A team from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, studied the sediments that Hurricanes Fabian (2003) and Igor (2010) transported from the Bermuda carbonate platform -- a shallow-water reef refuge for marine life – and deposited to the deep ocean. They found significant effects on the deep ocean environment that lasted for weeks. Hurricane Fabian delivered as much sediment to the deep ocean in just two weeks as would normally take a full year to accumulate. These sediments -- carbonate-rich material that forms in the thriving ecosystem on reef platforms -- have major effects on the ocean environment. If they get buried in deep sediments, they can sequester carbon for millennia or more. They can also provide a buffering effect to help offset ocean acidification, a consequence of rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The scientists, from the MBL's Oceanic Flux Program, published their data in Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans.

In a new study published in Nano Letters, researchers at the University of Rochester show that precisely layering nano-thin materials creates excitons—essentially, artificial atoms—that can act as quantum information bits, or qubits.

University of Texas at Dallas scientists are investigating how structures made from several layers of graphene stack up in terms of their fundamental physics and their potential as reconfigurable semiconductors for advanced electronics.

AIP and APS are excited to award Samson Shatashvili with the 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. Shatashvili is being recognized for his clever use of various techniques in studying symmetry in quantum field theory, particularly his work with L. Faddeev on anomalies, with C. Vafa on exceptional holonomy compactifications of superstrings, and for the co-discovery of Bethe/gauge correspondence between supersymmetric vacua and quantum integrability. This annual award recognizes significant contributions within the field of mathematical physics.

MIT engineers developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple, coordinated directions. These tissues could be useful for building “biohybrid” robots powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers.