Science

For Alan Barr, it started during the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit more time. I could sit and think,” he says. He had enjoyed being part of the success at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that discovered the Higgs boson. But now, he wondered, were they missing a trick? “I had spent long hours screwing bits of it together. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve built this beautiful piece of apparatus, but maybe we could be doing more with it,’ ” he says. The LHC is typically seen as a machine for finding new particles. But now Barr and a slew of other physicists are asking if it can also be used to probe the underlying meaning of quantum theory and why it paints reality as being so deeply weird. That’s exactly what Barr and hi...

As a climate scientist with over 25 years of experience, Anders Carlson understands the significant loss Oregon’s glaciers are facing. In 2020, this awareness led him to found the Oregon Glaciers Institute (OGI), a nonprofit institute run by a core group of volunteers, to research glacial health and inform the Oregon public about the far-reaching impacts of glacial loss in the state. In November 2024, OGI published its four-year impact report. The report underscores the danger facing Oregon’s glaciers. In 2021, OGI completed a field-based count of glaciers and determined that the state had 60 individual “flowing ice bodies” as recently as the 1970s. Now, only 27 remain. Oregon Glaciers Institute members conducting field work on Jefferson Park Glacier. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Bakken...

Hydrogels with a taste are administered into the mouth via a small tubeShulin Chen An electronic tongue that can replicate flavours like cake and fish soup could help recreate food in virtual reality, but can’t yet simulate other things that influence taste, such as smell. Yizhen Jia at The Ohio State University and his colleagues have developed a system, called e-Taste, that can sample a food and work out how to partly recreate its flavour in someone’s mouth. This involves using chemicals that correspond to the five basic tastes: sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami. “Those five flavours are already accounting for a very large spectrum of the food we have daily,” says Jia. The sy...

An illustration representing the ultra-thin material grapheneScience Photo Library/Alamy Why do cold thin sheets of carbon offer no resistance to electric currents? Two experiments are bringing us closer to an answer – and maybe even to practical room-temperature superconductors. Kin Chung Fong at Northeastern University in Massachusetts was stunned when another physicist, Abhishek Banerjee at Harvard University, told him a number over dinner. They were studying different aspects of graphene – sheets of carbon only one atom thick – but both made the same estimate about how hard it should be for an electric current flowing through graphene to suddenly change. Past experiments have shown that very cold stacks of two or three layers of graphene can superconduct, or p...

DNA can store digital data, such as visual and audio filesScience Picture Co / Alamy Artificial intelligence can read data stored in DNA strands within 10 minutes rather than the days required for previous methods, bringing DNA storage closer to practical use in computing. “DNA can store vast amounts of data in an extremely compact form and remain intact for thousands of years,” says Daniella Bar-Lev at the University of California, San Diego. “Additionally, DNA is naturally replicable, offering a unique advantage for long-term data preservation.” But retrieving the information encoded within DNA is a monumental challenge because the strands are mixed and jumbled together when stored. During the data-encoding process, individual strands are sometimes replicated im...