Scientists from UMass Amherst are among the researchers worldwide honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  alongside its sister experiments ALICE, CMS and LHCb. Among the laureates are 36 scientists from the UMass Amherst research team, including 14 Ph.D. students, who produced results based on the data collected at the LHC from 2015 to 2018. The UMass Amherst team is led by physicists Stéphane Willocq, also the ATLAS spokesperson, as well as Benjamin Brau, Rafael Coelho Lopes de Sa, Carlo Dallapiccola and Verena Martinez Outschoorn.

Water molecules flip their orientation before splitting into hydrogen and oxygen. These acrobatics require significant energy, leading to the reaction’s inefficiency. Researchers quantified the precise energy costs of flipping. Efficiency is significantly affected by the water’s pH levels.

Researchers from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, City University of New York and Monell Chemical Senses Center recently reported that American pallets are likely to accept pearl millet — a hardy, gluten-free grain that has been cultivated for centuries in rugged, drought conditions in Africa and India — as an acceptable substitute in recipes that use wheat flour.

Observations of Jupiter show that ammonia is unevenly distributed in the upper atmosphere, against expectations of uniform mixing. UC Berkeley scientists found evidence for a complicated but apparently real process associated with fierce lightning storms: strong updrafts generate slushy, ice-coated hailstones of ammonia and water that eventually plunge into the planet and deplete areas of ammonia. This is part of the first 3D picture of the planet's atmosphere, which shows storms are primarily shallow.

In AIP Advances, researchers share a model that identifies the optimal location for bowling ball placement. Employing a system of six differential equations derived from Euler’s equations for a rotating rigid body, their model creates a plot that shows the best conditions for a strike. The model accounts for a variety factors, including the thin layer of oil applied to bowling lanes, the motion of the subtly asymmetric bowling ball, and a “miss-room” to allow for human inaccuracies.

Ambisonic rendering is a way to simulate the precise locations of sounds in 3D, and an ambisonics algorithm has allowed researchers to create rich virtual “soundscapes.” In JASA, researchers decided to test the limits of ambisonic sound reproduction through their “AudioDome” loudspeaker array. Humans’ spatial acuity is high in front of our faces but decreases around the sides of our head, and the researchers’ experiments obtained very similar results from listeners in the AudioDome, proving that the loudspeaker array can reproduce sound locations at a spatial scale beyond the human limits of perception.

A recent study has revealed the intricate dynamics of submesoscale eddies (SEs) in the South China Sea, harnessing cutting-edge satellite technology to uncover their critical role in oceanic processes.