In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

Deeply immersive and fully interactive, Holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language; the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the Holodeck.

Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a process called “Sim2...

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic.

New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate.

“When doing background reading, I was struck by how special this system seemed,” says Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile and lead author of the study, “A magnetic massive star has experienced a stellar merger,” published in Science.

The system, HD 148937, is located about 3800 light-year...

Physicists have observed a novel quantum effect termed “hybrid topology” in a crystalline material. This finding opens up a new range of possibilities for development of efficient materials and technologies for next-generation quantum science and engineering.

The finding, published in Nature, came when Princeton scientists discovered that an elemental solid crystal made of arsenic (As) atoms hosts a never-before-ob...

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 slotted in the final missing piece of the Standard Model puzzle. Yet, it left lingering questions. What lies beyond this framework? Where are the new phenomena that would solve the universe’s remaining mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter and the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry?

One parameter that may hold clues about new physics phenomena is the “width” of the W boson, the electrically charged carrier of the weak force. A particle’s width is directly related to its lifetime and describes how it decays to other particles. If the W boson decays in unexpected ways, such as into yet-to-be-discovered new particles, these will influence the measured width.

As the Standard Model precisely predicts its value based on the strength o...