Science

Pong is a simple video gameINTERFOTO/Alamy An inanimate glob of ion-laced jelly can play the computer game Pong and even improve over time. Researchers plan further experiments to explore whether it can handle more complex computations and hope it could eventually be used to control robots. Inspired by previous research that used brain cells in a dish to play Pong, Vincent Strong and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, decided to try playing the tennis-like game with an even simpler material. They took a polymer material containing water and laced it with ions to make it responsive to electrical stimuli. When electricity is passed through the material, those ions move to the source of the current, dragging water with them and causing the gel to swell. ...

An array of sensors at the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter experiment in South DakotaMatthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility The latest hunt for dark matter has come up empty handed so far, but the upside is that physicists can now set the tightest constraints ever on the nature of this mysterious substance. New measurements from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment in South Dakota mean we are either closer than ever to finding particles of dark matter or ruling out the most popular explanation for it. Dark matter doesn’t interact much with regular matter or with light, so we can’t see it. We only know that it exists because of its gravitational effects, but those effects indicate it makes up over 80 per cent of all matter. The leading explanation for dark matter has lon...

The Climate Group has once again selected the Columbia Climate School as its university partner for this year’s Climate Week NYC. Running from Sept. 22-29, Climate Week NYC convenes key climate leaders to accelerate climate action and is the largest annual global climate event of its kind. “We are honored once again to be the education partner for Climate Week NYC and the Climate Group,” said Columbia Climate School interim dean Jeffrey Shaman. “The theme of this year’s conference, “It’s Time,” underscores the urgent need to tackle climate change and decarbonize our economies. We are proud to provide our expertise and host events to help raise awareness for critical topics like climate justice, food insecurity and water resilience.” Now in its 16th year, Climate Week NYC brings ...

A robot that peels vegetables in the same way that people do demonstrates a level of dexterity that could help move delicate objects along a manufacturing line. Prototype robots are often tasked with peeling vegetables to test their ability to carefully handle awkward objects. But these challenges are usually simplified, such as the vegetable being fixed in place, or only testing single fruits or vegetables, like peeling a banana. Now, Pulkit Agrawal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed a robotic system that can rotate different types of fruit and vegetable using its fingers on one hand, while the other arm is made to peel. “These additional steps of doing rotation are something which is very straightforward to...

This story is part of our Cosmic Perspective special, in which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Read the rest of the series here. We tend to think of space-time as the underlying structure of the universe. But whether it really is fundamental or emerges from something deeper is a question that keeps physicists up at night. “It’s not just a philosophical question that you discuss over a beer,” says Marika Taylor at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “It is actually something that comes into the calculations that people do.” The best place to start is quantum mechanics, which describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. Famously counterintuitive, one of the theory’s core tenets is that connections between particles can trans...