10 June 2020 is #Strike4BlackLives and we urge you to participate in this strike. Organised by a group of physicists, led by Brian Nord and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, this is a day to #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM in solidarity with Black colleagues, Black students and Black people who are excluded from academia. Learn more about the strike here. Read more
In 1967, Andrei Sakharov proposed conditions required in the early universe for generating matter and anti-matter at different rates, to explain the abundance of matter in our universe today. Charge-Parity (CP) violating processes are essential under these conditions. Measurements of the CP violation in quarks, first performed in 1964, are too small to explain the difference, and finding other sources of CP violation is an ongoing quest in the physics community. In April 2020, the T2K collaboration published a paper in Nature suggesting large CP violation in the leptonic sector, namely in neutrino oscillations. Some of the researchers involved in the project tell us their story. Read more
Francesca Chadha-Day is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying particle astrophysics and axion phenomenology. She is also a comedian. Here, Fran writes for us about her experience of stand-up comedy. … Read more
Ankita Anirban interviews Nell Freudenberger about her book `Lost and Wanted’ whose protagonist is a theoretical physicist. Read more
As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break science-related browsing. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in October: … Read more
As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break science-related browsing. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in September: … Read more
Welcome to our new monthly link round-up! As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break popular science reading. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in August: … Read more
The nuclide chart is a staple of nuclear physics, visualizing the properties of nuclides arranged by their number of protons and neutrons. The chart appears in text books, talk slides and Lego™ form (in the Binding Blocks science outreach programme). The 3D Nuclide Chart is a web app put together by Ed Simpson (@SuperSubatomic on Twitter) of the Australian National University. The app lets users plot the nuclear data of their choosing (taken from published data tables), play around with the 3D viewpoint (or work in 2D), set colour schemes and fonts, and then export the visualization as a png file or export the relevant data. The results are rather pretty, and the app is easy to use. Read more
Have you ever wondered what reviews editors do? Chasing authors to submit and making edits to the text of the reviews? That is just a small part of it. Read more
After a PhD in theoretical physics (specifically, holography and the ADS/CFT correspondence), John left academia and later co-founded Overleaf in 2012. He has been developing Overleaf ever since to bring it to more and more users. Read more
In theory, many ordinary materials can have exotic topological phases. But how can we find them? In 2018 a research group from the National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics in Beijing scanned 39519 materials to predict which phases of the already-known compounds might exhibit topological properties. These materials were summarised into an interactive database Materiae, where you can browse compounds containing particular elements, check if they have any topological phases and visualise their band structure. Read more
Federico Levi is a Senior Editor at Nature Physics. Read more
David Abergel is an Associate Editor at Nature Physics. Before joining Nature Physics in 2017, David carried out theoretical research on graphene and other two-dimensional crystals, and quantum topological materials. … Read more
Vittoria Colizza is Research Director of the EPIcx lab at Sorbonne Université. Read more
Bart Hoogenboom is a professor of biophysics at University College London. Read more
Georgia Francis is a Senior Editorial Assistant for the Nature Reviews journals, who works hard to keep Nature Reviews Physics running smoothly. Read more
The theoretical physicist Sam Goudsmit had a remarkable life. Not only did he discover the electron spin with his colleague George Uhlenbeck (for which they did not receive the Nobel prize – to the surprise of many colleagues), he was also the scientific leader of the Alsos mission, the United States mission searching for the ‘German nuclear bomb’. After the war, in 1958, he launched the pioneering weekly Physical Review Letters, which became one of the top publications in science. Read more
Iulia Georgescu is the Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Physics. Previously, she was an editor of Nature Physics, where she managed to sneak in three original “Alice in wonderland” illustrations (1, 2, 3) and the self-declared best cover-line ever. Read more
This year’s Berlin Science Week kicked off with a diverse programme. Among many events, visitors could discuss the connection between art and astronomy or learn how new technologies can be inspired by nature, or participate in a panel discussion at the Springer Nature office. The panellists set out to find an answer on how we define physics today, and to map out the boundaries with other related areas such as chemistry or biology. Read more
Alba Diz-Muñoz is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Read more
