Physicists and chemists at Heidelberg University have realized a photonic microchip that is driven by light just as easily as electronic components via a “plug.” Their development could serve as the basis for fast and cost-effective production of photonic integrated systems that are of great importance for implementing innovative computing and communications systems.
Prof. Dr. Wolfram Pernice of the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics headed up the research on this novel coupling concept for light-controlled chips. The results appear in the journal Science Advances.
“Glass” has a unique and distinct meaning in physics—one that refers not just to the transparent material we associate with window glass. Instead, it refers to any system that looks solid but is not in true equilibrium and continues to change extremely slowly over time. Examples include window glass, plastics, metallic glasses, spin glasses (i.e., magnetic systems), and even some biological and computational systems.
When a liquid is cooled very quickly—a process called quenching—it doesn’t have time to organize into a crystal but becomes stuck in a disordered state far from equilibrium. Its properties—like stiffness and structure—slowly evolve through a process called “aging.”
Now, a research team from the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a new theoretical framework for understanding the universal aging behavior of glassy materials. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
This script is a mind-bending follow-up to your first one. It moves from Physics into Metaphysics and Platonism, specifically exploring the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
When a human mind can be emulated — memories, habits, and the weather of thought running on engineered hardware — “uploading” stops being an ending and becomes a beginning. Substrate-independent minds can be backed up, restored, paused without time passing, and deployed into new bodies: telepresence robots, swarms, or chassis built for heat and radiation. Distance turns into bandwidth as consciousness moves as data, bound only by light. Under the spectacle is a harder, technical question: what must be captured, at what scale, for an emulation to be someone — and what rights and power follow once persons are portable infrastructure?
Mind uploading has usually been told as a one-way escape hatch: a last-minute transfer from a failing body into a machine, the technological equivalent of outrunning a deadline. That framing makes the idea feel like a hospice fantasy — dramatic, personal, terminal. But it leaves out the second verb that changes everything. If a mind can be reproduced as a running process, it isn’t just uploaded once; it can be instantiated again, moved, paused, restored, and redeployed. Uploading is capture. Downloading is what makes a mind into something mobile.
The phrase “substrate-independent mind” tries to name that mobility without the melodrama. A substrate is the medium a mind runs on: biological tissue, silicon, specialized hardware, something not yet invented. Independence doesn’t mean the mind floats free of physics; it means the same meaningful mental functions might be implementable on different platforms, like a program that can run on different computers. The promise is not that neurons are irrelevant, but that the mind might be the pattern of information processing the neurons carry out — the thing they do, not the stuff they’re made of.
A new experiment has uncovered the mechanism responsible for the screeching sound made by peeling sticky tape. Using a combination of ultrafast imaging and synchronized acoustic recordings, Sigurdur Thoroddsen and colleagues at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have shown that the noise is produced by a rapid train of tiny shockwaves, released through a specialized form of stick–slip motion. The research is published in Physical Review E.
If you’ve ever used sticky tape, you’ll probably be all too familiar with the harsh sound it makes as it peels away from a surface. Yet despite decades of experimental scrutiny, physicists have yet to fully explain the origins of this intriguing acoustic effect.
Previous studies established that peeling proceeds via a “stick–slip” mechanism—a jerky motion characterized by brief, rapid accelerations interrupted by sudden stops. Similar dynamics underpin phenomena ranging from earthquakes to the squeak of basketball shoes on a polished wooden court. However, the fine details of how this process unfolds in peeling tape turned out to be more complex than they first appeared.
In industrial plants around the world, tiny bubbles cause big problems. Bubbles clog filters, disrupt chemical reactions, reduce throughput during biomanufacturing, and can even cause overheating in electronics and nuclear power plants. MIT Professor Kripa Varanasi has long studied methods to reduce bubble disruption.
In a new study, Varanasi, along with Ph.D. candidate Bert Vandereydt and former postdoc Saurabh Nath, have uncovered the physics behind a promising type of debubbling membrane material that is “aerophilic”—Greek for “air-loving.” The material can be used in systems of all types, allowing anyone to optimize their machine’s performance by breaking free from bubble-borne disruptions.
“We have figured out the structure of these bubble-attracting membrane materials to allow gas to evacuate in the fastest possible manner,” says Varanasi, the senior author of the study.
We all know we live in three-dimensional space. But what does it mean when people talk about four dimensions? Is it just a bigger kind of space? Is it “space-time,” the popular idea which emerged from Einstein’s theory of relativity?
If you have wondered what four dimensions really look like, you may have come across drawings of a “four-dimensional cube.” But our brains are wired to interpret drawings on flat paper as two-or at most three-dimensional, not four-dimensional.
A newly discovered jellyfish galaxy, seen as it existed 8.5 billion years ago, is challenging assumptions about conditions in the early universe. Astrophysicists at the University of Waterloo have identified a newly discovered jellyfish galaxy that is now the most distant example of its kind ever
Three centuries after Newton described the universe through fixed laws and deterministic equations, science may be entering an entirely new phase.
According to biochemist and complex systems theorist Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist Andrea Roli, the biosphere is not a predictable, clockwork system. Instead, it is a self-organising, ever-evolving web of life that cannot be fully captured by mathematical models.
Organisms reshape their environments in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable. These processes, Kauffman and Roli argue, take place in what they call a “Domain of No Laws.”
This challenges the very foundation of scientific thought. Reality, they suggest, may not be governed by universal laws at all—and it is biology, not physics, that could hold the answers.
