S. Johnston

Electrons in a metal are like a crowd in a subway: each on their own, but at the slightest push, everyone moves at once. Physicists call this collective oscillation of the electron gas a plasmon. In superconductors, these oscillations are especially important because they reveal how electrons interact with each other.

Radio telescopes are like ears listening to space. Usually, there's just one ear: it picks up a signal from a single tiny spot in the sky. That's slow. The Parkes telescope in Australia now has 72 ears working at once.