Universe’s coldest fermions open portal to high-symmetry quantum realm. Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.

“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a studypublished today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”

A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billiont...

Astronomers using the VLBA have produced a full, 3-D view of a binary star system with a planet orbiting one of the stars. Their achievement promises important new insights into the process of planet formation.

By precisely tracing a small, almost imperceptible, wobble in a nearby star’s motion through space, astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting that star, which is one of a binary pair. Their work, using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), produced the first-ever determination of the complete, 3-dimensional structure of the orbits of a binary pair of stars and a planet orbiting one of them...

A newly identified link between chronic pain and lung cancer in mice offers hope for pain management. A new study points to possible new treatments for chronic pain with a surprising link to lung cancer. Findings of the research, conducted in laboratory mouse models, open up multiple therapeutic opportunities that could allow the world to improve chronic pain management and eclipse the opioid epidemic.

Pain is an important alarm system that alerts us to tissue damage and prompts us to withdraw from harmful situations...

Technische Universität Ilmenau (Germany) is using artificial intelligence to improve the detection and classification of unidentified phenomena in the night sky. The research team of the group for data-intensive systems and visualization collaborated with the American Meteor Society, which initiated the AllSky7, an international network of scientists and amateur astronomers that permanently observes the night sky with specially designed cameras and classifies and assigns all events...