long strings of gas called ‘cosmic filaments’, which connect clusters of galaxies,” Migkas explains. “These missing baryons should be found in the so-called ‘warm-hot intergalactic medium’ (WHIM).”
Despite being extremely sparse, models also predict that the WHIM should be extremely hot – primarily heated by shock waves produced as matter collapses into the large-scale cosmic web, as well as by phenomena including active galactic nuclei and mergers between galaxy clusters. As a result, these cosmic filaments should be emitting a faint yet detectable X-ray signal.
On top of this, the Standard Model places tight theoretical constraints on several physical properties of the WHIM – including its density, temperature, and composition. If X-rays are indeed being emitted by cosmic filaments, these properties should be encoded in their energies, intensities, and frequency spectra – providing astronomers with a clear target in their search for the elusive structures.
These X-ray signals have so far evaded detection because they are extremely faint compared to powerful X-ray signals such as those coming from supermassive black holes
To overcome this, researchers combined data from two of the world’s most advanced X-ray observatories. One is the Suzaku satellite, which was jointly operated by JAXA and NASA and was very good at detecting very faint signals. The other is the ESA’s XMM-Newton, which is very good at observing powerful X-ray signals.
Eliminating black holes
“Combining the two instruments, we carefully and appropriately eliminated the contaminating signal of the black holes throughout our filament,” Migkas explains. “This enabled us to isolate the signal of WHIM and measure its density and temperature for the very first time with such accuracy.”
For an observational target, Migkas’ team searched for cosmic filaments in the Shapley supercluster. This vast structure around 650 million light-years from the Milky Way contains one of the highest concentrations of galaxies in the known universe.
With the combined abilities of Suzaku and XMM-Newton, the researchers detected an X-ray signal indicating the presence of a filament – consistent with predictions of the Standard Model. As they expected, this intergalactic material was extremely hot and sparse: boasting temperatures close to 10 million Kelvin, while containing just around 10 electrons per cubic metre.
“We also found that on average, the filament is around 40 times denser than the average density of the universe – which is pretty empty in general – and around 1000 times less dense than the cores of the four-galaxy cluster it connects,” Migkas describes. Despite having gone undetected so far, this filament also carries a total mass around 10 times that of the Milky Way – making it a vast reservoir of previously hidden matter.
“For the very first time, our work confirms the validity of the predictions of the Standard Model of cosmology regarding the properties of a big part of the missing baryons,” Migkas concludes.
Beyond the technical skills tied to specific aspects of my research, my work involves continuously engaging a balance of creativity, critical thinking and curiosity. Creativity alone isn’t enough – in physics, ideas must ultimately stand up to scrutiny. Something is either right or it isn’t, so the goal is to let your imagination run free, while keeping it anchored to scientific rigour.
This balance becomes especially important when it comes to defining your own research direction. Early in your career, you’re usually handed a problem to work on. But, over time, you have to learn to ask your own questions, and formulating good ones is much harder than it sounds.
In the beginning, most of the ideas you come up with turn out either to be flawed or have already been explored. The alternative is to stay in safe territory and do incremental work, which certainly has its place, but it’s difficult to build a research career on that alone.
What helps is staying curious. Finding a meaningful research question often means diving into unfamiliar literature, following sparks of interest, and carving out time to read and think critically. It also means being open to inspiration from other people’s work, not just from research that overlaps with your own, but potentially from entirely different areas.
To me, one of the most precious traits in research is the ability to keep your curiosity alive
I’ve seen how easy it can be to fall into the trap of only valuing ideas that align with your own. To me, one of the most precious traits in research is the ability to keep your curiosity alive: to remain open to surprise, ready to recognize when you’re wrong, be willing to learn, and to be excited by someone else’s discovery, even when it has nothing to do with your own work.
What do you like best and least about your job?
What I like best is the freedom. I get to choose what my next research project will be about, and sometimes that process starts in the simplest of ways. I see an exciting talk at a conference, become fascinated by a new idea, and find myself reading everything I can about it. I’ll come back, pitch it to a student, and if they’re excited too, we explore it together.
When I start something new, I often feel like an imposter, venturing into foreign territory and trying to operate as if I know my way around, but as time goes on, things start to fall into place. Eventually, you reach the point where you create something new that others in the field may find interesting or inspiring in turn. That moment – when a once-distant topic becomes something you have actually contributed to – is deeply rewarding.
What I like least is answering e-mails. As a student, I couldn’t understand why some professors took ages to reply. Now I do. Some days, my inbox just fills up endlessly, and responding thoughtfully to every message would take the whole day. It’s a balancing act, deciding when to say yes and when to say no, and learning to say no in a considerate and fair way takes time and emotional energy. You want to be generous with your time, especially when someone genuinely needs help, but finding this balance can be exhausting. It’s an important part of the job, but I wish it took up a bit less space.
What do you know today that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
That everyone feels like an imposter sometimes. When I started out as a student, I looked around and assumed everyone else was an expert, while I was just trying to find my way, painfully aware of how much I didn’t know. Over time, you do gain confidence in certain areas, but research constantly pushes you in new directions. That means learning new things, starting from scratch, and feeling like an imposter all over again.
The first time I heard the term “imposter syndrome”, it felt like a revelation. Just knowing that this feeling had a name, and that others experienced it too, was validating. Does this mean I feel less like an imposter now? Not really. But I’ve come to understand that it’s part of the process. It means I’m still learning, still being challenged, still exploring new directions. And if that feeling never goes away entirely, maybe that’s a good sign.
Scientists have discovered a centrosymmetric crystal that behaves as though it is chiral – absorbing left- and right-handed circularly-polarized light differently. This counterintuitive finding, from researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, could help in the development of new technologies that control light. Applications include brighter optical displays and improved sensors.
Centrosymmetric crystals are those that look identical when reflected through a central point. Until now, only non-centrosymmetric crystals were thought to exhibit differential absorption of circularly-polarized light, owing to their chirality – a property that describes how an object differs from its mirror image (such as our left and right hands, for example).
In the new work, a team led by chemist Roel Tempelaar studied how a centrosymmetric crystal made from lithium, cobalt and selenium oxide interacts with circularly polarized light, that is, light with an electromagnetic field direction that rotates in a helical or “corkscrew-like” fashion as it propagates through space. Such light is routinely employed to study the conformation of chiral biomolecules, such as proteins, DNA and amino acids, as they absorb left- and right-handed circularly polarized light differently, a phenomenon known as circular dichroism.
The crystal, which has the chemical formula Li2Co3(SeO3)4, was first synthesized in 1999, but has not (to the best of the researchers’ knowledge) been discussed in the literature since.
A photophysical process involving strong chiroptical signals
Tempelaar and colleagues found that the material absorbed circularly polarized light more when the light was polarized in one direction than in the other. This property, they say, stems from a photophysical process involving strong chiroptical signals that invert when the sample is flipped. Such a mechanism is different to conventional chiroptical response to circularly polarized light and has not been seen before in single centrosymmetric crystals.
Not only does the discovery challenge long-held assumptions about crystals and chiroptical responses, it opens up opportunities for engineering new optical materials that control light, says Tempelaar. Potential applications could include brighter optical displays, polarization-dependent optical diodes, chiral lasing, more sensitive sensors and new types of faster, more secure light-based communication.
“Our work has shown that centrosymmetric crystals should not be dismissed when designing materials for circularly polarized light absorption,” Tempelaar tells Physics World. “Indeed, we found such absorption to be remarkably strong for Li2Co3(SeO3)4.”
The researchers say they took on this study after their theoretical calculations revealed that Li2Co3(SeO3)4 should show circular dichroism. They then successfully grew the crystals by mixing cobalt hydroxide, lithium hydroxide monohydrate and selenium dioxide and heating the mixture for five days in an autoclave at about 220 °C.
The “tip of the iceberg”
“This crystal is the first candidate material that we resorted to in order to test our prediction,” says Tempelaar. “The fact that it behaved the way it does could just be a great stroke of luck, but it is more likely that Li2Co3(SeO3)4 is just the tip of the iceberg spanning many centrosymmetric materials for circularly polarized light absorption.”
Some of those compounds may compete with current champion materials for circularly polarized light absorption, through which we can push the boundaries of optical materials engineering, he adds. “Much remains to be discovered, however, and we are eager to progress this research direction further.”
“We are also interested in incorporating such materials into photonic structures such as optical microcavities to amplify their desirable optical properties and yield devices with new functionality,” Tempelaar reveals.
Full details of the study are reported in Science.
Blue Origin launched its third crewed suborbital flight in under three months June 29, flying a group that included a married couple and a lawyer in legal trouble.
An H-2A rocket successfully launched an Earth science satellite June 28 on the final flight of a vehicle that had long been the workhorse for Japanese space access.
Quantum technology is rapidly growing with job demand tripling in the US along with venture capital bringing in billions of dollars into the field. That is according to the inaugural Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Quantum Index Report 2025, which finds, however, that large-scale commercial applications for quantum computing still remain “far off”.
Carried out by the Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) at MIT, the report is a result of data collection from academia, industry and policy sources. It sets out to track, measure and visualize trends across several areas such as education, funding, research and development.
One aim of the report is to reduce the complexity of quantum technology and to make the field more accessible and inclusive for entrepreneurs, investors, designers, teachers and decision makers. This in turn, the report says, can help to shape how the technology is developed, commercialized and governed.
The inaugural edition focusses on quantum computing and networks, due to their higher potential impact compared to quantum sensing and simulation. The report says that $1.6bn has been raised by quantum-computing firms in 2024 compared with $621m by quantum-software companies.
The report also finds that jobs in the quantum sector have increased with demand tripling in the US since 2018. This has led to a higher number of education initiatives, with Germany having the most Master’s degrees that include “quantum” in the name.
A ‘community-led project’
The report says that corporations and universities dominate innovation efforts, claiming up to 91% of quantum computing patents. When it comes to academic research, the report finds that while China produces the most papers in quantum computing, US research tends to have a greater impact and influence.
The report also indexes and analyzes published data on over 200 quantum processing units (QPUs) from 17 countries to provide insight into how the performance of different types of quantum computers can be verified. The report finds that despite QPUs making impressive progress in performance, they remain far from meeting the requirements for running large-scale commercial applications such as chemical simulations or cryptanalysis.
Principal investigator Jonathan Ruane from MIT Sloan calls the report a “community-led project” and encourages people to contribute additional data. He says that while a report will be published annually, data on its website will be updated “as often as input is given”.
EchoStar has delayed a potential bankruptcy filing to allow more time for talks with regulators reviewing whether the satellite operator is complying with conditions tied to its spectrum licenses.
June 27, 2025 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Starcloud and Volta Space Technologies as new Associate Members. These forward-looking companies bring cutting-edge capabilities that […]
We live in a brand new era for lunar activities. With over 100 payloads from around the globe planned to visit the Moon by 2030, our closest natural satellite will […]
Jodrell Bank was established in 1945 in Cheshire in northwest England by the English radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, who became the observatory’s first director, a position he held until 1980.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank was built in 1957, and at 76.2 m in diameter was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world. That year it also became the only instrument capable of tracking the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 rocket.
The Lovell Telescope was originally known as the “250 ft telescope” before becoming the Mark I telescope around 1961 and then in 1987 was renamed the Lovell Telescope.
It was given a Heritage Grade I listing in 1988 and in 2019 Jodrell Bank was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
To the next level
The LEGO model has been designed by Manchester’s undergraduate physics society and is based on the telescope’s original engineering blueprints. Student James Ruxton spent six months perfecting the design, which even involved producing custom-designed LEGO bricks with a 3D printer.
Ruxton and fellow students began construction in April and the end result is a model weighing 30 kg with 30 500 pieces and a whopping 4000-page instruction manual.
“It’s definitely the biggest and most challenging build I’ve ever done, but also the most fun,” says Ruxton. “I’ve been a big fan of LEGO since I was younger, and I’ve always loved creating my own models, so recreating something as iconic as the Lovell is like taking that to the next level!”
The model will now go on display in a “specially modified cabinet” at the university’s Schuster building. It will take pride of place alongside a decade-old LEGO model of CERN’s ATLAS detector.
“Jodrell Bank has always been a symbol of bold innovation – pushing the boundaries of science and engineering from its earliest days,” notes particle physicist Chris Parkes, who is head of physics and astronomy at Manchester. “What the students have created with this Lego build is a perfect reflection of that spirit. It’s not just a model; it’s a celebration of Manchester’s history of discovery and a testament to the creativity, precision, and ambition that continue to define our scientific community today.”
Power engineering: Multilayered films developed by Peak Nano can improve the performance and resilience of high-voltage capacitors that manage the flow of electricity around power grids (Courtesy: shutterstock/jakit17)
Grid operators around the world are under intense pressure to expand and modernize their power networks. The International Energy Authority predicts that demand for electricity will rise by 30% in this decade alone, fuelled by global economic growth and the ongoing drive towards net zero. At the same time, electrical transmission systems must be adapted to handle the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, as well as the extreme and unpredictable weather conditions that are being triggered by climate change.
High-voltage capacitors play a crucial role in these power networks, balancing the electrical load and managing the flow of current around the grid. For more than 40 years, the standard dielectric for storing energy in these capacitors has been a thin film of a polymer material called biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP). However, as network operators upgrade their analogue-based infrastructure with digital technologies such as solid-state transformers and high-frequency switches, BOPP struggles to provide the thermal resilience and reliability that are needed to ensure the stability, scalability and security of the grid.
“We’re trying to bring innovation to an area that hasn’t seen it for a very long time,” says Dr Mike Ponting, Chief Scientific Officer of Peak Nano, a US firm specializing in advanced polymer materials. “Grid operators have been using polypropylene materials for a generation, with no improvement in capability or performance. It’s time to realize we can do better.”
Peak Nano has created a new capacitor film technology that address the needs of the digital power grid, as well as other demanding energy storage applications such as managing the power supply to data centres, charging solutions for electric cars, and next-generation fusion energy technology. The company’s Peak NanoPlex™ materials are fabricated from multiple thin layers of different polymer materials, and can be engineered to deliver enhanced performance for both electrical and optical applications. The capacitor films typically contain polymer layers anywhere between 32 and 156 nm thick, while the optical materials are fabricated with as many as 4000 layers in films thinner than 300 µm.
“When they are combined together in an ordered, layered structure, the long polymer molecules behave and interact with each other in different ways,” explains Ponting. “By putting the right materials together, and controlling the precise arrangement of the molecules within the layers, we can engineer the film properties to achieve the performance characteristics needed for each application.”
In the case of capacitor films, this process enhances BOPP’s properties by interleaving it with another polymer. Such layered films can be optimized to store four times the energy as conventional BOPP while achieving extremely fast charge/discharge rates. Alternatively, they can be engineered to deliver longer lifetimes at operating temperatures some 50–60°C higher than existing materials. Such improved thermal resilience is useful for applications that experience more heat, such as mining and aerospace, and is also becoming an important priority for grid operators as they introduce new transmission technologies that generate more heat.
On a roll: NanoPlex films are made from ultrathin layers of polymer materials (Courtesy: Peak Nano)
“We talked to the users of the components to find out what they needed, and then adjusted our formulations to meet those needs,” says Ponting. “Some people wanted smaller capacitors that store a lot of energy and can be cycled really fast, while others wanted an upgraded version of BOPP that is more reliable at higher temperatures.”
The multilayered materials now being produced by Peak Nano emerged from research Ponting was involved in while he was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in the 2000s, where Ponting was a graduate student. Plastics containing just a few layers had originally been developed for everyday applications like gift wrap and food packaging, but scientists were starting to explore the novel optical and electronic properties that emerge when the thickness of the polymer layers is reduced to the nanoscale regime.
Small samples of these polymer nanocomposites produced in the lab demonstrated their superior performance, and Peak Nano was formed in 2016 to commercialize the technology and scale up the fabrication process. “There was a lot of iteration and improvement to produce large quantities of the material while still maintaining the precision and repeatability of the nanostructured layers,” says Ponting, who has been developing these multilayered polymer materials and the required processing technology for more than 20 years. “The film properties we want to achieve require the polymer molecules to be well ordered, and it took us a long time to get it right.”
As part of this development process, Peak Nano worked with capacitor manufacturers to create a plug-and-play replacement technology for BOPP that can be used on the same manufacturing systems and capacitor designs as BOPP today. By integrating its specialist layering technology into these existing systems, Peak Nano has been able to leverage established supply chains for materials and equipment rather than needing to develop a bespoke manufacturing process. “That has helped to keep costs down, which means that our layered material is only slightly more expensive than BOPP,” says Ponting.
Ponting also points out that long term, NanoPlex is a more cost-effective option. With improved reliability and resilience, NanoPlex can double or even quadruple the lifetime of a component. “The capacitors don’t need to be replaced as often, which reduces the need for downtime and offsets the slightly higher cost,” he says.
For component manufacturers, meanwhile, the multilayered films can be used in exactly the same way as conventional materials. “Our material can be wound into capacitors using the same process as for polypropylene,” says Ponting. “Our customers don’t need to change their process; they just need to design for higher performance.”
Initial interest in the improved capabilities of NanoPlex came from the defence sector, with Peak Nano benefiting from investment and collaborative research with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Naval Research Laboratory. Optical films produced by the company have been used to fabricate lenses with a graduated refractive index, reducing the size and weight of head-mounted visual equipment while also sharpening the view. Dielectric films with a high breakdown voltage are also a common requirement within the defence community.
A computational paradigm that can accurately simulate interactions between powerful laser beams and quantum fluctuations in a vacuum has been unveiled by researchers in the UK and Portugal. Led by Lily Zhang at the University of Oxford, the team hopes that their solver could lead to important new insights into the quantum nature of the vacuum.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a detailed picture of how light and matter interact, and has withstood decades of experimental scrutiny. So far, however, evidence for one of the theory’s key predictions about the nature of the vacuum has remained elusive.
Far from being empty, the vacuum contains a sea of virtual particles that are associated with quantum fluctuations. These particle–antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop into existence before annihilating almost instantly.
QED predicts that virtual particles create nonlinearities within the vacuum that can interact with powerful laser pulses. Underlying this effect is photon–photon scattering, something that particle physicists have tried to observe for several decades in accelerator experiments.
Powerful lasers
“So far, there has been no successful direct tests of photon–photon scattering,” Zhang explains. “However, the global emergence of multi-petawatt lasers has rekindled interest in testing the vacuum using just light itself.” For these experiments to succeed, robust analytical tools which can model the quantum vacuum’s responses to such immensely powerful lasers will be crucial.
So far, researchers have used computational tools that can only model simplified laser setups using 2D models. Zhang’s team addressed these limitations using a numerical technique called the Yee scheme. This is used to solve Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and is already widely used in plasma simulation. The method works by separately calculating electric and magnetic fields at staggered times and positions, ensuring greater stability and accuracy.
“The key challenge here is the nonlinear terms, which depend on the electromagnetic fields themselves,” Zhang explains. “We addressed this by combining the Yee scheme with an iterative loop that updates the nonlinear response at each time step until the solution converges.” Once integrated with a state-of-the-art plasma simulation code, the team was left with a fully 3D solver, capable of simulating arbitrary laser interactions within a vacuum.
To test their platform’s performance, they benchmarked it against existing theoretical predictions of vacuum birefringence, which is an effect triggered when a vacuum is distorted by and intense laser pulse that “pumps” the vacuum. In the context of photon–photon scattering, QED predicts that that these distortions will cause the light in a weaker probe beam to split into two separate rays, each with a different polarization and refractive index.
In addition, the team extended their solver to modelling four-wave mixing, which is a more complex effect whereby three input light beams interact in a vacuum to generate a fourth beam.
Tracking asymmetries
“The real-time simulation capability allowed us to track the evolving properties of this output signal, including its size, intensity, and duration, and link these to physical conditions at earlier stages of the interaction,” Zhang explains. “For instance, asymmetries in the signal beam were traced back to asymmetries in the interaction region, which is clearly observable from the simulation data.”
Just as the team hoped, their simulations of birefringence and four-wave mixing both closely matched their theoretical predictions – clearly showcasing their platform’s advanced capabilities.
For now, Zhang and colleagues hope that their solver could vastly reduce the computing resources required to develop robust 3D simulations of laser–vacuum interactions, making them far more efficient and accessible in turn. With its high flexibility in simulating arbitrary laser configurations, the team is now confident that their platform could soon be used to studying a diverse array of quantum vacuum effects – including birefringence, four-wave mixing, and many others.
“Looking ahead, we’re using the solver to explore new regimes, including novel beam profiles and exotic field interactions,” Zhang says. “Its structure also allows for easy extension to other nonlinear theories, such as Born–Infeld electrodynamics and axion-like particle fields. Ultimately, our goal is to create a versatile simulation platform for probing fundamental physics in the quantum vacuum.”
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