A memristor that uses changes in ion concentrations and mechanical deformations to store information has been developed by researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. By connecting two of these devices, the researchers created the first logic circuit based on nanofluidic components. The new memristor could prove useful for neuromorphic computing, which tries to mimic the brain using electronic components. In living organisms, neural architectures rely on flows of ions passing through tiny channels to regulate the transmission of information across the synapses that connect one neuron to anot ..read more

It was a scorcher last year. Land and sea temperatures were up to 0.2 °C higher every single month in the second half of 2023, with these warm anomalies continuing into 2024. We know the world is warming, but the sudden heat spike had not been predicted. As NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt wrote in Nature recently: “It’s humbling and a bit worrying to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.” As Schmidt went on to explain, a spell of record-breaking warmth had been deemed “unlikely” despite 2023 being an El Niño year, where the relat ..read more

Dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the universe’s total matter, and cosmologists believe it played a major role in the formation of galaxies. We know the location of this so-called galactic dark matter thanks to astronomical surveys that map how light from distant galaxies bends as it travels towards us. But so far, efforts to detect dark matter trapped within the Earth’s gravitational field have come up empty-handed, even though this type of dark matter – known as thermalized dark matter – should be present in greater quantities. The problem is that thermalized dark matter travels much ..read more

Complex scientific problems require large-scale resources to solve. So why not look for help from the billions of gamers around the world who spend so much time on their computers? That’s the idea behind a new kind of citizen science, in which members of the public contribute to research projects by playing video games designed to perform specific scientific tasks. A research team headed up at McGill University in Canada is now using this approach to understand more about the human microbiome – the tens of trillions of microbes that colonize our bodies, some of which play a vital role in our h ..read more

NASA is seeking alternative designs for its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, which is meant to bring back soil and rocks gathered by the agency’s Perseverance rover. But with the MSR beset by cost hikes and delays, NASA concedes that the current design is “too expensive” and that its aim of returning material by 2040 is “unacceptably too long”. A partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), the MSR is designed to return samples collected by Perseverance since 2021 at the Jezera crater on Mars. The material, once back on Earth, will boost our understanding of the red planet’s ..read more

Stacking layers of two-dimensional materials on top of each other and varying the twist angle between them massively alters their electronic properties. The trick is to get the twist angle just right, and to know when you’ve done so. Researchers in China have now developed a technique that helps with the second part of this challenge. By allowing scientists to directly visualize the variations in local twist angles, the new technique shed light on the electronic structure of twisted materials and accelerate the development of devices that exploit their properties. Graphene (a 2D form of carbon ..read more

Researchers in the US and Canada have detected an effect known as quantum Barkhausen noise for the first time. The effect, which comes about thanks to the cooperative quantum tunnelling of a huge number of magnetic spins, may be the largest macroscopic quantum phenomena yet observed in the laboratory. In the presence of a magnetic field, electron spins (or magnetic moments) in a ferromagnetic material all line up in the same direction – but not all at once. Instead, alignment occurs piecemeal, with different regions, or domains, falling into line at different times. These domains influence eac ..read more

Purpose-Led Publishing is a coalition of three not-for-profit scientific publishers: IOP Publishing, AIP Publishing and the American Physical Society. The coalition launched earlier this year, and its members have promised that they will continue to reinvest 100% of their funds back into science. Members have also pledged to “publish only the content that genuinely adds to scientific knowledge,” and have also promised to “put research integrity ahead of profit”. This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features an interview with Antonia Seymour, who is chief executive of IOP Publishing ..read more

The US Department of Energy has given the green light for the next stage of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Known as “critical decision 3A”, the move allows officials to purchase “long-lead procurements” such as equipment, services and materials before assembling the collider can begin. The EIC, costing between $1.7bn and $2.8bn, will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. This will involve the lab revamping its existing 3.8 km-long Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider accelerator complex that collides heavy nuclei such as gold and copper to produce a quark–gluon plas ..read more

I can’t really claim to have known the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, but after the sad news emerged last week that he had died on 8 April at the age of 94, I was immediately reminded of my one brush with him. An obituary in the Times described Higgs as “warm, funny and engaging” – and that was exactly the person I encountered when we met at the offices of IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, in May 2012. Higgs, then 82, had come to Bristol to speak at the city’s Festival of Ideas and to open the “Dirac–Higgs Science Centre” at Cotham School, where he spent five years as a child whi ..read more