This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features two pioneers in their fields. Margaret Gardel is a biophysicist who is setting up a new National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center at the University of Chicago. The Center for Living Systems will focus on the physics of adaptation, a new field that looks at how living matter stores, retrieves, and processes information as it adapts to change. Gardel explains how physics-inspired theory and experiments are providing fresh insights into biological systems. Our second pioneer is Susannah Glickman who has just completed what is probably the first scholarly history of quantum…
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I met Bella Swan in the middle of 2008, when the anticipatory Twilight movie poster circulated at my school. I took her home and hung her on my wall, blacks and grays covering the coral paint near my headboard. She gripped the folds of Edward Cullen’s dark denim jacket. They both looked like teens, but anyone who’d read the books knew he was a vampire, ninety years older than her. Edward looked off to the distance, to abstracted danger, to the movie’s simultaneous bomb and success, too busy to think about anything besides how the woman—girl—at his side reinforced his…
Recreational drug use has been prevalent in societies for centuries, and it continues to be a topic of interest and concern. As the pursuit of altered states of consciousness persists, it becomes crucial to prioritize the safety and well-being of individuals engaging in such activities. One effective strategy in harm reduction is the testing of recreational drugs. This article aims to explore the importance of drug testing, its benefits, and how it can contribute to a safer recreational drug culture. UNK Lab Solutions has revolutionized drug testing with their fentanyl test strip kits, primarily used by recreational drug users who…
The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise One little pale fresh tennis ball of rain bounces across my forehead. Fifteen-love. I have very bad posture. An only somewhat inquiring mind. But they tickle me the many and various uses for mayonnaise considering there is only one use for poetry. To lose money. To lose money. Toulouse Monet. I think we just connected, you and I. We’re inside of really quite a touching moment. Balloons lost in the trees. Balloon fruit. Rottenway the rotten the rotten way you therotten way you look in the…
Tiny device: photograph of the microchip containing the Friedrich-Alexander University dielectric laser accelerator. A one cent euro coin is shown for comparison. (Image: FAU/Laser Physics, Stefanie Kraus, Julian Litzel) Laser-driven particle accelerators on silicon chips have been created by two independent research groups. With further improvements, such dielectric laser accelerators could be used in medicine and industry – and could even find application in high-energy particle physics experiments. Accelerating electrons to high energies is normally done over long distances at large and expensive facilities. The electron accelerator at the heart of the European X-ray Free Electron Laser in Germany, for…
Justin Torres’ much-awaited follow-up to We The Animals, Blackouts is a meandering conversation between an unnamed young queer narrator and Juan, an older man on the verge of death in a decrepit palace in the desert. At its center lies a book of sexology from the 1930s, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. The book is a study of queerness and also an object of theft. The work, based on the research of writer and nudist Jan Gay, was appropriated to pathologize and cure homosexuality. Torres retakes the Gay’s findings, and fills in the homophobic erasures with redacted pages…
Militant extremist Islam is showing its carefully hidden Nazism. Just before the Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and started the current Hamas War, Mahmoud Abbas the president of the Palestinian Authority, went before the United Nations and gave a speech justifying Adolf Hitler.  “These people [Jews] were fought because of…usury,†Abbas said repeating an old anti-Semitic slander. “From Hitler’s point of view, they were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them.†Then came the Hamas attack of October 7th, the Israeli counter-attack against Hamas’ 311 miles of concrete military tunnels underneath Gaza City in which Hamas used the civilian population as…
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard it but it was in high school sometime in the early nineties. I was listening to the radio after school but before my parents returned home from work. Rock music was the sound of my teenage rebellion. It was forbidden in our house so I had one ear on the radio and the other on the garage door. Suddenly I heard a familiar twang in an unfamiliar place. It was the distinct sound of a sitar, but in a rock song: The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” How strange to hear the sitar alongside…
How it works: the noninvasive imaging technique combines acoustic radiation force and optical coherence tomography to produce 3D elastic wave speed maps of multiple eye components simultaneously. Left: cross-sectional image of a wave speed map of the anterior segment of the eyeball depicting different eye components: lens (L), iris (I), cornea (C), and sclera (S). Right: bar graph comparing the elastic wave speed of these components. (Courtesy: Mekonnen et al./doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.28.9.095001) A new technique evaluates the biomechanical properties of the eye with much better elastic resolution than current methods, raising hopes for more effective diagnostics and therapies. The new approach,…
Author Elissa Bassist is obsessed with the patriarchy. She once texted me, “BENNY needs to go pee, and I need to go tell him he’s a GOOD BOY for PEEING, which is TYPICAL PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT.” Reader, Benny is a dog. To read Elissa Bassist is to be in awe of Elissa Bassist. A self-proclaimed “aspiring witch,” Bassist’s powers are evident in Hysterical, her tragicomic memoir. Through a blend of narrative storytelling, research, and cultural criticism, she shares how a patriarchal society made her silent, which in turn made her physically ill, and how healing her body meant finding her voice.…
Betrayed by the City That Raised Me Annesha Mitha Share article The Waiting Room by Annesha Mitha I sweat through my blouse in a police station in Kolkata, not far from the house where I grew up. Kolkata is an unkind city in July. The officers look at me like a foreign object. I want to say, bhai, how are you? Or bhai, any news? But all my energy goes towards breathing: one moment, then another, then another. Each breath, each moment, is a kind of failure. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I hold tightly to my passport. It helps…
Michael Riordan argues that if the US had followed a more conservative strategy when building the Superconducting Super Collider, the history of particle physics could have been different Tunnel vision The Superconducting Super Collider in Texas was spiked after some $2bn had already been ploughed into its design and construction. (Courtesy: DOE) Thirty years ago this month, the US Congress voted to terminate the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) after some $2bn had been spent on its design and construction. At the time, nearly a third of its 87 km tunnel had already been completed, but congressional opponents insisted the SSC…
Reaching out: Brad Gibson at Thoresby Primary School in Hull. (Courtesy: University of Hull) Congratulations to University of Hull physicist Brad Gibson who this week celebrated his 1000th visit to a school in the region. Gibson began doing schools outreach in 2016, focusing on those that have a significant proportion of children who grew up in deprivation. On Wednesday, Gibson travelled to Thoresby Primary School – the seventh time he has visited the west Hull school since 2019 – marking the 1000th visit to a school. In that time, he estimates to have reached some 70 000 pupils through his…
Common trends: researchers at the University of Tokyo have used data taken by telescopes such as the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico (pictured here in 2019) to uncover similarities between fast radio bursts and earthquakes (Courtesy: UCF) Researchers in Japan have found striking similarities between the statistical behaviour of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) and earthquakes. FRBs are brief, intense bursts of radio waves from outside our galaxy. Whilst these bursts typically last a few milliseconds, astronomers have also found bursts a thousand times shorter. FRBs are broadly split into two categories: repeating FRB sources and “one-off†FRBs, which have…
Most of my really potent reading memories have less to do with exact books or passages, and more to do with the city I was living in, the people I was surrounded by, and the things happening on the fringes of my life as I read. It’s for this reason, in part, that I tend to keep a near-religious accounting of the books that I’ve read and the movies that I’ve seen and the records that I’ve listened to, each operating as a sort of snapshot of wherever I was in time. Years removed now, and I have no recollection…
On March 11, 2022, Molly McGhee shared a resignation letter on Twitter. She was quitting her job as an assistant editor at Tor, despite the fact that her first acquisition, The Atlas Six, had debuted at number three on the New York Times Bestseller List. She cited “systemwide prejudice against junior employees, rooted in the invisibility of junior employees’ workload” among her reasons for leaving. McGhee wasn’t alone. That week, she joined a rash of junior and midlevel publishing employees making an exodus from their underpaid posts and the industry writ large. The Times responded to the #publishingburnout phenomenon with…
On a wire: the new quantum-computing protocol creates cubits from strings of trapped atoms. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Evgenia-Fux) Quantum bits (qubits) based on cold atoms are increasingly attractive candidates for quantum computing. However, targeting single atoms in an array with lasers to manipulate them individually for processing quantum information remains a challenge. Now, Francesco Cesa and Hannes Pichler at Austria’s University of Innsbruck have designed a new protocol for quantum computation that does not rely on targeting individual atoms. Other researchers are now trying to implement the protocol in the lab. Quantum computers should be able to perform some calculations that are…
Mona Simpson’s latest novel, Commitment, is a tour de force that takes place in the early 1970s and follows three siblings—Walter, Lina, and Donnie—as they grow up in Los Angeles, into adulthood, and discover themselves while deciding whether to live an artist’s life, or a stable one. Each character uniquely confronts this question after their single mother, Diane, suffers from a debilitating depression and is committed to a long-term stay in a mental hospital, leaving them alone financially and emotionally. As the Aziz children try to stay afloat with part-time jobs at ice cream shops to cover rent and a…