Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have become the first to experimentally observe a quirky behavior of the quantum world: a “quantum boomerang” effect that occurs when particles in a disordered system are kicked out of their locations. Instead of landing elsewhere as one might expect, they turn around and come back to where they started and stop there.

“It’s really a fundamentally quantum mechanical effect,” said atomic physicist David Weld, whose lab produced the effect and documented it in a paper published in Physical Review X. “There’s no classical explanation for this phenomenon.”

Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that the axis of rotation of a black hole in a binary system is tilted more than 40 degrees relative to the axis of stellar orbit. The finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation.

The observation by the researchers from Tuorla Observatory in Finland is the first reliable measurement that shows a large difference between the axis of rotation of a black hole and the axis of a binary system orbit. The difference between the axes measured by the researchers in a binary star system called MAXI J1820+070 was more than 40 degrees.

Often for the space systems with smaller objects orbiting around the central massive body, the own rotation axis of this body is to a high degree aligned with the rotation axis...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed and tested a system that allows commercial electronic components—such as microprocessors on circuit boards—to operate in close proximity with ultracold devices employed in quantum information processing. That design allows 4X as much data to be output for the same number of connected wires.

In the rising excitement about quantum computing, it can be easy to overlook the physical fact that the data produced by manipulation of quantum bits (qubit...