An overview of the gender gap in recreational cycling across cities included in the study according to Strava. Credit: A. Battison et al. (2023) New research looks at why cycling has a low uptake among women in urban areas Over recent years not only has cycling proved itself to be an outdoor activity with tremendous health benefits, but it has also presented itself as a useful tool in the quest to find an environmentally friendly method of urban transportation. Despite the increasing popularity of cycling, many countries still have a negligible uptake in the pursuit and this is even more pron ..read more

Simulating flows in a complex fluid While neural networks can help to improve the accuracy of fluid flow simulations, new research shows how their accuracy is limited unless the right approach is taken. By embedding fluid properties into neural networks, simulation accuracy can improve by orders of magnitude. The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is a simulation technique used to describe the dynamics of fluids. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in employing neural networks for computational modelling of fluids. The results of a collaboration between researchers from Eindhoven Unive ..read more

Experimental setup Austenitic steel is a potential material for nuclear fusion reactors Producing energy on Earth through nuclear fusion, the type of reaction that powers the Sun, has proven to be a major challenge. The extreme conditions needed for such a reaction require the walls of a nuclear fusion device to be made of a material with a particular set of mechanical properties, including being able to withstand incredibly high temperatures and be shock- and corrosion-resistant. Austenitic steel, a non-magnetic steel with a crystalline structure, is one of the materials considered for use in ..read more

Charting the survival of linguistic structures Models based on the principles of statistical physics can provide useful insights into how languages change through contact between speakers of different languages. In particular, the analysis reveals how unusual linguistic forms are more likely to be replaced by more regular ones over time. The field of historical linguistics explores how languages change over time, with a particular focus on the evolution of sounds, meanings, and structures in words and sentences. So far, however, it hasn’t been widely studied from the viewpoint of statistical p ..read more

Building a structured curriculum of data By carefully structuring the data used to train models of complex systems by leveraging physics and information theory, researchers can significantly improve the quality of their predictions, without relying on additional principles from machine learning in situations where less information about the system is available. Researchers are now increasingly driven to identify and model the intricate mathematical patterns found in complex natural systems, where the interactions of many simple parts and subsystems can give rise to deeply intricate mathematica ..read more

Guest Editors: Jürgen Kurths, Thomas Penzel, Valery Tuchin, Teemu Myllylä, Ruikang Wang, Oxana Semyachkina-Glushkovskaya The treatment of brain diseases during sleep is a pioneering trend in modern medicine. This is due to new discoveries in the science of lymphatic "vessels-vacuums" that clean the brain during deep sleep. Today, sleep is considered as a novel biomarker and a promising therapeutic target for brain diseases associated with the drainage system injuries and the blood-brain barrier (BBB) leakage, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, depression, brain trauma and intracr ..read more

More than 70 participants from 15 countries attended ESSENA11, in Catania, in June 2022. The European Summer School on experimental Nuclear Astrophysics has run for more than 2 decades and brings together nuclear physicists and astrophysicists from major universities, laboratories and research facilities. It has been organized jointly by the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (Catania) and the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “E. Majorana” of the Catania University. It is an opportunity to present novel work across the full range of both theoretical and experimental activities covering all n ..read more

The Scientific Advisory Committee of EPJ is delighted to welcome Professor Quentin Glorieux, as the new representative for the French Physical Society. Quentin Glorieux is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université, Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, and fellow member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His expertise covers a broad range of topics from nanooptics to quantum gases and superfluidity. In the last years, his experimental work focus on Quantum Fluids of Light to simulate many-body physics and analogue gravity with light in various platforms (from exciton-polaritons in microcaviti ..read more

More than a decade has passed since the publication of the special issue “20 Years of Recurrence Plots: Perspectives for a Multi-purpose Tool of Nonlinear Data Analysis” in the European Physical Journal—Special Topics (EPJST). The hope for further developments inspired by the interesting contributions in this special issue was fully realized. We see an amazing development in the field of recurrence plots (RPs), recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), and recurrence networks. Recurrence analysis is not just one method; it has emerged as an entire framework with many extensions, special recur ..read more

Estimating neutron scattering after a collision A new simulation approach named eTLE aims to improve the precision of a primary tool for estimating neutron behaviours in 3D space. This study examines the approach in detail – validating its reliability in predicting the scattering of neutrons in crystalline media. Tripoli-4® is a tool used by researchers to simulate the behaviours of interacting neutrons in 3D space. Recently, researchers developed a new ‘next-event estimator’ (NEE) for Tripoli-4®. Named eTLE, this approach aims to increase Tripoli-4®’s precision using Monte Carlo simulations ..read more