Physics

The body that defines the world's civil time has decided to stop adding leap seconds to it. The General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted Resolution 5, which makes continuous UTC effective…

Physicists in China have turned the conducting edge of one crystal into a microscope probe sensitive to the spin of single electrons, and used it to gather evidence that the top layer of a second…

When heated, a magnet can gradually lose its magnetization until it disappears. This is an example of a continuous phase transition: the quantity used to distinguish between two states of matter…

In 1961 Rolf Landauer worked out what it costs to forget. Erasing a bit of information carries a physical price that no better engineering can get under: memory is matter, and clearing it gives off…

Two research groups have turned a transition inside the thorium-229 nucleus into the frequency reference of a working clock, each reporting it in Nature on Oct. 7, 2026. Both locked a steadily…

Ask how much current a superconductor can carry and the most honest answer is a number about its flaws. Push the current up and thin tubes of magnetic field, called vortices, tear loose from the…

Physicists have watched a string of force snap into new charge pairs, moment by moment and site by site. Arinjoy De, Christopher Monroe and colleagues report that the pairs formed at the string's two…

Physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln report that hafnia, the hafnium oxide already deposited as a thin insulating layer inside ordinary computer chips, is antiferroelectric when it is…

Physicists in Paris drove a single vortex in a tank of water, resolved the helical ripples that travel along its thin core, and watched energy pass from long waves to short ones in resonant groups of…

Two optical clocks built around single lutetium-176 ions have been compared directly against each other, and they agree down to the 19th digit, a group at the National University of Singapore…

Physicists at Northwestern University report that a standard conclusion in network science, that variation among a network's parts makes the whole less stable, is an artifact of simplified models and…

A single experiment can be unlucky. A statistical wobble shaped like a discovery is the oldest hazard in particle physics, and the field's reflex, when one detector reports something strange, is to…