Yifan Wang

The kitchen where stars are baked works on a simple recipe: as much flour as you have, that's how many pies you get. For a long time, astronomers saw a strict relation between a galaxy's mass and how fast it forms stars, and they considered it a standalone rule. But a new study of 24,954 nearby galaxies shows that this relation is just a shadow of two more fundamental laws.

The dance floor is packed with people, each moving on their own. Suddenly, some of them break into pairs (spinning around, barely noticing their neighbors) while the rest line up in chains. That's roughly how atoms behave in the metal CsCr₃Sb₅, a member of the kagome metals, whose crystal lattice resembles a woven basket.