On your wavelength

Ghina M. Halabi is an astrophysicist and social entrepreneur, whose work lies at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship and education. During her PhD and postdoctoral work, her research was on internal structure and evolution of stars. Now, working at Cambridge Judge Business School Entrepreneurship Centre, she creates and leads impactful opportunities for scientists and academics to thriv…

On 16 September 2021, Nature Reviews Physics and Nature Reviews Earth & Environment hosted a webinar, “How you can get involved with Nature Reviews as a PhD student/postdoc”. The event featured panellists Louisa Brotherson (University of Liverpool), Franziska Keller (ETHZ) and Zengji Yue (University of Wollongong) alongside editors Erin Scott (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment) and Zoe Budrikis …

Guest post by Andrea Richaud, recipient of the Communications Physics 2020 Early Career Researcher grant which enabled him to attend a conference or scientific school of his choice. In December 2020, I had the pleasure to receive the 2020 Training Grant for Early Career Researchers from the journal Communications Physics. After defending my doctoral thesis in February 2020, I joined SISSA (Intern…

The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was probably the most recognizable scientist of the last 50 years. Many of his greatest contributions were in the study of black holes. In particular, he discovered in 1974 that black holes emit what came to be known as Hawking radiation — which shows that black holes are not truly black and appears to contradict quantum mechanics. His public pe…

Contributed by the following authors (in alphabetical order): Dr Claudia Antolini, Dr Clara Barker, Dr Kathryn Boast, Dr Izzy Jayasinghe, Dr Caroline Müllenbroich, Dr Clara Nellist Why we launched a webinar series 2020 has seen an explosion of physics webinars. Many of these came about out of necessity to adapt established seminar series and conferences to suit the restrictions around the COVID-1…

Women’s Day was originally conceived at the turn of the 20th century and used in many countries as a focal point for the women’s suffrage movement, and other equal rights for women. 8th of March became a national holiday in the Soviet Union in 1917 after women gained suffrage there. It was recognised by the United Nations in 1977 and continues to be celebrated around the world in different ways. …

Contributed by Saar Nehemia and Ido Kaminer – Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. In 1934, Pavel Cherenkov discovered that when charged particles surpass the speed of light in matter, they generate an electromagnetic shockwave. A well-known analogue for this phenomenon is a sonic boom – shockwaves of sound generated when jet planes surpass the speed of sound in air. This new understanding o…

Posted on behalf of Nina Meinzer, senior editor at Nature Physics The October issue of Nature Physics marks the journal’s 15th anniversary, complete with a cover on which four experimental images are arranged in such a way to form the number ‘15’. Here Nina Meinzer tells the story of how the images that make the cover were created. Earlier this year, the Nature Physics editors started to think ab…

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), was an English mathematician and is regarded as the first person to recognise the potential of computing power and programming. Since 2009, the second Tuesday of October has been commemorated as Ada Lovelace day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Here we celebrate the stories of five pioneering…

During the COVID-19 lockdown which led to the closure of many labs around the world, Dr. Amruta Gadge, a postdoctoral researcher in the Quantum Systems and Devices group at the University of Sussex*, made headlines for remotely setting up a Bose–Einstein condensate from her living room. Here, she tells us her story. When the UK government announced the national lockdown on 23rd March due to the p…

As coronavirus restrictions have been easing over the past few months, increasing numbers of researchers are starting to return to labs and begin experimental work again. Nature Reviews Physics organised a photo competition, inviting submissions of photos which depict lab-life in the era of COVID-19. Read more Continue reading →

On 21st July 2020, editors from various Nature journals who handle 2D materials research gathered in an online discussion with Joshua Lui (UC Riverside) , Cecilia Mattevi (Imperial College London) and Matthew Yankowitz (University of Washington)  to discuss the reproducibility issues currently faced by the 2D materials research community. Read more Continue reading →

In her new book, “The End of the Universe (Astrophysically Speaking)”, Katie Mack takes us on a journey through cosmology to find out how it will all end. Will the Universe collapse into itself in a Big Crunch? Or will a vacuum bubble slowly swallow up everything? Read more Continue reading →

10 June 2020 is #Strike4BlackLives and we urge you to participate in this strike. Organised by a group of physicists, led by Brian Nord and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, this is a day to #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM in solidarity with Black colleagues, Black students and Black people who are excluded from academia. Learn more about the strike here. Read more Continue reading →

In 1967, Andrei Sakharov proposed conditions required in the early universe for generating matter and anti-matter at different rates, to explain the abundance of matter in our universe today. Charge-Parity (CP) violating processes are essential under these conditions. Measurements of the CP violation in quarks, first performed in 1964, are too small to explain the difference, and finding other so…

Christine Horejs reviews the latest series in the Star Trek franchise, the recently broadcasted Star Trek: Picard. Read more Continue reading →

Francesca Chadha-Day is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying particle astrophysics and axion phenomenology. She is also a comedian. Here, Fran writes for us about her experience of stand-up comedy. … Read more Continue reading →

Ankita Anirban interviews Nell Freudenberger about her book `Lost and Wanted’ whose protagonist is a theoretical physicist. Read more Continue reading →

Guest post by Daniel Stadler, PhD student in Chemistry at the University of Cologne and organizer of the PowerPoint©  Karaoke at the Materials Research Society (MRS) meetings … Read more Continue reading →

Ana Godinho, the Head of Education, Communications and Outreach at CERN, talked to us about the CERN Science Gateway, a very exciting outreach project. Read more Continue reading →