Alongside the elementary particles that make us up, there is a second and third generation of matter.

The muonium is an exotic atom containing a second-generation antiparticle.

Using an intense, cold beam of muonium, researchers aim to measure for the first time whether the Earth’s gravitational pull acts on the exotic atom in the same way as it does on ordinary matter.

A difference in the gravitational effect on normal and exotic matter could point to the existence of a further, as yet unknown fundamental force.

Scientists have found how a protein produced by bacteria disrupts the mechanism that controls flower development in plants, turning reproductive organs into leaf-like structures. These findings shed light on a plant disease that is expected to spread as climate change expands the range of its insect vectors in northern latitudes. They used synchrotron technique at the ESRF, the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France. The results are the Editor’s Pick in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Chemical reactions are often written as simple equations: starting materials go in, and a product comes out. In reality, the samesubstrates can follow many different pathways depending on their concentrations, temperature, catalysts, and other conditions.

Exploring all of these possibilities by hand is practically impossible. Now, advances in laboratory automation and chemical artificial intelligence are allowing researchers to systematically map this vast “reaction hyperspace”—and uncover chemistry that may have remained hidden even in reactions studied for more than a century.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have helped confirm that one of the strangest phenomena in physics - quantum entanglement - occurs even among some of the heaviest and most fleeting particles ever created. The discovery, made using the world’s most powerful particle collider at CERN, has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Scientists use light-driven chemistry to synthesize a valuable pharmaceutical building block and generate trifluoromethyl radicals directly from inexpensive, low-toxicity fluoroform.

Extended reality (XR) aims for "immersion," requiring displays to simultaneously deliver a wide field of view (FOV) and true 3D imagery free of vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Researchers in China have reported a near-eye light-field display architecture based on a heterogeneous metalens array. By integrating lens and spatially heterogeneous prism phase designs with nanoimprint technology, the array overcomes the aberration-induced FOV limit of conventional microlens arrays, providing a hardware path for next-generation immersive XR displays.

Irrigating U.S. crops prevents higher greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding land conversion, groundbreaking new research by Colorado State University shows.