The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed—something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years—has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.

The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang had remained one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so early.

The team of experts led by Dr. Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth have found that the first quasars naturally formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare reservoirs of gas in the early universe.

Dr...

Biologists have used population genomics to shed light on the evolution and consequences of a selfish genetic element known as Segregation Distorter (SD). The researchers report that SD has caused dramatic changes in chromosome organization and genetic diversity.

The human genome is littered with “selfish genetic elements,” which do not seem to benefit their hosts, but instead seek only to propagate themselves...

Breakthrough could point the way towards new quantum technology. University of Chicago physicists have invented a “quantum flute” that, like the Pied Piper, can coerce particles of light to move together in a way that’s never been seen before.

Described in two studies published in Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics, the breakthrough could point the way towards realizing quantum memories or new forms of error correction in quantum computers, and observing quantum phenomena that cannot be seen in n...

Analysis offers new means to predict ‘cosmological signatures’ for models of dark matter. A team of physicists has developed a method for predicting the composition of dark matter – invisible matter detected only by its gravitational pull on ordinary matter and whose discovery has been long sought by scientists.

Its work, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters, centers on predicting “cosmological signatures” for models of dark matter with a mass between that of the electron and the proton...