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Stephen Blundell ponders the history of disagreements between scientists — from the ancient Greeks to questions about room-temperature superconductivity — and what they show about how to disagree well.
Despite decades of ever more urgent warnings, humanity is failing to address the climate crisis. Astronomer and climate activist Bernadette Rodgers argues that climate action, in any number of ways, can get results and is a moral and professional responsibility for scientists at this critical moment in human history.
Stéphane Kenmoe, editor-in-chief of the African Physics Newsletter, discusses how the project helps foster communication among physicists in Africa and the African diaspora, and brings African physics worldwide.
Labos 1point5 is a nationwide action-research project that so far about half of research units in France have used to assess their carbon footprint. Tamara Ben-Ari describes some of the scientific findings from the resulting dataset and what they show about how to change the scientific system.
Astroparticle physicists met for the 38th edition of the biennial series of the International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023), which took place in late July in Nagoya, Japan.
Raphaël Lévy, one of the principal investigators of NanoBubbles — an interdisciplinary project that explores how, when and why science fails to correct itself, talks about the importance of questioning and correcting the scientific record.
Gathering evidence is key to science, so it is not surprising that scientific institutions have started to report their carbon emissions. However, it is critical to go beyond reporting, and act. Even without a perfect evidence base there are actions scientists and institutions can take that will lead to lasting change, argues Astrid Eichhorn, physicist and chair of the ALLEA Working Group on Climate Sustainability in the Academic System.
A paper in Nature Communications shows that a hyperbolic map can still be useful for navigating a real-world network, even if the information about the network is incomplete.
Twenty-five years ago, Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz published ‘Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks’, a paper that helped kickstart the modern era of network science.
A paper in Physical Review E shows that in several real-world networks, the number of cliques grows faster than the number of links, and the number of big cliques grows even faster than the number of small cliques.
A paper in Science Advances puts forward a framework for quantifying the level of homophily in group interactions, and shows that simple-seeming definitions of group homophily are constrained by combinatorics in ways that are not immediately obvious.
A paper in Communications Physics shows that effective interventions to increase the visibility of minorities in networks should consider both increasing the size of the minority and changing how connections are made.
This is a brief account of the influential role physicists played in the early days of computing — a story with unexpected parallels with the current revolution in AI.
Simon Batzner, Albert Musaelian and Boris Kozinsky discuss how exploiting the symmetry of Euclidean space can help tackle challenges in molecular simulations.
