Classical clocks have to obey the second law of thermodynamics: the higher their precision, the more entropy they produce. For a while, it seemed like quantum clocks might beat this system, at least in theory. This is because although quantum fluctuations produce no entropy, if you can count those fluctuations as clock “ticks”, you can make a clock with nonzero precision. Now, however, a collaboration of researchers across Europe has pinned down where the entropy-precision trade-off balances out: it’s in the measurement process. As project leader Natalia Ares observes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The clock the team used to demonstrate this principle consists of a pair of quantum dots coupled by a thin tunnelling barrier. In this double quantum dot system, a “tick” occurs whenever an electron tunnels from one side of the system to the other, through both dots. Applying a bias voltage gives ticks a preferred direction.

This might not seem like the most obvious kind of clock. Indeed, as an actual timekeeping device, collaboration member Florian Meier describes it as “quite bad”. However, Ares points out that although the tunnelling process is random (stochastic), the period between ticks does have a mean and a standard deviation. Hence, given enough ticks, the number of ticks recorded will tell you something about how much time has passed.

In any case, Meier adds, they were not setting out to build the most accurate clock. Instead, they wanted to build a playground to explore basic principles of energy dissipation and clock precision, and for that, it works really well. “The really cool thing I like about what they did was that with that particular setup, you can really pinpoint the entropy dissipation of the measurement somehow in this quantum dot,” says Meier, a PhD student at the Technical University in Vienna, Austria. “I think that’s really unique in the field.”

Calculating the entropy

To measure the entropy of each quantum tick, the researchers measured the voltage drop (and associated heat dissipation) for each electron tunnelling through the double quantum dot. Vivek Wadhia, a DPhil student in Ares’s lab at the University of Oxford, UK who performed many of the measurements, points out that this single unit of charge does not equate to very much entropy. However, measuring the entropy of the tunnelling electron was not the full story.

Because the ticks of the quantum clock were, in effect, continuously monitored by the environment, the coherence time for each quantum tunnelling event was very short. However, because the time on this clock could not be observed directly by humans – unlike, say, the hands of a mechanical clock – the researchers needed another way to measure and record each tick.

For this, they turned to the electronics they were using in the lab and compared the power in versus the power out on a macroscopic scale. “That’s the cost of our measurement, right?” says Wadhia, adding that this cost includes both the measuring and recording of each tick. He stresses that they were not trying to find the most thermodynamically efficient measurement technique: “The idea was to understand how the readout compares to the clockwork.”

This classical entropy associated with measuring and recording each tick turns out to be nine orders of magnitude larger than the quantum entropy of a tick – more than enough for the system to operate as a clock with some level of precision. “The interesting thing is that such simple systems sometimes reveal how you can maybe improve precision at a very low cost thermodynamically,” Meier says.

As a next step, Ares plans to explore different arrangements of quantum dots, using Meier’s previous theoretical work to improve the clock’s precision. “We know that, for example, clocks in nature are not that energy intensive,” Ares tells Physics World. “So clearly, for biology, it is possible to run a lot of processes with stochastic clocks.”

The research is reported in Physical Review Letters.

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Rocket Lab has delayed the first launch of its reusable Neutron rocket to 2026, saying it wants to maximize the chances that the flight will be a success.

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China is continuing assessments for the return of the Shenzhou-20 crew after a suspected debris impact, with no new timeline yet announced.

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When you look back at the early days of computing, some familiar names pop up, including John von Neumann, Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman. But they were not lonely pioneers – they were part of a much larger group, using mechanical and then electronic computers to do calculations that had never been possible before.

These people, many of whom were women, were the first scientific programmers and computational scientists. Skilled in the complicated operation of early computing devices, they often had degrees in maths or science, and were an integral part of research efforts. And yet, their fundamental contributions are mostly forgotten.

This was in part because of their gender – it was an age when sexism was rife, and it was standard for women to be fired from their job after getting married. However, there is another important factor that is often overlooked, even in today’s scientific community – people in technical roles are often underappreciated and underacknowledged, even though they are the ones who make research possible.

Human and mechanical computers

Originally, a “computer” was a human being who did calculations by hand or with the help of a mechanical calculator. It is thought that the world’s first computational lab was set up in 1937 at Columbia University. But it wasn’t until the Second World War that the demand for computation really exploded; with the need for artillery calculations, new technologies and code breaking.

In the US, the development of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project (established in 1943) required huge computational efforts, so it wasn’t long before the New Mexico site had a hand-computing group. Called the T-5 group of the Theoretical Division, it initially consisted of about 20 people. Most were women, including the spouses of other scientific staff. Among them was Mary Frankel, a mathematician married to physicist Stan Frankel; mathematician Augusta “Mici” Teller who was married to Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb”; and Jean Bacher, the wife of physicist Robert Bacher.

As the war continued, the T-5 group expanded to include civilian recruits from the nearby towns and members of the Women’s Army Corps. Its staff worked around the clock, using printed mathematical tables and desk calculators in four-hour shifts – but that was not enough to keep up with the computational needs for bomb development. In the early spring of 1944, IBM punch-card machines were brought in to supplement the human power. They became so effective that the machines were soon being used for all large calculations, 24 hours a day, in three shifts.

The computational group continued to grow, and among the new recruits were Naomi Livesay and Eleonor Ewing. Livesay held an advanced degree in mathematics and had done a course in operating and programming IBM electric calculating machines, making her an ideal candidate for the T-5 division. She in turn recruited Ewing, a fellow mathematician who was a former colleague. The two young women supervised the running of the IBM machines around the clock.

The frantic pace of the T-5 group continued until the end of the war in September 1945. The development of the atomic bomb required an immense computational effort, which was made possible through hand and punch-card calculations.

Electronic computers

Shortly after the war ended, the first fully electronic, general-purpose computer – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) – became operational at the University of Pennsylvania, following two years of development. The project had been led by physicist John Mauchly and electrical engineer J Presper Eckert. The machine was operated and coded by six women – mathematicians Betty Jean Jennings (later Bartik); Kathleen, or Kay, McNulty (later Mauchly, then Antonelli); Frances Bilas (Spence); Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer) and Ruth Lichterman (Teitelbaum); as well as Betty Snyder (Holberton) who had studied journalism.

Polymath John von Neumann also got involved when looking for more computing power for projects at the new Los Alamos Laboratory, established in New Mexico in 1947. In fact, although originally designed to solve ballistic trajectory problems, the first problem to be run on the ENIAC was “the Los Alamos problem” – a thermonuclear feasibility calculation for Teller’s group studying the H-bomb.

Like in the Manhattan Project, several husband-and-wife teams worked on the ENIAC, the most famous being von Neumann and his wife Klara Dán, and mathematicians Adele and Herman Goldstine. Dán von Neumann in particular worked closely with Nicholas Metropolis, who alongside mathematician Stanislaw Ulam had coined the term Monte Carlo to describe numerical methods based on random sampling. Indeed, between 1948 and 1949 Dán von Neumann and Metropolis ran the first series of Monte Carlo simulations on an electronic computer.

Work began on a new machine at Los Alamos in 1948 – the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer (MANIAC) – which ran its first large-scale hydrodynamic calculation in March 1952. Many of its users were physicists, and its operators and coders included mathematicians Mary Tsingou (later Tsingou-Menzel), Marjorie Jones (Devaney) and Elaine Felix (Alei); plus Verna Ellingson (later Gardiner) and Lois Cook (Leurgans).

Early algorithms

The Los Alamos scientists tried all sorts of problems on the MANIAC, including a chess-playing program – the first documented case of a machine defeating a human at the game. However, two of these projects stand out because they had profound implications on computational science.

In 1953 the Tellers, together with Metropolis and physicists Arianna and Marshall Rosenbluth, published the seminal article “Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines” (J. Chem. Phys. 21 1087). The work introduced the ideas behind the “Metropolis (later renamed Metropolis–Hastings) algorithm”, which is a Monte Carlo method that is based on the concept of “importance sampling”. (While Metropolis was involved in the development of Monte Carlo methods, it appears that he did not contribute directly to the article, but provided access to the MANIAC nightshift.) This is the progenitor of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, which are widely used today throughout science and engineering.

Marshall later recalled how the research came about when he and Arianna had proposed using the MANIAC to study how solids melt (AIP Conf. Proc. 690 22).

Edward Teller meanwhile had the idea of using statistical mechanics and taking ensemble averages instead of following detailed kinematics for each individual disk, and Mici helped with programming during the initial stages. However, the Rosenbluths did most of the work, with Arianna translating and programming the concepts into an algorithm.

The 1953 article is remarkable, not only because it led to the Metropolis algorithm, but also as one of the earliest examples of using a digital computer to simulate a physical system. The main innovation of this work was in developing “importance sampling”. Instead of sampling from random configurations, it samples with a bias toward physically important configurations which contribute more towards the integral.

Furthermore, the article also introduced another computational trick, known as “periodic boundary conditions” (PBCs): a set of conditions which are often used to approximate an infinitely large system by using a small part known as a “unit cell”. Both importance sampling and PBCs went on to become workhorse methods in computational physics.

In the summer of 1953, physicist Enrico Fermi, Ulam, Tsingou and physicist John Pasta also made a significant breakthrough using the MANIAC. They ran a “numerical experiment” as part of a series meant to illustrate possible uses of electronic computers in studying various physical phenomena.

The team modelled a 1D chain of oscillators with a small nonlinearity to see if it would behave as hypothesized, reaching an equilibrium with the energy redistributed equally across the modes (doi.org/10.2172/4376203). However, their work showed that this was not guaranteed for small perturbations – a non-trivial and non-intuitive observation that would not have been apparent without the simulations. It is the first example of a physics discovery made not by theoretical or experimental means, but through a computational approach. It would later lead to the discovery of solitons and integrable models, the development of chaos theory, and a deeper understanding of ergodic limits.

Although the paper says the work was done by all four scientists, Tsingou’s role was forgotten, and the results became known as the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem. It was not until 2008, when French physicist Thierry Dauxois advocated for giving her credit in a Physics Today article, that Tsingou’s contribution was properly acknowledged. Today the finding is called the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem.

The year 1953 also saw IBM’s first commercial, fully electronic computer – an IBM 701 – arrive at Los Alamos. Soon the theoretical division had two of these machines, which, alongside the MANIAC, gave the scientists unprecedented computing power. Among those to take advantage of the new devices were Martha Evans (whom very little is known about) and theoretical physicist Francis Harlow, who began to tackle the largely unexplored subject of computational fluid dynamics.

The idea was to use a mesh of cells through which the fluid, represented as particles, would move. This computational method made it possible to solve complex hydrodynamics problems (involving large distortions and compressions of the fluid) in 2D and 3D. Indeed, the method proved so effective that it became a standard tool in plasma physics where it has been applied to every conceivable topic from astrophysical plasmas to fusion energy.

The resulting internal Los Alamos report – The Particle-in-cell Method for Hydrodynamic Calculations, published in 1955 – showed Evans as first author and acknowledged eight people (including Evans) for the machine calculations. However, while Harlow is remembered as one of the pioneers of computational fluid dynamics, Evans was forgotten.

A clear-cut division of labour?

In an age where women had very limited access to the frontlines of research, the computational war effort brought many female researchers and technical staff in. As their contributions come more into the light, it becomes clearer that their role was not a simple clerical one.

There is a view that the coders’ work was “the vital link between the physicist’s concepts (about which the coders more often than not didn’t have a clue) and their translation into a set of instructions that the computer was able to perform, in a language about which, more often than not, the physicists didn’t have a clue either”, as physicists Giovanni Battimelli and Giovanni Ciccotti wrote in 2018 (Eur. Phys. J. H 43 303). But the examples we have seen show that some of the coders had a solid grasp of the physics, and some of the physicists had a good understanding of the machine operation. Rather than a skilled–non-skilled/men–women separation, the division of labour was blurred. Indeed, it was more of an effective collaboration between physicists, mathematicians and engineers.

Even in the early days of the T-5 division before electronic computers existed, Livesay and Ewing, for example, attended maths lectures from von Neumann, and introduced him to punch-card operations. As has been documented in books including Their Day in the Sun by Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, they also took part in the weekly colloquia held by J Robert Oppenheimer and other project leaders. This shows they should not be dismissed as mere human calculators and machine operators who supposedly “didn’t have a clue” about physics.

Verna Ellingson (Gardiner) is another forgotten coder who worked at Los Alamos. While little information about her can be found, she appears as the last author on a 1955 paper (Science 122 465) written with Metropolis and physicist Joseph Hoffman – “Study of tumor cell populations by Monte Carlo methods”. The next year she was first author of “On certain sequences of integers defined by sieves” with mathematical physicist Roger Lazarus, Metropolis and Ulam (Mathematics Magazine 29 117). She also worked with physicist George Gamow on attempts to discover the code for DNA selection of amino acids, which just shows the breadth of projects she was involved in.

Evans not only worked with Harlow but took part in a 1959 conference on self-organizing systems, where she queried AI pioneer Frank Rosenblatt on his ideas about human and machine learning. Her attendance at such a meeting, in an age when women were not common attendees, implies we should not view her as “just a coder”.

With their many and wide-ranging contributions, it is more than likely that Evans, Gardiner, Tsingou and many others were full-fledged researchers, and were perhaps even the first computational scientists. “These women were doing work that modern computational physicists in the [Los Alamos] lab’s XCP [Weapons Computational Physics] Division do,” says Nicholas Lewis, a historian at Los Alamos. “They needed a deep understanding of both the physics being studied, and of how to map the problem to the particular architecture of the machine being used.”

Overlooked then, overlooked now

Credited or not, these pioneering women and their contributions have been mostly forgotten, and only in recent decades have their roles come to light again. But why were they obscured by history in the first place?

Secrecy and sexism seem to be the main factors at play. For example, Livesay was not allowed to pursue a PhD in mathematics because she was a woman, and in the cases of the many married couples, the team contributions were attributed exclusively to the husband. The existence of the Manhattan Project was publicly announced in 1945, but documents that contain certain nuclear-weapons-related information remain classified today. Because these are likely to remain secret, we will never know the full extent of these pioneers’ contributions.

But another often overlooked reason is the widespread underappreciation of the key role of computational scientists and research software engineers, a term that was only coined just over a decade ago. Even today, these non-traditional research roles end up being undervalued. A 2022 survey by the UK Software Sustainability Institute, for example, showed that only 59% of research software engineers were named as authors, with barely a quarter (24%) mentioned in the acknowledgements or main text, while a sixth (16%) were not mentioned at all.

The separation between those who understand the physics and those who write the code, understand and operate the hardware goes back to the early days of computing (see box above), but it wasn’t entirely accurate even then. People who implement complex scientific computations are not just coders or skilled operators of supercomputers, but truly multidisciplinary scientists who have a deep understanding of the scientific problems, mathematics, computational methods and hardware.

Such people – whatever their gender – play a key role in advancing science and yet remain the unsung heroes of the discoveries their work enables. Perhaps what this story of the forgotten pioneers of computational physics tells us is that some views rooted in the 1950s are still influencing us today. It’s high time we moved on.

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Gravity might be able to quantum-entangle particles even if the gravitational field itself is classical. That is the conclusion of a new study by Joseph Aziz and Richard Howl at Royal Holloway University of London. This challenges a popular view that such entanglement would necessarily imply that gravity must be quantized. This could be important in the ongoing attempt to develop a theory of quantum gravity that unites quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“When you try to quantize the gravitational interaction in exactly the same way we tried to mathematically quantize the other forces, you end up with mathematically inconsistent results – you end up with infinities in your calculations that you can’t do anything about,” Howl tells Physics World.

“With the other interactions, we quantized them assuming they live within an independent background of classical space and time,” Howl explains. “But with quantum gravity, arguably you cannot do this [because] gravity describes space−time itself rather than something within space−time.”

Quantum entanglement occurs when two particles share linked quantum states even when separated. While it has become a powerful probe of the gravitational field, the central question is whether gravity can mediate entanglement only if it is itself quantum in nature.

General treatment

“It has generally been considered that the gravitational interaction can only entangle matter if the gravitational field is quantum,” Howl says. “We have argued that you could treat the gravitational interaction as more general than just the mediation of the gravitational field such that even if the field is classical, you could in principle entangle matter.”

Quantum field theory postulates that entanglement between masses arises through the exchange of virtual gravitons. These are hypothetical, transient quantum excitations of the gravitational field. Aziz and Howl propose that even if the field remains classical, virtual-matter processes can still generate entanglement indirectly. These processes, he says, “will persist even when the gravitational field is considered classical and could in principle allow for entanglement”.

The idea of probing the quantum nature of gravity through entanglement goes back to a suggestion by Richard Feynman in the 1950s. He envisioned placing a tiny mass in a superposition of two locations and checking whether its gravitational field was also superposed. Though elegant, the idea seemed untestable at the time.

Recent proposals − most notably by teams led by Sougato Bose and by Chiara Marletto and Vlatko Vedral – revived Feynman’s insight in a more practical form.

Feasible tests

“Recently, two proposals showed that one way you could test that the field is in a superposition (and thus quantum) is by putting two masses in a quantum superposition of two locations and seeing if they become entangled through the gravitational interaction,” says Howl. “This also seemed to be much more feasible than Feynman’s original idea.” Such experiments might use levitated diamonds, metallic spheres, or cold atoms – systems where both position and gravitational effects can be precisely controlled.

Aziz and Howl’s work, however, considers whether such entanglement could arise even if gravity is not quantum. They find that certain classical-gravity processes can in principle entangle particles, though the predicted effects are extremely small.

“These classical-gravity entangling effects are likely to be very small in near-future experiments,” Howl says. “This though is actually a good thing: it means that if we see entanglement…we can be confident that this means that gravity is quantized.”

The paper has drawn a strong response from some leading figures in the field, including Marletto at the University of Oxford, who co-developed the original idea of using gravitationally induced entanglement as a test of quantum gravity.

“The phenomenon of gravitationally induced entanglement … is a game changer in the search for quantum gravity, as it provides a way to detect quantum effects in the gravitational field indirectly, with laboratory-scale equipment,” she says. Detecting it would, she adds, “constitute the first experimental confirmation that gravity is quantum, and the first experimental refutation of Einstein’s relativity as an adequate theory of gravity”.

However, Marletto disputes Aziz and Howl’s interpretation. “No classical theory of gravity can mediate entanglement via local means, contrary to what the study purports to show,” she says. “What the study actually shows is that a classical theory with direct, non-local interactions between the quantum probes can get them entangled.” In her view, that mechanism “is not new and has been known for a long time”.

Despite the controversy, Howl and Marletto agree that experiments capable of detecting gravitationally induced entanglement would be transformative. “We see our work as strengthening the case for these proposed experiments,” Howl says. Marletto concurs that “detecting gravitationally induced entanglement will be a major milestone … and I hope and expect it will happen within the next decade.”

Howl hopes the work will encourage further discussion about quantum gravity. “It may also lead to more work on what other ways you could argue that classical gravity can lead to entanglement,” he says.

The research is described in Nature.

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Culling proceeds after Canada’s Supreme Court ends heated 11-month battle over the fate of more than 300 birds

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November 10, 2025 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Seagate Space, Michael Baker International, and Lanteris Space Systems as new Associate Members. These new members […]

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A new analysis tries to calculate the coming environmental footprint of AI in the US and finds that the ideal sites for data centers aren’t where they’re being built.

Spain’s Sateliot announced plans Nov. 10 to develop upgraded satellites from newly expanded facilities in Barcelona, aiming to move beyond connecting sensors and machines to also provide wideband voice, video and data links directly to smartphones.

The post Sateliot opens Barcelona facility to build more capable direct-to-device satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.

“Drain the swamp!”

In the intense first few months of his second US presidency, Donald Trump has been enacting his old campaign promise with a vengeance. He’s ridding all the muck from the American federal bureaucracy, he claims, and finally bringing it back under control.

Scientific projects and institutions are particular targets of his, with one recent casualty being the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). Outsiders might shrug their shoulders at a panel of scientists being axed. Panels come and go. Also, any development in Washington these days is accompanied by confusion, uncertainty, and the possibility of reversal.

But HEPAP’s dissolution is different. Set up in 1967, it’s been a valuable and long-standing advisory committee of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy (DOE). HEPAP has a distinguished track record of developing, supporting and reviewing high-energy physics programmes, setting priorities and balancing different areas. Many scientists are horrified by its axing.

The terminator

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders – presidential decrees that do not need Congressional approval, legislative review, or public debate. One order, which he signed in February, was entitled “Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”.

It sought to reduce parts of the government “that the President has determined are unnecessary”, seeking to eliminate “waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation”. While supporters see those as laudable goals, opponents believe the order is driving a stake into the heart of US science.

Hugely valuable, long-standing scientific advisory committees have been axed at key federal agencies, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Service, the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What’s more, the committees were terminated without warning or debate, eliminating load-bearing pillars of the US science infrastructure. It was, as the Columbia University sociologist Gil Eyal put it in a recent talk, the “Trump 2.0 Blitzkrieg”.

Then, on 30 September, Trump’s enablers took aim at advisory committees at the DOE Office of Science. According to the DOE’s website, a new Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC) will take over functions of the six former discretionary (non-legislatively mandated) Office of Science advisory committees.

“Any current charged responsibilities of these former committees will be transferred to the SCAC,” the website states matter-of-factly. The committee will provide “independent, consensus advice regarding complex scientific and technical issues” to the entire Office of Science. Its members will be appointed by under secretary for science Dario Gil – a political appointee.

Apart from HEPAP, others axed without warning were the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, and the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee.

Over the years, each committee served a different community and was represented by prominent research scientists who were closely in touch with other researchers. Each committee could therefore assemble the awareness of – and technical knowledge about – emerging promising initiatives and identify the less promising ones.

Many committee members only learned of the changes when they received letters or e-mails out of the blue informing them that their committee had been dissolved, that a new committee had replaced them, and that they were not on it. No explanation was given.

Closing HEPAP and the other Office of Science committees will hamper both the technical support and community input that it has relied on to promote the efficient, effective and robust growth of physics.

Physicists whom I have spoken to are appalled for two main reasons. One is that closing HEPAP and the other Office of Science committees will hamper both the technical support and community input that it has relied on to promote the efficient, effective and robust growth of physics.

“Speaking just for high-energy physics, HEPAP gave feedback on the DOE and NSF funding strategies and priorities for the high-energy physics experiments”, says Kay Kinoshita from the University of Cincinnati, a former HEPAP member. “The panel system provided a conduit for information between the agencies and the community, so the community felt heard and the agencies were (mostly) aligned with the community consensus”.

As Kinoshita continued: “There are complex questions that each panel has to deal with. even within the topical area. It’s hard to see how a broader panel is going to make better strategic decisions, ‘better’ meaning in terms of scientific advancement. In terms of community buy-in I expect it will be worse.”

Other physicists cite a second reason for alarm. The elimination of the advisory committees spreads the expertise so thinly as to increase the likelihood of political pressure on decisions. “If you have one committee you are not going to get the right kind of fine detail,” says Michael Lubell, a physicist and science-policy expert at the City College of New York, who has sat in on meetings of most of the Office of Science advisory committees.

“You’ll get opinions from people outside that area and you won’t be able to get information that you need as a policy maker to decide how the resources are to be allocated,” he adds. “A condensed-matter physicist for example, would probably have insufficient knowledge to advise DOE on particle physics. Instead, new committee members would be expected to vet programs based on ideological conformity to what the Administration wants.”

The critical point

At the end of the Second World War, the US began to construct an ambitious long-range plan to promote science that began with the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950 and developed and extended ever since. The plan aimed to incorporate both the ability of elected politicians to direct science towards social needs and the independence of scientists to explore what is possible.

US presidents have, of course, had pet scientific projects: the War on Cancer (Nixon), the Moon Shot (Kennedy), promoting renewable energy (Carter), to mention a few. But it is one thing for a president to set science to producing a socially desirable product and another to manipulate the scientific process itself.

“This is another sad day for American science,” says Lubell. “If I were a young person just embarking on a career, I would get the hell out of the country. I would not want to waste the most creative years of my life waiting for things to turn around, if they ever do. What a way to destroy a legacy!”

The end of HEPAP is not draining a swamp but creating one.

The post Is Donald Trump conducting a ‘blitzkrieg’ on science? appeared first on Physics World.

An observatory detected the first radio signal from the interstellar object 3I/Atlas. Here’s what it means.

Recent reports suggest that NASA is looking to accelerate its lunar landing timeline — partly to ensure that America returns to the moon before China does. The echoes of the 1960s Space Race are unmistakable. Once again, the focus seems to be on being first — planting a flag, capturing headlines and proving technological superiority. […]

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Washington, D.C. — November 10, 2025 — SpaceNews, the leading source of global space industry reporting and analysis, partnered with the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center to launch a new […]

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The focus of direct-to-device (D2D) services so far has been mainly on extending the coverage of terrestrial cellular networks for cell phones and remote IoT devices. Although this presents a great business opportunity for both D2D satellite and terrestrial Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), the satellite industry needs to be conscious about another fast-developing opportunity in […]

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China conducted a pair launches late Sunday, adding to the national Guowang megaconstellation, but also suffering the failure of a Ceres-1 commercial solid rocket.

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