What makes the squid eye so powerful? From giant eyeballs to bioluminescence detection, learn how squid evolved to thrive in the darkest depths of the ocean.
House Democrats sent letters to the potential buyers of the genetic testing company, asking how they plan to protect customer genetic data under a change of ownership.
In this week's episode of Space Minds, we explore how microgravity accelerates aging—and guest Dr. Nadia Maroouf shares her insights on the phenomenon and what she’s doing to help protect astronauts.
In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast we explore the career opportunities open to physicists and engineers looking to work within healthcare – as medical physicists or clinical engineers.
Physics World’s Tami Freeman is in conversation with two early-career physicists working in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). They are Rachel Allcock, a trainee clinical scientist at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, and George Bruce, a clinical scientist at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. We also hear from Chris Watt, head of communications and public affairs at IPEM, about the new IPEM careers guide.
This episode was created in collaboration with IPEM, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. IPEM owns the journal Physics in Medicine & Biology.
This episode is supported by Radformation, which is redefining automation in radiation oncology with a full suite of tools designed to streamline clinical workflows and boost efficiency. At the centre of it all is AutoContour, a powerful AI-driven autocontouring solution trusted by centres worldwide.
Four-year-old small satellite maker Muon Space announced $89.5 million in new funding June 12 to scale production and acquire propulsion startup Starlight Engines, bringing a potential supply chain bottleneck in-house.
Jack Harris, a quantum physicist at Yale University in the US, has a fascination with islands. He grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, an island just south of Cape Cod on the east coast of America, and believes that islands shape a person’s thinking. “Your world view has a border – you’re on or you’re off,” Harris said on a recent episode of the Physics World Stories podcast.
It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Harris is one of the main organizers of a five-day conference taking place this week on Helgoland, where Werner Heisenberg discovered quantum mechanics exactly a century ago. Heisenberg had come to the tiny, windy, pollen-free island, which lies 50 km off the coast of Germany, in June 1925, to seek respite from the hay fever he was suffering from in Göttingen.
According to Heisenberg’s 1971 book Physics and Beyond, he supposedly made his breakthrough early one morning that month. Unable to sleep, Heisenberg left his guest house just before daybreak and climbed a tower at the top of the island’s southern headland. As the Sun rose, Heisenberg pieced together the curious observations of frequencies of light that materials had been seen to absorb and emit.
Where it all began This memorial stone and plaque sits at the spot of Werner Heisenberg’s achievements 100 years ago. (Courtesy: Matin Durrani)
While admitting that the real history of the episode isn’t as simple as Heisenberg made out, Harris believes it’s nevertheless a “very compelling” story. “It has a place and a time: an actual, clearly defined, quantized discrete place – an island,” Harris says. “This is a cool story to have as part of the fabric of [the physics] community.” Hardly surprising, then, that more than 300 physicists, myself included, have travelled from across the world to the Helgoland 2025 meeting.
Much time has been spent so far at the event discussing the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which might seem a touch self-indulgent and esoteric given the burgeoning (and financially lucrative) applications of the subject. Do we really need to concern ourselves with, say, non-locality, the meaning of measurement, or the nature of particles, information and randomness?
Why did we need to hear from Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton getting so excited talking about information loss and black holes? (Fun fact: a “white” black hole the size of a bacterium would, he claimed, be as hot as the Sun and emit so much light we could see it with the naked eye.)
But the fundamental questions are fascinating in their own right. What’s more, if we want to build, say, a quantum computer, it’s not just a technical and engineering endeavour. “To make it work you have to absorb a lot of the foundational topics of quantum mechanics,” says Harris, pointing to challenges such as knowing what kinds of information alter how a system behaves. “We’re at a point where real-word practical things like quantum computing, code breaking and signal detection hinge on our ability to understand the foundational questions of quantum mechanics.”
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The Heisenberg uncertainty principle holds things together. Articulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg almost a century ago, it remains the foundation of the physical world. Its name suggests the rule of the vague and temporary. But the principle is quantitative. A high uncertainty about the position of, say, an electron is compensated by a low uncertainty in its momentum. The principle is vital in helping us to understand chemical bonding, which is what holds matter together.
The Trump uncertainty principle, which I hereby coin, does the opposite; it tears things apart. Having taken effect on the US president’s inauguration day back in January, it almost immediately began damaging scientific culture. Researchers can no longer be sure if their grants will be delayed or axed – or if new proposals are even in the ballpark of the potentially fundable. Work is being stalled, erased or doomed, especially in the medical and environmental sciences.
The Trump administration has sought to terminate billions of dollars worth of grants at Harvard University alone. It wants to ban US universities from recruiting international students and has even been cancelling the visas of current students, many of whom are enrolled in the sciences. It also wants to vet what prospective students have posted on social media, despite Trump’s supposed support for free speech. Harvard is already suing the Administration over these actions.
Back in March the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education sent letters to Harvard and 59 other universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, accusing them of what it considers “discrimination and harassment”. The office threatened “potential enforcement actions if institutions do not fulfil their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act”, which “prohibits discrimination against or otherwise excluding individuals on the basis of race, color, or national origin”.
“Saddening, traumatic and unnecessary”
But the impact of the Trump uncertainty principle reaches far beyond these 60 institutions because it is destroying the bonding of these institutions through its impact on the labs, institutions and companies that collaborate with them. It is also badly damaging the hiring of postdocs, the ability to attract undergraduates, the retention of skilled support staff, and laboratory maintenance. Most disruptively of all, the Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to.
The Trump uncertainty principle provides no explanation for why or where it shows up, or what it is going to be applied to
Stony Brook University, where I teach, is a research incubator not on the list of 60 institutions of higher learning threatened by the Department of Education. But many of my colleagues have had their NIH, NSF or Department of Energy funding paused, left unrenewed, or suspended without explanation, and nobody could tell them whether or when it might be restored or why it was stopped in the first place.
Support for 11 graduate students at Stony Brook was terminated. Though it was later restored after months of uncertainty, nobody knows if it might happen again. I, too, had a grant stopped, though it was due to a crude error and the money started up again. Everyone in the sciences I’ve spoken to – faculty, staff and students – is affected in one way or another by the Trump uncertainty principle even if they haven’t lost funding or jobs.
It is easy to sound hyperbolic. It is possible that Trump’s draconian cuts may be reversed, that the threats won’t be implemented, that they won’t stand up in court, and that the Trump administration will actually respect the court decisions. But that’s not the point. You can’t plan ahead if you are unsure how much money you have, or even why you may be in the administration’s cross-hairs. That’s what is most destructive to US science. It’s also saddening, traumatic and unnecessary.
Maintaining any culture, including an academic research one, requires supporting an active and ongoing dynamic between past, present and future. It consists of an inherited array of resources, a set of ideas about how to go forward, and existing habits and practices about how best to move from one to the other. The Trump administration targets all three. It has slashed budgets and staff of long-standing scientific institutions and redirected future-directed scientific programmes at its whim. The Trump uncertainty principle also comes into play by damaging the existing habits and practices in the present.
The critical point
In his 2016 book The Invention of Science, David Wootton – a historian at the University of York in the UK – defined scientific culture as being “innovative, combative, competitive, but at the same time obsessed with accuracy”. Science isn’t the only kind of culture, he admitted, but it’s “a practical and effective one if your goal is the acquisition of new knowledge”. It seeks to produce knowledge about the world that can withstand criticism – “bomb-proof”, as Wootton put it.
Bomb-proof knowledge is what Trump fears the most, and he is undermining it by injecting uncertainty into the culture that produces it. The administration says that the Trump uncertainty principle is grounded in the fight against financial waste, fraud and discrimination. But proof of the principle is missing.
How do you save money by ending, say, a programme aimed at diagnosing tuberculosis? Why does a study of maternal health promote discrimination? What does research into Alzheimer’s disease have to do with diversity? Has ending scientific study of climate change got anything to do with any of this?
The justifications are not credible, and their lack of credibility is a leading factor in damaging scientific culture. Quite simply, the Trump uncertainty principle is destroying the position and momentum of US science.
Using a neural network trained with simulations of supermassive black holes, astronomers have found that the one at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, likely rotates at maximum speed.
Thanks to a new sound-based control system, a microfluidic processor can precisely manipulate droplets with an exceptionally broad range of volumes. The minimalist device is compatible with many substrates, including metals, polymers and glass. It is also biocompatible, and its developers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University say it could be a transformative tool for applications in biology, chemistry and lab-on-a-chip systems.
Nano- and microfluidic systems use the principles of micro- and nanotechnology, biochemistry, engineering and physics to manipulate the behaviour of liquids on a small scale. Over the past few decades, they have revolutionized fluid processing, enabling researchers in a host of fields to perform tasks on chips that would previously have required painstaking test-tube-based work. The benefits include real-time, high-throughput testing for point-of care diagnostics using tiny sample sizes.
Microfluidics also play a role in several everyday technologies, including inkjet printer heads, pregnancy tests and, as the world recently discovered, tests for viruses like SARS-Cov2, which causes COVID-19. Indeed, the latter example involves a whole series of fluidic operations, as viral RNA is extracted from swabs, amplified and quantified using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
In each of these operations, it is vital to avoid contaminating the sample with other fluids. Researchers have therefore been striving to develop contactless techniques – for instance, those that rely on light, heat or magnetic and electric fields to move the fluids around. However, such approaches often require strong fields or high temperatures that can damage delicate chemical or biological samples.
In recent years, scientists have experimented with using acoustic fields instead. However, this method was previously found to work only for certain types of fluids, and with a limited volume range from hundreds of nanolitres (nL) to tens of microlitres (μL).
Versatile, residue-free fluid control
The new sound-controlled fluidic processor (SFP) developed by Liqiu Wang and colleagues is not bound by this limit. Thanks to an ultrasonic transducer and a liquid-infused slippery surface that minimizes adhesion of the samples, it can manipulate droplets with volumes of between 1 nL to 3000 μL. “By adjusting the sound source’s position, we can shape acoustic pressure fields to push, pull, mix or even split droplets on demand,” explains Wang. “This method ensures versatile, residue-free fluid control.”
The technique’s non-invasive nature and precision make it ideal for point-of-care diagnostics, drug screening and automated biochemical assays, Wang adds. “It could also help streamline reagent delivery in high-throughput systems,” he tells Physics World.
A further use, Wang suggests, would be fundamental biological applications such as organoid research. Indeed, the Hong Kong researchers demonstrated this by culturing mouse primary liver organoids and screening for molecules like verapamil, a drug that can protect the liver by preventing harmful calcium buildup.
Wang and colleagues, who report their work in Science Advances, say they now plan to integrate their sound-controlled fluidic processor into fully automated, programmable lab-on-a-chip systems. “Future steps include miniaturization and incorporating multiple acoustic sources for parallel operations, paving the way for next-generation diagnostics and chemical processing,” Wang reveals.
The first session at the Helgoland 2025 meeting marking the centenary of quantum mechanics began with the four Nobel-prize-winning physicsts in attendance being invited on stage to sign the island’s memorial “gold book” and add a short statement to it.
Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize with John Clauser for their work on entanglement and quantum information science, were first up on stage. They were followed by Serge Haroche and David Wineland, who shared the 2012 prize for their work on measuring and manipulating quantum systems.
During the coffee break, the book was placed on display for participants to view and add their own signatures if they wished. Naturally, being the nosey person I am, I was keen to see what the Nobel laureates had written.
Signing ceremony (From left to right) Anton Zeilinger, Alain Aspect, Serge Haroche and David Wineland troop on stage to sign the Helgoland book. (Courtesy: Matin Durrani)
Here, for the record, are their comments.
“Great sailing. Great people.” Anton Zeilinger
“C’est une émotion de se trouver à l’endroit où a commencé la méchanique quantique.” Alain Aspect [It’s an emotional feeling to find yourself in the place where quantum mechanics started.]
“Thank you for your warm welcome in Helgoland, an island which is known by all quantum physicists.” Serge Haroche
“An honor to be here.” David Wineland
All the comments made sense to me apart from that of Zeilinger so after the evening’s panel debate on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in which he had taken part, I asked him what the reference to sailing was all about.
Turns out that Zeilinger (as Albert Einstein once was) is a keen sailor in his spare time and he and his wife had come to Helgoland three days before the conference began to see the final stages of a North Sea regatta that takes place in late spring every year.
In fact, Zeilinger explained that the Helgoland meeting had to start on a Tuesday as the day before the venue was host to the regatta’s awards ceremony.
As for the flag, it is that of Helgoland, with the green representing the land, the red for the island’s cliffs and the white for the sand on the beaches.
Join us on for an exclusive one-on-one conversation with Representative George Whitesides (D-CA), a freshman congressman representing California’s 27th District. Whitesides brings years of experience to Capitol Hill, having previously served as NASA’s Chief of Staff and as CEO of Virgin Galactic.
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This episode is supported by Radformation, which is redefining automation in radiation oncology with a full suite of tools designed to streamline clinical workflows and boost efficiency. At the centre of it all is AutoContour, a powerful AI-driven autocontouring solution trusted by centres worldwide.SpaceNews
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