Hao Zhang

A magnetic field is invisible, but you can make it 'glow' using tiny defects in diamond — nitrogen-vacancy centers. Each such defect acts as a miniature compass, telling you which way the field points. The problem is that there are many of these compasses, and reading them all in sequence is like transcribing every letter in a thick book by hand.

The night sky in a telescope image looks like a photo taken through a fogged-up window: bright stars are visible, but everything faint drowns in a murky haze. That haze is noise — random interference from electronics, heat, and the atmosphere itself.

A typical accelerator is like an assembly line where electrons are the workpieces. To get the desired X-ray pulse, the workpiece is fine-tuned after it's already on the line: squeezed, filtered, corrected. In the new work, engineers decided to take a different approach — shaping the workpiece before it even hits the conveyor. At LCLS-II, electrons are knocked out of a metal by a short laser pulse.

A drop of water stretches in a strong electric field. The deuterium nucleus, a bound pair of a proton and a neutron, behaves the same way, except here the field comes from a passing gamma ray, and instead of just stretching, the nucleus can simply fall apart.

The La3Ni2O7 crystal resembles a layered pie, where the filling of nickel and oxygen atoms alternates with lanthanum layers. At ambient pressure, it does not conduct without resistance, but squeeze it or grow it as a thin film, and high-temperature superconductivity emerges.

Reflecting off a nanowire, a radio wave, like a barcode scanner beam, instantly reads its state, offering hope for stable quantum processors.

The giant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, lying 4 billion light-years away, works not just as a lens but as a gravitational well of time. Its mass bends space so sharply that photons from an era when the Universe was just 500 million years old slide along curved paths, like rays in slow motion, and converge on us magnified forty-three times.

Cleaning speech from noise is like tuning an old TV: twist the contrast knob too far, and faces become unnatural. Researchers separately adjusted the 'volume' and 'time shift' for each frequency of sound, as if splitting it into a rainbow — a method known as spectroscopy. It turned out the key knob is volume, not phase synchronization.

A laser beam passes through a glass cell filled with cesium vapor. The atoms in the vapor dart around chaotically, like a crowd at a train station: each one enters the beam, spends a moment there, and flies back out. Their internal state, something like the orientation of a tiny magnet, changes under the influence of light. If all atoms were identical and stationary, the signal would be steady.