A billionaire-backed philanthropic organization is funding the development of a series of new observatories, including a space telescope larger than Hubble.
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Launchers Isar Aerospace is expected to attempt its second two-stage Spectrum vehicle test flight, a key step after its first, partially successful liftoff in 2025. In parallel, Spain’s PLD Space and its Miura-5 remain the second contender — after Isar — for the European Launcher Challenge, a competition that increasingly looks like Europe’s closest analogue […]
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In this special episode of Space Minds, our show is split into two segments from the recent SpaceNews annual Icon Awards.
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The launch of USSF-87 comes amid leadership change at United Launch Alliance and pressure to increase launch tempo
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LiDAR costs, compute power and AI training are the “big three” usually associated with the high cost of autonomous vehicles (AVs). We rarely look up. But maybe we should. High above the Earth, the ionosphere, a chaotic, sun-charged layer of our atmosphere, is levying an invisible tax on every self-driving car in development. If you […]
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This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Alex May, whose research explores the intersection of quantum gravity and quantum information theory. Based at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, May explains how ideas being developed in the burgeoning field of quantum information theory could help solve one of the most enduring mysteries in physics – how to reconcile quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, creating a viable theory of quantum gravity.
This interview was recorded in autumn 2025 when I had the pleasure of visiting the Perimeter Institute and speaking to four physicists about their research. This is the last of those conversations to appear on the podcast.
The first interview in this series from the Perimeter Institute was with Javier Toledo-Marín, “Quantum computing and AI join forces for particle physics”; the second was with Bianca Dittrich, “Quantum gravity: we explore spin foams and other potential solutions to this enduring challenge“; and the third was with Tim Hsieh, “Building a quantum future using topological phases of matter and error correction”.
This episode is supported by the APS Global Physics Summit, which takes place on 15–20 March, 2026, in Denver, Colorado, and online.
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Chess is a seemingly simple game, but one that hides incredible complexity. In the standard game, the starting positions of the pieces are fixed so top players rely on memorizing a plethora of opening moves, which can sometimes result in boring, predictable games. It’s also the case that playing as white, and therefore going first, offers an advantage.
In the 1990s, former chess world champion Bobby Fischer proposed another way to play chess to encourage more creative play.
This form of the game – dubbed Chess960 – keeps the pawns in the same position but randomizes where the pieces at the back of the board – the knights, bishops, rooks, king and queen – are placed at the start while keeping the rest of the rules the same. It is named after the 960 starting positions that result from mixing it up at the back.
It was thought that Chess960 could allow for more permutations that would make the game fairer for both players. Yet research by physicist Marc Barthelemy at Paris-Saclay University suggests it’s not as simple as this.
He used the open-source chess program called Stockfish to analyze each of the 960 starting positions and developed a statistical method to measure decision-making complexity by calculating how much “information” a player needs to identify the best moves.
He found that the standard game can be unfair, as players with black pieces who go second have to keep up with the moves from the player with white.
Yet regardless of starting positions at the back, Barthelemy discovered that white still has an advantage in almost all – 99.6% – of the 960 positions. He also found that the standard set-up – rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook – is nothing special and is presumably an historical accident possibly as the starting positions are easy to remember, being visually symmetrical.
“Standard chess, despite centuries of cultural evolution, does not occupy an exceptional location in this landscape: it exhibits a typical initial advantage and moderate total complexity, while displaying above-average asymmetry in decision difficulty,” writes Barthelemy.
For a more fair and balanced match, Barthelemy suggests playing position #198, which has the starting positions as queen, knight, bishop, rook, king, bishop, knight and rook.
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An unspecified “medical concern” involving one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station has postponed a spacewalk and could force an unprecedented early return of part of the crew.
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We are in an era where planetary science no longer depends on government missions. Commercial capabilities are mature and ready to deliver a higher cadence of planetary exploration that fits within proposed budgets. What’s missing is an operational model that matches ambition. The old way — one in which bespoke, government-run missions with decade-long development […]
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The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration has made the first measurements of the quantum properties of a family of three “all-charm” tetraquarks that was recently discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The findings could help shed more light on the properties of the strong nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons together in nuclei. The result could help us better understand how ordinary matter forms.
In recent years, the LHC has discovered tens of massive particles called hadrons, which are made of quarks bound together by the strong force. Quarks come in six types: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Most observed hadrons comprise two or three quarks (called mesons and baryons, respectively). Physicists have also observed exotic hadrons that comprise four or five quarks. These are the tetraquarks and pentaquarks respectively. Those seen so far usually contain a charm quark and its antimatter counterpart (a charm antiquark), with the remaining two or three quarks being up, down or strange quarks, or their antiquarks.
Identifying and studying tetraquarks and pentaquarks helps physicists to better understand how the strong force binds quarks together. This force also binds protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei.
Physicists are still divided as to the nature of these exotic hadrons. Some models suggest that their quarks are tightly bound via the strong force, so making these hadrons compact objects. Others say that the quarks are only loosely bound. To confuse things further, there is evidence that in some exotic hadrons, the quarks might be both tightly and loosely bound at the same time.
Now, new findings from the CMS Collaboration suggest that tetraquarks are tightly bound, but they do not completely rule out other models.
In their work, which is detailed in Nature, CMS physicists studied all-charm tetraquarks. These comprise two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks and were produced by colliding protons at high energies at the LHC. Three states of this tetraquark have been identified at the LHC. These are: X(6900); X(6600); and X(7100), where the numbers denote their approximate mass in millions of electron volts. The team measured the fundamental properties of these tetraquarks, including their quantum numbers: parity (P); charge conjugation (C); angular momentum, and spin (J). P determines whether a particle has the same properties as its spatial mirror image; C whether it has the same properties as its antiparticle; and J, the total angular momentum of the hadron. These numbers provide information on the internal structure of a tetraquark.
The researchers used a version of a well-known technique called angular analysis, which is similar to the technique used to characterize the Higgs boson. This approach focuses on the angles at which the decay products of the all-charm tetraquarks are scattered.
“We call this technique quantum state tomography,” explains CMS team member Chiara Mariotti of the INFN Torino inItaly. “Here, we deduce the quantum state of an exotic state X from the analysis of its decay products. In particular, the angular distributions in the decay X -> J/ψJ/ψ, followed by J/ψ decays into two muons, serve as analysers of polarization of two J/ψ particles,” she explains.
The researchers analysed all-charm tetraquarks produced at the CMS experiment between 2016 and 2018. They calculated that J is likely to be 2 and that P and C are both +1. This combination of properties is expressed as 2++.
“This result favours models in which all four quarks are tightly bound,” says particle physicist Timothy Gershon of the UK’s University of Warwick, who was not involved in this study. “However, the question is not completely put to bed. The sample size in the CMS analysis is not sufficient to exclude fully other possibilities, and additionally certain assumptions are made that will require further testing in future.”
Gershon adds, “These include assumptions that all three states have the same quantum numbers, and that all correspond to tetraquark decays to two J/ψ mesons with no additional particles not included in the reconstruction (for example there could be missing photons that have been radiated in the decay).”
Further studies with larger data samples are warranted, he adds. “Fortunately, CMS as well as both the LHCb and the ATLAS collaborations [at CERN] already have larger samples in hand, so we should not have to wait too long for updates.”
Indeed, the CMS Collaboration is now gathering more data and exploring additional decay modes of these exotic tetraquarks. “This will ultimately improve our understanding how this matter forms, which, in turn, could help refine our theories of how ordinary matter comes into being,” Mariotti tells Physics World.
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NASA says it is continuing to prepare for a possible Artemis 2 launch as soon as February, but with remarkably little publicity for the historic mission.
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