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Scientists Who Uncovered Altermagnetism Win Major Physics Honor
A previously overlooked set of spin symmetries has revealed that magnetism does not fit neatly into just two categories.
For more than a century, physicists divided collinear magnets into two basic types. The discovery of altermagnetism has added a third, earning Professor Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Dr. Libor Šmejkal and Professor Tomas Jungwirth the 2026 Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (EPS) Condensed Matter Division.
One of Europe’s leading honors in condensed matter physics, the prize recognizes their work establishing altermagnetism as a previously unknown fundamental form of magnetic order alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The finding has challenged a long-accepted picture of magnetism and created a research field with potential consequences for quantum materials, condensed matter physics and future information technologies.
Giant Alien World Found Hiding in Plain Sight for 11 Years
A giant planet spent more than a decade concealed inside one of astronomy’s most closely watched star systems.
Astronomers have discovered a planet named Beta Pictoris d orbiting a young star just 63 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is about 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the first planet found in the system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from the ground. Researchers later discovered that it had been hiding in telescope observations for as long as 11 years.
“This was a serendipitous discovery,” says Ben Sutlieff, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and co-lead of one of two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We initially wanted to look more at a known planet in the system, Beta Pictoris b, to see how it changed over time,” he adds.
Scientists Link Heavy TV Watching to Brain Changes Decades Later
Heavy television viewing in middle age was linked to a troubling brain signature more than 20 years later.
Television may be doing more than filling quiet hours. A long-term study suggests that people who watched it most frequently in middle age later showed structural brain differences linked to memory loss, vascular damage, and dementia.
The findings, published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, challenge the idea that all sitting affects the brain in the same way. Time spent watching television was associated with poorer brain health decades later, while sitting at work showed a very different pattern.
Quantum Computers Could Freeze Like Ordinary PCs
How even small but frequent disruptions can cause quantum computers to fail.
Quantum computers are expected to tackle difficult tasks more quickly and with less energy than current supercomputers, including molecular simulations and complex logistics planning.
Progress toward that goal depends partly on increasing the number of qubits, the basic units that store and process quantum information. Yet scaling up may introduce a problem that has received far less attention.
Adobe Campaign Classic CVSS 10.0 Flaw Could Run Code Without User Interaction
Adobe has released security updates to address a maximum-severity security flaw in Campaign Classic (ACC), its enterprise-focused marketing automation platform, that could result in arbitrary code execution.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026–48449, carries a severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system.
It has been described as a case of incorrect authorization that could result in arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user without requiring any user interaction.
