January 2023

Tractor beams have long been a staple of sci-fi, but you might not know that they’ve also existed in the real world for some time, albeit at a very small scale. Microscopic tractor beams, better known as optical tweezers, can pull atoms and nanoparticles for use in medicine and research. But we’ve never actually been

Why satisfy yourself with one course when you can have a double helping? The US space agency Nasa has issued a second image of the famous “Pillars of Creation” taken by the new super space telescope, James Webb. This week we get a rendering of the active star-forming region as seen by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument

Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has huge reserves of sea water under its surface, according to multiple new peer-reviewed studies published in the journal Nature. Yes, an ocean world. In other words, Ceres has all the ingredients necessary for life. Using high-definition photographs from NASA’s Dawn mission, a

We have an unquenchable energy need. When we need to run anything that cannot be plugged in, electricity will have to come from a battery, and the quest for a better battery is being launched in laboratories around the globe. Hold that thought for a moment. Nuclear waste is radioactive waste generated by nuclear power

A new kind of quantum magnet is made up of atoms only a billionth of a degree warmer than absolute zero – and physicists aren’t certain how it behaves. A regular magnet strongly repels or attracts magnetic objects depending on whether electrons inside it are in an “up” or a “down” quantum spin state, a