Lei Xu

The magnets in this crystal behave like guests at a party where everyone wants the same chair. No one can settle down for good, and from this chaos, a special state emerges. In it, spin momentum (what makes an electron a tiny magnet) manages to travel 480 micrometers.

A raindrop falling to the ground strikes with a certain force. But what if the drop isn't round but elongated like a cigar or flattened like a pancake? It turns out that shape is everything: the impact force can vary by more than a factor of ten just because of how the drop looks at the moment of impact.

An ordinary lens always refracts light the same way. Its properties are frozen in glass forever. But now there's a surface that changes the game on the fly. Scientists made an ultrathin film with resonant elements and infused it with liquid crystals — the same stuff used in phone screens.

Light passing by a tiny structure changes direction. If the structure is smaller than the wavelength of the light, it acts like a lens and focuses the light into a spot smaller than the wave itself.