How well have you been following events in physics? There are 20 questions in total: blue is your current question and white means unanswered, with green and red being right and wrong.

16–20 Top quark – congratulations, you’ve hit Einstein level

11–15 Strong force – good but not quite Nobel standard

6–10 Weak force – better interaction needed

0–5 Bottom quark – not even wrong

The post Check your physics knowledge with our bumper end-of-year quiz appeared first on Physics World.

WIRED spoke with DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli about the recent past—and promising future—of the Nobel Prize-winning research project that changed biology and chemistry forever.

More accurate and individualized health predictions will allow for preventative factors to be implemented well in advance.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Pat Hanrahan, who studied nuclear engineering and biophysics before becoming a founding employee of Pixar Animation Studios. As well as winning three Academy Awards for his work on computer animation, Hanrahan won the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, or CGI.

Earlier this year, Hanrahan spoke to Physics World’s Margaret Harris at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. He explains how he was introduced to computer graphics by his need to visualize the results of computer simulations of nervous systems. That initial interest led him to Pixar and his development of physically-based rendering, which uses the principles of physics to create realistic images.

Hanrahan explains that light interacts with different materials in very different ways, making detailed animations very challenging. Indeed, he says that creating realistic looking skin is particularly difficult – comparing it to the quest for a grand unified theory in physics.

He also talks about how having a background in physics has helped his career – citing his physicist’s knack for creating good models and then using them to solve problems.

The post Oscar-winning computer scientist on the physics of computer animation appeared first on Physics World.

Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide will soon be available in a daily pill Americans can take for weight loss.

An analysis of the expansion of cracks in the Thwaites Glacier over the past 20 years suggests that a total collapse could be only a matter of time.

Smartwatches are cool and all, but have you considered wearable neurotech?

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

The administration’s pro-industry tilt—across three executive agencies—is feeding the MAHA movement’s growing discontent.

Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit.

Polling shows that nearly half of Americans now believe aliens have visited this planet—and that the number who aren't sure has dropped by two-thirds. The reasons why, experts say, are complicated.

As the world looks to incorporate more renewables into energy grids, centuries-old systems that can balance supply and demand are being reappraised and innovated upon.

Science Corporation, founded by Neuralink’s first president, Max Hodak, has unveiled a prototype machine to extend the life of organs for longer periods.

Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, who has entertained a connection between Covid vaccines and “turbo cancer” and promoted ivermectin, says he'll chair the President's Cancer Panel.

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally.

Even the best telescopes can’t see exoplanets. It’s all about watching for jiggly stars, blue shifts, and transits.

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

A destructive storm in 2020 prematurely shut down Iowa’s only nuclear plant. With Google’s plans to reopen it to power nearby data centers, will extreme weather threaten the reactor’s safety?

More molecules and compounds vital to the origin of life have been detected in asteroid samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. The discovery strengthens the case that not only did life’s building blocks originate in space, but that the ingredients of RNA, and perhaps RNA itself, were brought to our planet by asteroids.

Two new papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy describe the discovery of the sugars ribose and glucose in the 120 g of samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, as well as an unusual carbonaceous “gum” that holds important compounds for life. The findings complement the earlier discovery of amino acids and the nucleobases of RNA and DNA in the Bennu samples.

A third new paper, in Nature Astronomy, addresses the abundance of pre-solar grains, which is dust that originated from before the birth of our Solar System, such as dust from supernovae. Scientists led by Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center found six times more dust direct from supernova explosions than is found, on average, in meteorites and other sampled asteroids. This could suggest differences in the concentration of different pre-solar dust grains in the disc of gas and dust that formed the Solar System.

Space gum

It’s the discovery of organic materials useful for life that steals the headlines, though. For example, the discovery of the space gum, which is essentially a hodgepodge chain of polymers, represents something never found in space before.

Scott Sandford of NASA’s Ames Research Center, co-lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper describing the gum discovery, tells Physics World: “The material we see in our samples is a bit of a molecular jumble. It’s carbonaceous, but much richer in nitrogen and, to a lesser extent, oxygen, than most of the organic compounds found in extraterrestrial materials.”

Sandford refers to the material as gum because of its pliability, bending and dimpling when pressure is applied, rather like chewing gum. And while much of its chemical functionality is replicated in similar materials on our planet, “I doubt it matches exactly with anything seen on Earth,” he says.

Initially, Sandford found the gum using an infrared microscope, nicknaming the dust grains containing the gum “Lasagna” and “Neapolitan” because the grains are layered. To extract them from the rock in the sample, Sandford went to Zack Gainsforth of the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in analysing and extracting materials from samples like this.

Platinum scaffolding

Having welded a tungsten needle to the Neapolitan sample in order to lift it, the pair quickly realised that the grain was very delicate.

“When we tried to lift the sample it began to deform,” Gainsforth says. “Scott and I practically jumped out of our chairs and brainstormed what to do. After some discussion, we decided that we should add straps to give it enough mechanical rigidity to survive the lift.”

By straps, Gainsforth is referring to micro-scale platinum scaffolding applied to the grain to reinforce its structure while they cut it away with an ion beam. Platinum is often used as a radiation shield to protect samples from an ion beam, “but how we used it was anything but standard,” says Gainsforth. “Scott and I made an on-the-fly decision to reinforce the samples based on how they were reacting to our machinations.”

With the sample extracted and reinforced, they used the ion beam cutter to shave it down until it was a thousand times thinner than a human hair, at which point it could be studied by electron microscopy and X-ray spectrometry. “It was a joy to watch Zack ‘micro-manipulate’ [the sample],” says Sandford.

The nitrogen in the gum was found to be in nitrogen heterocycles, which are the building blocks of nucleobases in DNA and RNA. This brings us to the other new discovery, reported in Nature Geoscience, of the sugars ribose and glucose in the Bennu samples, by a team led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan.

The ingredients of RNA

Glucose is the primary source of energy for life, while ribose is a key component of the sugar-phosphate backbone that connects the information-carrying nucleobases in RNA molecules. Furthermore, the discovery of ribose now means that everything required to assemble RNA molecules is present in the Bennu sample.

Notable by its absence, however, was deoxyribose, which is ribose minus one oxygen atom. Deoxyribose in DNA performs the same job as ribose in RNA, and Furukawa believes that its absence supports a popular hypothesis about the origin of life on Earth called RNA world. This describes how the first life could have used RNA instead of DNA to carry genetic information, catalyse biochemical reactions and self-replicate.

Intriguingly, the presence of all RNA’s ingredients on Bennu raises the possibility that RNA could have formed in space before being brought to Earth.

“Formation of RNA from its building blocks requires a dehydration reaction, which we can expect to have occurred both in ancient Bennu and on primordial Earth,” Furukawa tells Physics World.

However, RNA would be very hard to detect because of its expected low abundance in the samples, making identifying it very difficult. So until there’s information to the contrary, “the present finding means that the ingredients of RNA were delivered from space to the Earth,” says Furukawa.

Nevertheless, these discoveries are major milestones in the quest of astrobiologists and space chemists to understand the origin of life on Earth. Thanks to Bennu and the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, from which a sample was returned by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission Hayabusa2, scientists are increasingly confident that the building blocks of life on Earth came from space.

The post Components of RNA among life’s building blocks found in NASA asteroid sample appeared first on Physics World.

Retatrutide, originally developed by Eli Lilly, has found a loyal fan base—even though clinical trials of the drug still haven’t finished.

At an FDA discussion of testosterone replacement therapy, a top official called for special health centers to address a “men’s health crisis.” Others called to ease men’s access to hormones.

With support from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, Running Tide billed itself as on the cutting edge of carbon removal. In the end, it resorted to dumping thousands of tons of wood chips in the sea.

Conditions in the US should be perfect for the final meteor shower of 2025, with no moonlight present to interfere with spotting shooting stars.