Pawan Kumar

Sometimes bright loops flash on the Sun — solar flares. They resemble giant electric discharges, but instead of wires, there are magnetic fields. Inside an active region, magnetic lines tangle like threads in a ball, and when they snap and reconnect, energy is released. In this work, scientists found the exact spot where this happens.

A tiny oil drop squeezes through a water channel narrower than itself. In pure water, it crawls along calmly, like a round bead. But add a little soap to the water, and the drop begins to bend, like a caterpillar.

The enigma of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is not just a question of 'what exploded?' It’s a drama of energy transfer under extreme conditions, where the slightest stumble leads to collapse.

A mosaic of atoms where each tile switches on its own long remained a beautiful but impractical idea. In an ordinary ferroelectric, a material that stores a bit through the direction of its electric polarization, neighboring tiles are coupled. To flip one, you have to drag others along, and the pattern comes out coarse: domains several nanometers wide, not one atom.