“The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same” is the title of a 34 page preprint on arXiv. Written by the mathematician Jonathan Touboul at Brandeis University in the US, the paper tries to come to grips with why people who want to stand-out from the crowd, can develop a common look. Judging from his photo on the Brandeis website, Touboul is not a hipster – but his plaid shirt does suggest a certain affinity to the look.

There is no shortage of sunshine in Jordan so it is not surprising that the Middle Eastern country is claiming to be home to world’s first large accelerator to be fully powered by renewable energy. That accelerator is the SESAME synchrotron light source, which is now supplied by a new 6.48 MW solar plant.

Flavour, colour and field are seemingly normal words that would be familiar to most, if not all, English speakers. But these and other common words such as wimp and trigger have very different meanings to physicists, as Lauren Biron explains in Symmetry.

Is Jackson Oswalt the youngest person to achieve fusion? The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a hobbyist group, says that the Tennessee native fused deuterium nuclei in the playroom of his parents’ house in 2018 – when he was 12. The Guardian has the full story.