Wei Wang

In layers of molybdenum telluride twisted at a specific angle, electrons behave unusually: they can split into parts. This is akin to a whole pie suddenly being cut into perfectly equal slices, even though there's only one knife. In ordinary materials, the electron's charge is indivisible, but in these layers, under strong cooling, states emerge where the charge splits into three parts.

Neutrons leave no trace in ordinary glass: they pass right through, like light through a window pane. But some materials flash a faint burst of light when a particle hits them. That's how a scintillator works: a substance that turns invisible radiation into visible light. The new transparent glass SG101 is one such material.

Electronics get hot. The more powerful the processor, the more heat you need to get rid of, or it will fail. One bottleneck is the boundary between two materials: heat hits it like a seam between tiles and slows down.

A garden hose blasts a powerful stream of water. If you pinch it or give it a jerk, the stream starts to writhe like a snake, and spray flies everywhere. Something similar happens with the giant plasma jets that black holes shoot out.

The NICER X-ray telescope has become a precise stethoscope for astrophysicists. In 2025, it was 'listening to' the black hole in the binary system 4U 1630−47—a compact object born from the core collapse of a massive star (the stability limit for white dwarfs was…

A huge pool of clear liquid is hidden deep underground. Inside, there is nothing but a pristine 'broth' that flashes with faint light when an invisible particle flies through. This is the JUNO detector—20,000 tons of liquid scintillator built to hunt for neutrinos. The main enemy of such a hunt is not darkness but its own noise.

During surgery, an anesthesiologist watches a screen where pressure and pulse curves run. But behind these lines hide several other quantities: how much the vessels constrict, how fast the blood flows, how elastic the artery walls are. Precise instruments for measuring them are only used in the most severe cases because it's risky — a needle in the artery, a catheter in the heart.

Picture a room where hundreds of people are talking at once while you strain to hear a pin drop. That is essentially how physicists with the PandaX-4T collaboration listened for silence inside 3.7 tonnes of liquid xenon.