Science X Dialog

Many fascinating phases in quantum materials emerge when electrons, atoms and other microscopic components begin to act collectively. But these phases do not necessarily appear out of nowhere when a material crosses a transition ...

Pokémon, sports and other physical trading and collectible cards have been around for decades but have surged in popularity since COVID. These cards are usually obtained through gambling-like packs containing random cards. ...

My ancestral languages, Boarisch (Bavarian) and Schwäbisch (Swabian), are routinely described as German dialects. That might sound like a technical linguistic distinction. For me, a Boarisch-Schwob scholar and community member, ...

The weather over the North Atlantic affects hundreds of millions of people. From winter storms over Europe to cold spells in eastern North America, many of these impacts are shaped by large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns ...

Black holes, despite their extreme nature, are described by surprisingly few basic parameters: their mass, charge and spin. Two black holes may have formed for completely different reasons and passed through very different ...

When a prairie river carries more water in one year than another, the obvious place to look for an explanation is the sky. A year with more snow and rain should have more water in rivers. That was also how I initially thought ...

When I explain topology to students, I start with a knot in a rope. You can stretch it, twist it or shake it, but the knot stays until you cut the rope. Physicists have found that some materials and devices carry similar ...

Atmospheric circulation governs weather and climate, but it also carries angular momentum. When winds shift or mass redistributes, the atmosphere can exchange momentum with the solid Earth, slightly altering the planet's ...

On July 29, 2025, at 23:24 Universal Time, a long stretch of seafloor off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula was thrust upward. The magnitude 8.8 earthquake was the largest on Earth since the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, according ...

At the southwest tip of Sweden, the Falsterbo Peninsula stretches into the Baltic Sea, creating a natural bottleneck for hundreds of millions of birds traveling south for the winter each year. Falsterbo is particularly known ...

Slaughterhouses are places most people never want to go, and might seem like unlikely places to search for rare or endangered species. In West Africa, however, they are among the last places one can find a critically endangered ...

Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational ...