Shashwat Sharma

0.965—a number that split cosmologists into 'before' and 'after'. That's the value of the spectral index ns measured by the ACT telescope as it stared into the cosmic microwave background — the cooled light of the Big Bang.

In an underground laboratory beneath Sanford Mountain in South Dakota, a tank holding ten tons of liquid xenon waits for a dark matter particle to fly through it. Over 60 days of observation, the LZ detector registered a single nuclear recoil with an energy of 248 keV.