Patrick Kerr, a former programmer on the original Grand Theft Auto, has published a playable physics demo that eventually became the game’s vehicle system.
Learn more and play it here.
Former Grand Theft Auto programmer Patrick Kerr has shared his system and explained how it works.
Clocks have always been about more than keeping time. In the 18th century, marine chronometers helped solve the “longitude problem,” enabling sailors to determine their ships’ east–west position at sea [1]. A new generation of ultraprecise clocks may now help researchers navigate uncharted territory beyond the standard model of particle physics. Building on decades of development, two independent teams—one led by Thorsten Schumm of the Vienna University of Technology and Ekkehard Peik of PTB, the German National Metrology Institute [2] and the other by Shiqian Ding of Tsinghua University in China [3]—have reported in Nature the first operating nuclear clocks. Their ticks are set by a transition in the atomic nucleus rather than by transitions of the electrons surrounding it.
Peik says he was “absolutely delighted” by the rapid progress and surprised by the clock’s robustness. Ding says he felt humbled to see decades of work come together in an operating clock. “Two years earlier, that still felt almost too ambitious to imagine,” he says.
These clocks don’t yet match the stability of today’s best atomic clocks, but they hold promise for both practical applications and tests of fundamental physics. Nuclear clocks could eventually become compact and robust, doing away with the ultrahigh-vacuum chambers and elaborate laser-cooling and trapping systems required by today’s most precise atomic clocks.
Pairing superconducting qubits with microwave cavities could reduce the hardware requirements for quantum simulations of fundamental physics.
Performing simulations of quantum systems on an ordinary computer is fundamentally difficult. The resources required to track the state of a quantum system grow exponentially with the size of the system. Therefore, even modest-sized simulations can exceed the capacity of the largest supercomputers. In 1982, Richard Feynman proposed using a controllable quantum system as the computer, so that the quantum mechanics of the machine itself performs the computation [1]. This proposal has grown into a worldwide effort to build quantum computers made up of large numbers of quantum bits, or qubits. But simulating fundamental physics poses a special challenge, as the two classes of particles—fermions and bosons—map to qubits in distinctly different ways.
Astronomers have confirmed a powerful radio galaxy from nearly 12.5 billion years ago. The source, TXS 2354+015, was originally identified as a high-redshift candidate from its characteristic drop in optical light, and follow-up spectroscopy placed it at a redshift of 4.946. Their paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 23.
When material falls onto a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, the resulting accretion activity can power an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and launch powerful relativistic jets of plasma, producing large amounts of radio waves. Such a galaxy is called a radio-loud active galactic nucleus (RLAGN). The energy that the jets carry can influence star formation in the galaxy and heat its surrounding gas.
This “AGN feedback” is incorporated in simulations to correctly predict the number of galaxies in the universe. Such powerful galaxies in the early universe—called high-z RLAGNs—tend to mark the locations of the most massive, earliest-forming galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Modern technological breakthroughs like lasers, MRI scanners, semiconductors and quantum computers rest on the study of quantum mechanics. However, the field has predominantly focused on (sub)atomic phenomena far removed from our human senses.
Demonstrating quantum phenomena in objects massive enough to be meaningfully influenced by gravity has proven difficult, as large objects are significantly harder to isolate from environmental factors, such as heat and vibration, than nanoscopic particles are.
But now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have moved a levitating, centimeter-wide diamond using the force generated by electron spin alone, the first time a quantum effect has been observed directly manipulating an object subject to gravity.
Today, many physicists are actively exploring how light could be used to link objects through quantum entanglement. By fully harnessing the effect, they hope to unlock a wide array of applications, from secure communication networks spanning vast distances to sensitive new tests of the fundamental laws of physics.
Through new research published in Science, a team led by Francesco Marin at the University of Florence has taken an important step toward this goal by entangling the motion of a tiny levitating glass sphere with light, without needing to cool their experiment to ultralow temperatures.
A new type of advanced microscope (wide-field coherent multidimensional microscopy) has been developed. It uses a carefully designed sequence of ultrashort light pulses to study the behavior of high-tech materials, with potential practical applications in the study of innovative materials such as those used to build solar panels. This is the result of work by a research group of physicists from the Faculty of Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Natural Sciences at Università Cattolica’s Brescia campus who, for the first time, have developed a “multidimensional microscope” that, in a sense, records the behavior of materials.
The study is published in the journal Optica and coordinated by the dean of the faculty, professor Claudio Giannetti, director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratories for Advanced Materials Physics (ILAMP).
Two studies on critical topology have recently been published in the journal Nature. These studies were led by the teams of Prof. Baile Zhang at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Prof. Jianhua Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China, respectively. Prof. Xue-Jia Yu from the School of Physics at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo (EIT), served as a co-corresponding author on both papers and provided key theoretical guidance in the related experimental collaborations.
To understand the significance of this work, we first need to discuss the concept of topology.
In the conventional picture of physics, the states of matter are determined by symmetry. For example, the transition of water into ice and the magnetization of iron are both results of symmetry breaking. However, the discovery of topological phases of matter fundamentally changed this understanding (recognized by the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics).
Over the past few decades, electronics engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated implantable medical devices. Reliably powering some of these devices, however, can be challenging, particularly when they are based on stretchable materials that move along with the body.
Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University and other institutions in South Korea recently developed a new wireless power system that could provide energy to soft implantable devices, even when they are stretching or moving. The new system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was initially used to develop a cardiac pacemaker, a medical device that uses electrical pulses to control heartbeats.
“This work began with a practical question: How can we reliably power a wireless implant in a body that is constantly moving?” Dae-Hyeong Kim, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Advances in soft electronics have enabled implants to conform to living tissues and accommodate their natural motion, helping reduce mechanical stress and maintain stable contact. However, as these implants move and even stretch within the body, changes in their position and shape can disrupt wireless power delivery.”