Jie Sheng

Gravity works like an invisible photographer. When a piece of metal falls, inside it, according to Albert Einstein and the electromagnetism of James Clerk Maxwell, an electric field is born — that's how spacetime curvature…

An ordinary flash drive stores bits in electron traps, but you can only read them through a separate wire and amplifier. In the new development, the same piece of the semimetal tellurium plays both the role of storage and the light bulb.

Two metal cylinders hang inside a satellite almost without touching, with a finger-thick gap between them. Past them, like wind through window frames, streams a flow of invisible waves. This is dark matter, and it does not simply fly by: it makes the cylinders tremble ever so slightly, as if someone were drawing a bow across the strings stretched between them.