Detecting whale motion Graphic showing a distributed acoustic sensing system that uses fibre-optic cables to help researchers detect ships and whales in the waters near Svalbard. (Courtesy: Léa Bouffaut)
A technique currently used to track whale vocalizations could be adapted to pick up the hydrodynamic pressure fields created as they swim, researchers in Norway have demonstrated. Through analysis of backscattered light in an undersea optical fibre, Robin Rørstadbotnen and Martin Landrø at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) showed how silent whales can be detected as they swim close to the fibre. The duo hopes the discovery could ultimately provide a valuable new tool for whale conservation.
With the combined disruption of climate change and human activity, whales are rapidly being forced into new habitats and migration patterns. To understand these profound shifts in behaviour, conservationists widely rely on a technique named distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which detects acoustic waves via the strain they induce on optical fibres.
When coherent laser pulses are passed through a fibre, a small portion of laser light is inevitably scattered back to the source by small fluctuations in the fibre’s structure and density. If the fibre is strained by an acoustic wave, the oscillating pressure field imprints a phase shift on this backscattered light, which varies in proportion to the degree of strain.
So far, this approach has been used to pick up whale vocalizations: the loudest sounds produced by any animal, which can travel for thousands of kilometres through the ocean. By analysing backscattered light across the global network of undersea optical fibres, researchers have gathered valuable information about how the habitats and migration paths of these marine mammals are changing.
“At NTNU, we started activity within distributed acoustic sensing in 2016,” Rørstadbotnen describes. “When the Center for Geophysical Forecasting was launched in 2021, this technology became a key field of interest.”
Despite the value of data that can be gathered through whale vocalizations, the approach leaves conservationists with a significant blind spot for the majority of the time when whales are silent. To address this limitation, Rørstadbotnen and Landrø considered how DAS could be adapted to pick up the hydrodynamic pressure and velocity fields constantly being created by the whales moving through the water, which generates ultralow-frequency signals similar to those created by the movement of ships.
To test this idea, the duo revisited scattering data gathered from a seabed optical fibre off the coast of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic. After filtering the data for a selected band of frequencies, they carried out frequency–wavenumber analysis to determine how rapidly the signals varied along the length of the fibre. Just as they hoped, “we found that this new approach could be applied to detect silent whales, given that they are swimming close to the fibre optic cable,” Rørstadbotnen says.
Through this analysis, the researchers were able to identify ships crossing the fibre from depths of up to 413 m, and at a maximum distance of 550 m from the fibre. They also managed to determine the vessel speeds and roughly estimate their sizes. Crucially, they were also able to distinguish the speeds and approximate sizes of silent whales swimming less than 40 m away from the fibre, as well as estimating their depths.
“Since we also recorded the acoustic signals in the frequency range from 5 to 100 Hz, we could identify whales when they were vocalizing closer to the sea surface,” Rørstadbotnen describes. “Thereby, we could use this information as a strong indication that the low-frequency signal observed a bit later in time was most likely generated by the whale moving closer to the fibre.”
Having demonstrated this possibility, Rørstadbotnen and Landrø now hope that their technique could provide researchers with a new tool for tracking whales around the world, even when they aren’t vocalizing. “In addition, this method can potentially detect toothed whales that vocalize in the high-frequency band outside what is normally recorded for distributed acoustic sensing,” Rørstadbotnen adds.
Beyond its potential for whale conservation, the duo is also hopeful that the technique could help researchers build up a more extensive picture of marine mammals more generally, along with other vital elements of fast-changing marine ecosystems.
Electricity grids need to be carefully balanced, with too low levels of electricity leading to blackouts and too high levels causing damage to grids. Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, it is possible for specific regions (e.g. the north of Germany) to have an excess of electricity, while the power lines do not have enough capacity to transport it to higher demand regions such as cities and industrial areas. This is known as a grid bottleneck. To keep the grid running properly, operators redispatch electricity by reducing renewable feed-in in oversupplied areas and increasing generation elsewhere. However, this leads to renewable energy being wasted, and because producers are still compensated and generation increase on demand is costly, it is financially inefficient.
In 2024, Germany created regional redispatch markets so that renewable electricity that would otherwise be curtailed can instead be sold locally. This is particularly useful for hydrogen producers because they do not require a continuous supply of electricity. Because they can operate flexibly, turning on and off depending on electricity availability, they can take advantage of very low-priced electricity. In this work, the researchers ask whether using this electricity source makes producing green hydrogen cheaper and how market prices for otherwise curtailed renewable electricity affect this.
They found that using only redispatch electricity is not cost-effective because of its unreliability. However, combining it with different renewable energy sources does reduce costs. Depending on hydrogen storage costs, using redispatch electricity can reduce hydrogen production costs by €0.9 – €1.96 per kg, if the redispatch electricity is available for 0 €/MWh, compared to typical costs of around €6-8 per kg without redispatch electricity.
Increased redispatch prices reduce the potential for production cost reductions, which, combined with the unreliability of redispatch availability, lowers the incentive for
system beneficial electrolyser siting within the regional market areas. Therefore, the success of these markets depends heavily on keeping prices low, which might necessitate effective price capping but could increase green hydrogen competitiveness and simultaneously decrease renewable energy curtailment.
Quantum computers promise to simulate physical systems far beyond the reach of classical machines. But even quantum algorithms face fundamental limits: no fast-forwarding theorems. These say that if you want to simulate a system for longer, the computational effort increases at least in proportion.
In many real algorithms, the situation is even worse than the ideal case. This is because the requirements of accuracy and runtime compound one another, so that running longer and running precisely become entangled and costly together.
In their new study, a team of researchers from Beijing and Hong Kong showed that this link between time and cost is not as rigid as it seems, at least for a broad class of realistic systems that interact with their surroundings. These so‑called open quantum systems are described by Lindbladian dynamics, which include both ordinary evolution and the effects of noise or dissipation.
In earlier approaches, improving the accuracy of a simulation made long-time calculations much more demanding, because the two effects multiplied together. The new method separates these contributions, so that the cost of simulating longer times does not automatically amplify the cost of achieving accuracy. In practical terms, this means that extending a simulation in time becomes far more manageable than before.
An even more surprising result appears when the dissipative processes in the system have a particular structure common in quantum physics. In these cases, the number of sequential computational steps needed grows only very slowly as the simulated time increases. Instead of needing proportionally more effort to simulate longer dynamics, the algorithm can effectively skip ahead, compressing what would normally be a long sequence of steps into a much shorter one. This fast‑forwarding is a dramatic departure from the usual expectation that longer simulations must always take longer to run.
The team also demonstrated how these ideas can be applied to studying thermal properties of quantum systems. These are essential for understanding matter at finite temperature. Such calculations are especially challenging at low temperatures, where lots of interesting physics often occurs. By exploiting their more favourable scaling, the new approach can extract certain thermal properties more efficiently, making it easier to probe regimes that are typically hard to access.
Beyond the specific application of this advance itself, the work highlights an important shift in perspective. Rather than focusing only on the worst‑case limits imposed by general theorems, it shows that carefully chosen physical structure can loosen those limits. Only time will tell what the implications for quantum simulation and computation will be in the future.
Top quarks are the heaviest known elementary particles. They are produced in pairs with their antiparticle equivalent, the antitop quark. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smash protons together at extremely high energies in the hope of producing these top-quark pairs. The minimum energy required to create a pair is known as the production threshold (approximately twice the top mass). Near this threshold, the particles move relatively slowly and, because of the strong nuclear force, they may briefly interact strongly enough to form a quasi-bound state before each top quark decays individually.
In this work, researchers used a huge dataset collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Top quark pairs decay far too quickly to be observed directly, so the ATLAS team instead studied their decay products. A top quark usually decays into a W boson and a b-quark, while the antitop quark decays into the corresponding antiparticles. The W bosons then decay further, either through leptonic decay (producing an electron, muon or tau plus a neutrino) or through hadronic decay, which produces jets of particles.
The ATLAS analysis focuses on the case where both W bosons decay leptonically into electrons and muons and reconstructs the invariant mass of the system using the energy and momentum of the decay products.
If non-relativistic QCD effects are included, the event rate near threshold is expected to be higher than that predicted by standard perturbative QCD alone, due to contributions such as the formation of quasi-bound states that are not accounted for in the perturbative framework. The analysis also employs spin-correlation observables to enhance the sensitivity to the unique spin structure of the phenomena. If non-relativitic QCD effects occur near the production threshold, including the formation of quasi-bound states, physicists expect to see an excess of events concentrated at masses close to the minimum energy needed to produce the pair.
The researchers observed significantly more events near the production threshold (∼345 GeV) than standard QCD calculations predicted, confirming a previous similar measurement by the CMS collaboration. The excess matches predictions from non-relativistic QCD that the top and antitop quarks briefly perform non-relativistic QCD interaction, including the formation of quasi-bound states, before separating and decaying. This is important because it provides strong evidence for a subtle quantum effect of the strong force and improves our understanding of top-quark behaviour in an extreme regime. This measurement underscores the capacity of LHC experiments at the precision frontier, reinforcing the vital interplay between theory and experiment in these precision studies.
“This is a very exciting finding that pushes our current understanding of top quark physics and its modelling to the extreme. It has only been made possible by recent efforts to connect quantum information theory and collider physics.” – Yoav Afik, an ATLAS physicist affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago
“With the newly collected Run 3 dataset, which is more than twice as large as the Run 2 dataset used in this first analysis, we will be able to scrutinize this excess in much greater detail and determine whether it can be described solely by non-relativistic QCD effects, or whether there is something more to it.” – Baptiste Ravina, a Senior Research Fellow at CERN
A major astronomy facility in the Andes has begun a 10-year survey of the Southern sky with the aim of creating the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe ever made.
Based in Cerro Pachón in the Andes, the Vera C Rubin Observatory is named in honour of the US astronomer and dark-matter pioneer Vera Rubin.
The observatory is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy along with international partners including France and the UK.
Last year the observatory released its first images, featuring millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids in exquisite detail. This was then followed by further commissioning work as well as an “operational readiness” review.
Now that is complete, the LSST has today begun its 10-year mission. It will now take a ultrawide, ultrahigh-definition picture of the southern night sky every 3–4 nights, replicating the process over a decade to produce almost 1000 full images of sky.
This will be used to plot the positions and measure the brightness of objects in the sky to help improve our understanding of dark matter and dark energy.
The survey will examine 20 billion galaxies as well as produce the most detailed star map of the Milky Way, imaging 17 billion stars and cataloguing some six million small objects within our solar system including asteroids.
When the LSST survey is complete, the final dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements, all accessible through regular data releases.
“It is amazing and humbling as we start the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, after more than two decades of incredible work by our dedicated team,” says Vera C Rubin Observatory director Bob Blum. “Rubin Observatory is for everyone; the LSST will change how we do astronomy and astrophysics, allowing researchers anywhere to participate in cutting-edge science.”
Officials at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva have turned off the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the last time. Over the coming four years, the accelerator complex will be upgraded to prepare for the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC) that is set to start operations in 2030.
Taking decades to plan and construct, the LHC began circulating its first proton beams in September 2008 garnering attention from the world’s media. Yet days later the accelerator suffered an electrical fault that delayed first proton collisions for a year.
In the past decade, the LHC has also discovered more than 85 hadrons, put limits on the discovery of new particles, examined the imbalance between matter and antimatter and explored the nature of the quark–gluon plasma.
A new adventure
The LHC will now make way for HiLumi LHC that will increase the collider’s luminosity by a factor of up to ten. This will enable precision studies of the Higgs boson and enhance the potential to uncover phenomena beyond the Standard Model.
The shutdown will involve upgrading about 1.2 km of the 27 km ring by including 11-12 T superconducting magnets and superconducting “crab” cavities — that reduce the angle at which the bunches cross — to increase the number of collisions at the two detectors.
The ATLAS and CMS detectors will also be upgraded to cope with between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every “bunch crossing”, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run.
German accelerator physicist Oliver Brüning, who is director for accelerators and technology at CERN, says that the LHC has “exceeded every expectation”.
“For nearly two decades, it has transformed our understanding of the universe and inspired generations of scientists, engineers and citizens around the world,” adds Brüning. “We say goodbye to the LHC as we have known it, while preparing to welcome its successor: the HiLumi LHC, which will extend this scientific adventure far into the future.”
“Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal,” observes Ryland Grace, the main protagonist of Project Hail Mary, as he floats alone in interstellar space, millions of miles from Earth. And yet there is nothing ordinary about the spectacular film released earlier this year, based on Andy Weir’s bestselling 2021 novel of the same name.
With its sweeping plot that spans civilizations and light-years, at its heart, Project Hail Mary is a humorous and uplifting story routed in friendship, survival and what it means to be “human”. It also shines a bright light on international co-operation and scientific problem-solving under great pressure, as the human race is forced to come together in a time of dire need.
Starring Ryan Gosling (who also produced the film), the tale follows Grace, a middle-school science teacher turned extremely unwilling astronaut – “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut! I’ve never done a space walk, I can’t even moonwalk!” Strongarmed into becoming our interstellar saviour, Grace has the self-deprecating charm coupled with enough scientific acumen to make him a lead character that audiences can happily root for.
Art meets reality NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with the people behind Project Hail Mary, including Ryan Gosling and Andy Weir, and the audience during a panel about the movie at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Courtesy: NASA)
The film is a visual masterpiece, with sequences that visualize the beauty and terror of space, often viewed from Grace’s disorienting and lonely perspective; alongside scenes on an increasingly more frantic Earth in a bid for survival and sunshine. It is directed and produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), who are both well known for their funny and fast-paced movie style. If you expected a certain level of inventive energy in their adaption of this story you will not be disappointed, as Project Hail Mary is expansive in every aspect. New cinematic techniques were combined with the centuries old artform of puppetry to simulate the disorienting reality of long-term zero gravity and the unique physiology of alien life for gigantic IMAX screens.
A dual timeline narrative
Project Hail Mary opens with a familiar Weir set-up – a lone scientist in crisis, who must use all his ingenuity and scientific know-how to save the day. Indeed, Grace wakes up aboard a spacecraft, light-years from Earth with no memory of his identity or how he got there. He soon realizes that he is the sole surviving member of the crew on the ship, and as he slowly recovers his memories, he recalls their desperate, one-way mission to save humanity.
Interspersed in flashbacks, we learn that scientists have discovered a so-called “Petrova line” of infrared light between the Sun and Venus. They have worked out that this line is made up of a mysterious micro-organism, which seems to be consuming the Sun’s energy and threatens to plunge our planet into icy doom. Dubbed “astrophage” (Latin for “star eater”), the algae-like microbe has already noticeably dimmed the light that Earth receives from the Sun, and extrapolating, it will cause catastrophic global cooling within 30 years.
A “Petrova Taskforce” is created, made up of scientists and military personnel from across the globe. It is led by the formidable Eva Stratt – perfectly played by German actor Sandra Hüller – who brings a reticent Grace into the fold, who uses his skills as a one-time top molecular biologist to study the unicellular organism. It is Grace who, after some comedic and somewhat DIY experimentation, figures out that the astrophage are capable of absorbing and storing solar radiation; and later expelling it, which serves as a source of propulsion, allowing them to travel at near-light speeds.
Further research shows that all but one of the stars in our galactic neighbourhood are similarly infected by the astrophage. The exception is Tau Ceti, which is 11.9 light-years away from Earth (see box “Around the Sun”) and hosts a few planets of its own. The taskforce decides to send a one-way crewed mission to this special star, to determine what makes it immune to these interstellar interlopers.
Around the Sun
(Courtesy: Nsae Comp by CC-BY-SA-4.0)
This stellar map is a graphical representation of nearby stars to our own star – Sol – all within 12 light-years of Earth. Each stellar object is jointly marked by two points, a diamond marked point (which shows the location of the stellar objects according to its declination) and a line marked point (which represents the distance in light-years from the centre). The circular lines indicate the distance from the centre by being set apart in one light-year steps.
The map accurately depicts these stars’ distance from Sol and their location in 3D space; to help visualize the distances to nearby stars in our galactic neighbourhood. Both Taue Ceti (2) and Eridani (4) can be seen on the map in the top right-hand quadrant.
In an interesting twist, it is the astrophage themselves that ultimately fuel the Hail Mary ship, after Grace discovers how to breed them on Earth. With only enough time to breed the required amount of astrophage for a one-way trip – they decide that any findings will be sent back to Earth via a series of much smaller and lighter probes. Despite Tau Ceti being almost 12 light-years away from Earth, it takes the spacecraft only about four years to get there, thanks to the fact that the ship travels at 92% the speed of light. This allows relativistic effects such as time dilation and length contraction come into play.
With this complex set-up, the real story picks up once Grace arrives at Tau Ceti, only to find that he is second in line, with another spaceship already there. Grace soon meets its sole occupant – the alien creature that he refers to as Rocky thanks to its stone-like morphology. Grace learns that Rocky is on the exact same mission as him, and that the alien hails from another nearby astrophage-infested star system called 40 Eridani. The pair soon realize that the only way to save both their planets is to work together.
Alongside Grace and Rocky’s adventures in space, the film does well in bringing in the more sober aspects of the story back on Earth – highlighting the trials and triumphs of the taskforce. These range from the global mobilization of scientists and engineers, working together to build and fuel a light-speed ship in record time; to Stratt’s character bypassing international law to ensure humanity’s survival. Lord and Miller use a distinct visual language to illustrate the two timelines. The Earth sequences look more bleak; while the scenes aboard the Hail Mary use visualizations of waveforms and light-absorption to show how Grace perceives the microscopic threat that is astrophage.
Natural predators Grace floats in space above the planet Adrian in the Tau Ceti system, to observe the native home of “Taumoeba”. (Courtesy: Landmark Media Studios / Amazon MGM / Alamy)
Rocky is one of the most lovable alien creatures to have graced our cinema screens in recent years, brought to life by the clever use of puppetry. The astrophage, by contrast, are meant to evoke fear and intrigue. We are treated to visualizations of how these “black matter” organisms absorb radiation, giving the audience a sense of how matter and energy can be manipulated on a grand scale. Visually, this metaphor continues throughout the film and, ultimately, to the survival of the planet.
Science and fiction, on screen and the page
It is clear that both Weir and the film’s producers and director were keen to highlight science and scientists throughout the book and film. For example, 40 Eridani is a real star system and Weir used astronomical data to build Rocky’s world.
In fact, when the book Project Hail Mary was written, the planet 40 Eridani-B was believed to be real. More recent data has revealed the dimming of the star that inferred the planet’s existence is in fact more likely a result of the composition of the star itself, and the planet most likely does not exist (see box “Exoplanetary exploits”).
In Project Hail Mary, Weir used the real-world observations of stars sometimes dimming for unknown reasons to come up with the idea of the astrophage and its effects on stars. The book also has much more detailed (if scientifically dubious) explanations, using neutrinos and quantum physics, for how astrophage devours starlight and manages to survive on the surface of stars.
Exoplanetary exploits: the science and speculation behind Rocky’s home world
(Courtesy: Gemini Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab, NSF, AURA, Julien Rameau (University of Montreal), Christian Marois (NRC Herzberg))
Andy Weir based Rocky’s home planet in a star system that is beloved in science fiction, while existing in reality. 40 Eridani is a triple star system that is about 16.3 light-years from the Sun. Fans of Star Trek might also recognize 40 Eridani as the solar system that is home to planet Vulcan. The system comprises the larger star 40 Eridani A and a binary pair of stars, consisting of a red dwarf (40 Eridani C), and a white dwarf star (40 Eridani B).
The system has been well known and observed for a number of years, so much so that as of 1991, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry described how the binary stars would “gleam brilliantly in the Vulcan sky” in a letter to Sky & Telescope magazine.
In Project Hail Mary, Erid (or “40 Eridani A b”) is the closest planet to the main star in the system, with some extreme conditions compared with those found on Earth. For example, the planet’s gravity is more than twice Earth’s, and it has a very dense (28 Earth atmospheres) ammonia-based atmosphere at extremely high pressure. The planet has an average surface temperature of 210 °C – despite this, it is able to have liquid water on its surface, as the high surface pressure raises water’s boiling point above that temperature.
According to Weir, Erid’s dense atmosphere blocks almost all incoming light, meaning that Eridians are “blind” to visible light and use echolocation to “see” and communicate. Erid also has a strong magnetic field that blocks the large amount of radiation a planet so close to a star would be bathed in. The high-pressure environment, meanwhile, meant that Weir had to base Eridian biology on a high-mineral content, stone-like exoskeleton, with a circulatory system using liquid mercury, making it an especially unique alien life form.
In reality, astronomers at one point believed that 40 Eridani A was host to a planet or two, thanks to periodic variations in its radial velocity – a common signature of exoplanets. However, the observed variation was on the scale of 42 days, which is similar to the star’s rotation period, meaning that it was next to impossible to confirm the existence of a planet. After a series of observations over a number of years, as of 2024 astronomers sadly concluded that the radial velocity signal very likely does originate from stellar activity, and not from a planet.
But all is not lost in the Eridian stellar neighbourhood – the not too far away system of 51 Eridani b (roughly 96 light-years from Earth) has a confirmed and directly imaged exoplanet (see image above). Dubbed 51 Eridani b, the Jupiter-sized planet orbits 11 billion miles from its star, a little farther out than Saturn’s orbit in our solar system. As of 2021, NASA announced that its James Webb telescope plans to probe the planet’s atmosphere at infrared wavelengths to learn more about this distant world – and the secrets it currently keeps.
Weir wrote the book before the global COVID-19 pandemic, but it was released in the very midst of it. Indeed, there are many parallels in the way humanity deals with global problems. As we see in Project Hail Mary, the fictional version of our world has this immediate burning issue and while not everybody quite agrees on a plan, there is a global realization and agreement that something must be done, no matter what it takes. Weir is not so convinced that it always works like this though, as he told us that “I do think that the world works together when there’s a common problem, but only if it’s a direct and immediate problem like COVID. We’re not so great at it when it’s a slow burn, like environmental damage.”
Filmmaker and scriptwriter Drew Goddard – who wrote the screenplay for Project Hail Mary as well as Weir’s previous bestselling-book-turned-movie The Martian – reportedly drew up a list of 10 things that he would like to bring from the pages to the film. He achieved nine of them – the missing one was the nuking of the polar ice-caps by Stratt to purposefully trigger global warming. It is a shocking and thought-provoking moment in the book, stripped from the film due to the necessary time it would take to explore and depict such a drastic decision (though one can imagine an entire story based on just that one issue). The film also could have included some more details from the book of the political machinations on Earth, though there are already a lot of ideas to take in, especially for those viewers who have not read the book.
Building a common language
When it comes to depicting an alien, the filmmakers did a great job, not only of realizing Rocky on screen, but also showing the growing friendship between two creatures from distant worlds. Despite their many differences, both Grace and Rocky have been displaced from their homes and tasked with the burden of saving them. To do so, they must overcome their fear of the unknown, and find ways to converse and connect.
On Earth, we are able to communicate in a number of ways – even sometimes between species. In science fiction, science and maths often become a common language. Rocky’s language is decidedly otherworldly. The script, which includes not just the spoken lines but also the complex “musical” language of the Eridian, was developed with linguists and xenobiologists. Via Grace, the audience is able to experience the genuine difficulty of two distinct life-forms learning to communicate for the first time (see box “Words of great encouragement”).
Despite the challenges the pair face in dealing with a culture alien to their own, the two of them go from being fearful and intrigued to amused and friendly; eventually making great sacrifices to help one another.
“Words of great encouragement”
Hannah Little, a linguist and lecturer in communication and media at the University of Liverpool, on the language and communication between Grace and Rocky:
I love Rocky and Grace’s first contact scene – they initially don’t know how the other communicates, but Rocky must find a way to tell Grace to leave the airlock. To do this, he creates a 3D model of Grace and the Hail Mary, to act out that he wants Grace to return to his ship. Grace understands this communication attempt immediately. Without a shared language at the start, the pair must use other strategies to converse, such as using something called “iconicity”. Iconicity is when we use sounds or gestures that depict what we are trying to communicate in some way. Humans often do this using gesture (imagine playing charades) or with drawings (like in Pictionary), but we don’t usually have a 3D printer to hand like Rocky does. This is an excellent opening concept as a 3D model can be a more accurate representation of a human or a ship than a 2D drawing, and it also tells us something about how Rocky perceives the world – he doesn’t have vision that uses light as we do, but instead something more similar to echolocation that can only detect 3D objects.
As they continue to interact, we see Rocky mimicking Grace in raising his index finger: a gesture Grace uses to communicate “can you wait a minute”. Through imitating him, Rocky is able to see what Grace does in response to this gesture and gather data about what the gesture means and the effect it has. This is exactly how humans learn language. When we speak to babies, we are constantly trying to get them to imitate us.
After these initial exchanges, Grace starts to build a translation programme where he logs different sounds Rocky makes and his best guess for what they mean in English. This is where the realism of the movie gets lost: to build reliable translation systems between different human languages, we need an enormous amount of data, even with everything we know about how human languages are produced and structured. It would be a mammoth task to work out what aspects of Rocky’s sounds are meaningful and how those meanings map to human concepts and grammar, but the film depicts this as relatively straightforward. We then suddenly jump forward in time to a point where they have a working translation model without much clue of how long this took. Of course, this has to happen for the sake of the story, and I prefer this as an explanation than some magical universal translator or a fish you put in your ear.
I also love how Rocky’s biology is such that he looks like a strange rocky spider with no discernible face. This makes Project Hail Mary a more exciting exploration of potential alien biology than other films and TV shows where the aliens all look and speak a lot like humans do. But Rocky still communicates with sound, as humans do, and presumably using structures that are very easy to translate. I’m always after depictions of alien communication that get away from a human-centric view of what language can be. It would have been entertaining if Rocky communicated via smell or vibrations or electricity.
“I’m going to have to science the **** out of this.”
Alongside the intriguing linguistics, a side-effect of the interwoven timelines is that viewers are confronted with the reality of scientific progress: it is often messy, desperate and driven by people who are deeply flawed. For the most part, the characters are shown as tenacious individuals, who refuse to give up in the face of a dying sun.
Grace is the embodiment of a reluctant hero. He is also painted as something of a lone voice in academia, having presented a paper at a conference about non-carbon-based life, and being ridiculed for the idea. He is then ostracized by the scientific community, and so turns to being a school-teacher instead, making him a rather unlikely candidate for a space mission.
Despite Grace’s reticence, it turns out he is perfect for the role of saviour of the planet, mainly thanks to his relentless resolve to find the answer, even when armed with minimal resources. Gosling’s face, initially confused, then increasingly determined, fills the screen as we see him try to come to terms with his mission.
It is, however, impossible to know for sure how a person in such total isolation may truly feel or react. This uncertainty is core to the script. The big questions of the film about the value of sacrifice and the necessity of co-operation are left for the audience to decide. The directors are not didactic storytellers, and Weir himself is adamant that his main aim is to entertain. It will be a great bonus if readers and viewers come away with a new understanding of science and the scientific process.
Indeed, this story features many physics concepts, from exoplanetary science to the special theory of relativity; as well as space travel, artificial gravity and a healthy dose of quantum and materials science. Weir contends that the science of Project Hail Mary is sound until you get deep into the quantum level. It is there where he used a literary plot device often referred to as a “MacGuffin” that enabled interstellar travel, using a biological organism.
Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, recently joined the Physics World Stories podcast, and was delighted that Weir went to such lengths for the science in his narratives. “I think it really surprised me in terms of energy storage,” says Smethurst. “It’s mass-energy equivalence at the crux of the story, if the astrophage can take in the Sun’s energy and store it and then release it later. It’s just e = mc2.”
She goes on to explain that this fundamental physics concept is what allowed for interstellar travel, by harnessing huge amounts of energy to accelerate the spacecraft up to nearly the speed of light. In reality, the issue lies in terms of what kind of single-cell can store that much energy and with that much energy efficiency, which she estimates to be “a billion times more efficient” than any we know on Earth.
But Smethurst goes on to highlight that this is what makes Weir a creative writer, especially when it came to developing the biological and physical mechanisms that allow astrophage to interact with neutrinos. “He invented this whole term in the book called ‘super cross-sectionality’,” she says, “which is fun because it’s sort of a borrowed word from particle physics, when you talk about cross sections of particles and whether they’re likely to intersect. So I like that the idea is obviously sci-fi, but the fact that it’s rooted in some elements of physics and he made that effort to do that, I think was incredible.”
At the heart
Project Hail Mary succeeds as an entertaining space adventure because it trusts its audience to be as smart as its protagonist. It treats astrophysics and molecular biology not as hurdles to the plot, but as the plot itself. Without giving it all away, the story does not end with a straightforward “victory” and much of the lessons learned come from the realization that science is a universal language. In 2026, where global challenges often feel intractable, the film offers a fundamentally sunny outlook. It suggests that when people – or even different species from distant planets – come together to overcome impossible odds, survival is possible.
Using the immense format of IMAX, Project Hail Mary leads us into a total immersion of Grace’s lonely, pressurized world; only to show us that we are never truly alone – as long as we have the tools of discovery, and the ability to overcome our fear of the unknown.
A new glass screen containing nanoclusters of copper iodide could create higher-resolution X-ray images using a much lower dose of radiation. The scintillating screen, which also works underwater, can be moulded into curved shapes, overcoming key limitations of the conventional rigid, flat-panel detectors used for many medical imaging applications. These include mammography, say the researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, and the University of Hamburg, Germany, who developed it.
X-ray scintillators capture X-rays passing through an object and convert them into flashes of visible light to form a digital image, explains physicist Mehmet Bayindir of KAUST and the University of Hamburg. The more efficient the scintillator is at this conversion, the clearer the final image and the lower dose of radiation required to generate it.
He and his colleagues’ detailed analyses of a scintillator containing nanoclusters of copper, iodine and an organic ligand revealed a fascinating phenomenon: its photoluminescence and radioluminescence pathways appear to have distinct physical origins. This implies that the scintillating light yield – that is, how much visible light a material emits when struck by high-energy X-rays – can be separated from its standard photoluminescence quantum yield (how efficiently the material converts absorbed ultraviolet or visible light into a different wavelength of light).
Until now, Bayindir explains, it was assumed that a material must have high photoluminescence efficiency to perform well when excited by X-rays. “Breaking this assumption directly challenges conventional wisdom and opens up a promising new design space for making high-performance scintillators – provided that materials highly responsive to radiation can be engineered of course.”
Enter amorphous quantum systems
In recent years, researchers have been looking into cubane-type [Cu4I4L4, L: organic ligand] nanocluster glasses (NCGs) for use in this context. These belong to a family of hybrid transparent luminescent amorphous materials that show much promise for X-ray scintillation applications.
In their latest work, detailed in ACS Energy Letters, Bayindir and colleagues studied several stable alkyl-phosphine ligand-based NCGs. In these amorphous zero-dimensional quantum systems, ionizing radiation is mostly absorbed by the heavy iodine and copper elements at the cluster cores. The researchers used these NCGs to make large-area, free-standing scintillating screens – both planar and conformal – with ultrasmooth surfaces, using a fabrication methodology that they developed in their lab.
The screens are robust and can image samples – both electronic and biological – with sub-3 µm spatial resolution. They also work underwater, something that is difficult for conventional screens. The researchers demonstrated this by capturing a very clear scan of a fish’s tail in water that was indistinguishable from an image taken in air.
Such a glass scintillator represents a significant milestone, says team leader Osman Bakr. “Indeed, the level of precision we obtained allows us to capture highly detailed, high-contrast X-ray images of complex internal microstructures, such as the delicate anatomy of a microscopic insect and an electronic memory card, to cite but two examples,” he says.
X-ray imaging systems that curve to fit a person’s body
“Combined with the fact that this new nanocluster glass becomes almost rubbery when heated to 42 °C, we can mould it into any three-dimensional shape at low temperatures,” study lead author Bashir Hasanov adds. “This could allow for X-ray imaging systems that curve to fit a person’s body and overcomes the limitations of conventional rigid, flat-panel detectors.”
One possible application is in mammography, he notes. Today, a major drawback of current mammography machines is that breast tissue must be firmly compressed between flat panels so that it can be imaged. This is very uncomfortable – and even painful – and deters many women from going for a scan.
“One in 20 women around the world will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, with annual cases projected to reach 3.2 million and related deaths climbing to 1.1 million by 2050,” says Bayindir. “Many of these fatalities stem from late-stage diagnosis.
Nearly one-third of women miss their initial mammogram appointments, something that significantly increases their risk of succumbing to the disease. “While the reasons for this vary, the medical literature frequently cites the physical discomfort of tissue compression,” says Bakr. “What is more, because current guidelines recommend starting routine mammography screenings at age 40, cumulative lifetime exposure to X-ray radiation remains a clinical concern for many. Our long-term objective is to completely redefine this clinical experience.”
Indeed, the researchers say they would now like to bring this quantum glass out of the lab and into real-world applications. Bakr tells Physics World that his team’s immediate next step is to scale up the geometric dimensions of its mouldable screens while maintaining perfect thickness and clarity. “This would move us closer to full-scale clinical prototyping for 3D conformal medical imaging.”
“We are also designing a novel detector architecture capable of high-resolution imaging on curved surfaces using an array of specialized optical sensors,” he reveals.
Physicists (and engineers) are great at estimating. We’ve obviously never counted the number of electrons in the visible universe, but we reckon there are between 1080 and 1082 of them. As for the “Planck length” at which quantum effects start to dominate gravity, that’s estimated to be 10–35 metres. The transition between laminar and turbulent flow in fluids, meanwhile, comes in at Reynolds’ numbers of between 2500 and 4000.
These estimation skills, which are a familiar part of any physicist’s toolkit, can also come in handy for anyone working in the business world. In particular, the ability to estimate is useful when examining the business cases drawn up by start-up companies seeking to drum up financial support from investors and banks.
Most business cases completely overestimate a company’s predicted profits and make wild – and mostly nonsensical – statements
Such documents inevitably paint a rosy picture of a firm’s potential because, without money, nothing can be done. However, in my experience, most business cases completely overestimate a company’s predicted profits. They also make wild – and mostly nonsensical – statements about the transformational impact it will have on a particular industry.
Now I appreciate that business cases need to contain a bit of hyperbole if they are to attract investor funding; there’s no point being unnecessarily gloomy and down-beat. But given that up to 90% of start-up companies fail, it’s essential to have the ability and skills to evaluate a start-up company’s business case as realistically as possible.
Here’s the rub
Let me give you a specific example from tribology – the science of friction, lubrication and wear. Tribology might seem mundane, but it is a big deal, especially when you realize that 25% of the world’s energy is used simply to overcome friction and wear. (The Institute of Physics has a special interest group in tribology if you want to find out more about the field.)
One topic of huge interest, on which Google Scholar reckons almost 15,000 papers were published in 2025 alone, is that of nanoparticles as potential lubricant additives. Despite that large amount of research, I am not aware of any mainstream commercial lubricants that use any of these additives. So why is there such a large disconnect between academia and actual practice?
This is where our estimation skills come in. We know that lubricants are mostly hydrocarbon oils plus chemical additives such as antioxidants, friction modifiers, dispersants, detergents and anti-wear and anti-foaming agents. According to data from Kline and Company, about 40 million tonnes of lubricants are used annually around the world, roughly evenly split between industry and the automotive sector.
Automotive lubricants typically contain 15% additives, whilst industrial lubricants have about 1%. The “average” additive content, over all lubricants, is therefore about 8%, which equates to 3.2 million tonnes. With Polaris Market Research estimating that the lubricant-additives business being worth about $20 billion, we can see that the “average” additive price is roughly $6250 per tonne.
Particularly important to lubricants are anti-wear additives, which stop metal surfaces from breaking down when the oil that normally keeps them apart has disappeared. Lubricants usually have about 1% of such additives. Given the numbers above, we can estimate that the overall market for them should be about 400,000 tonnes.
That’s not far off the real market size, which business analysts Markets and Markets reckon to be about 300,000 tonnes. (The figure is slightly less than my estimate because some lubricants, such as transformer and circulating oils, don’t contain such additives.) With that market being worth almost $1 billion a year, the average price of anti-wear additives is about $3300 per tonne.
There’s also another key component of modern engine oils, namely friction modifiers – “slippery” substances that form films on moving surfaces to reduce friction and stop them from shearing. Some of the best friction modifiers, which are based on molybdenum, cost about $10,000 per tonne. Given that base oils typically cost between $1000 and $2500 per tonne, molybdenum-based friction modifiers are much pricer than anti-wear additives.
Graphene isn’t gold
Armed with this information, we can now see why graphene – the “poster child” of lubricant nanoparticles – has flopped so badly from a commercial point of view as a lubricant additive. This 2D carbon material costs a staggering $50,000–$200,000 per tonne, which is more than five times pricier than the most expensive additives in lubricant formulations.
The message is clear. For lubricant nanoparticles to become commercially competitive additives, their price per tonne needs to be come down by at least an order of magnitude. Now most Physics World readers are unlikely to be in the business of selling lubricants. But for anyone developing a new technology, the point is you cannot assume customers will come running.
Businesses need to be aware of what existing technologies are out there – and how much those rival technologies cost
Businesses need to be aware of what existing technologies are out there – and how much those rival technologies cost. If a new technology is too expensive for that application, different markets may need to be considered. Graphene, for example, has proved more useful in composites and materials reinforcement, coatings, energy storage and electronics, rather than lubricants.
Looking at new technologies even more broadly, the most successful by far are those that have fallen in price year-on-year for a decade or more. In computing, for example the cost of CPU time per dollar has typically dropped by a third every single year for the last 70 years, while computer memory has plummeted from $604trillion per terabyte in 1959 to just over $1000 per terabyte in 2023. As for electric cars, they are selling like hot cakes now that batteries have dropped from $10,000 per kWh in 1991 to barely $100 per kWh today.
My message is simple. When it comes to any technology, a sure-fire way to judge if it’ll succeed is to see if its price is likely to drop. No-one can know what the future will hold, but as physicists and engineers, we have a great ability to make estimations. By applying those skills when we sift through business cases, we’re more likely than most to identify the real gems from the rest.
Quantum connections UTC Quantum Center brings together a cross-disciplinary mix of departments and colleges to support targeted development efforts in research infrastructure, translational R&D and education. (Courtesy: Angela Foster/UTC)
Think big, win big. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) is ticking both boxes, it seems, with a programme of strategic investments spanning quantum research, education, workforce development and academic-industry partnerships. By 2030, the hope is that those investments will pay out, putting Chattanooga on the fast-track to becoming the “Quantum Capital of the South” – a destination where researchers, students, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, national laboratories and public-sector partners work together to accelerate quantum discovery and deployment.
“Success will be measured not only through research funding and scholarly output, but also through the strength of the quantum ecosystem and the opportunities it creates throughout the region,” says Mina Sartipi, UTC’s interim vice-chancellor for research. Equally important, early-career faculty and researchers will have the opportunity to make an outsized impact. “They are not entering an environment where every role has already been defined,” she adds. “They are helping to build the future of quantum science and engineering in Tennessee, delivering a long-term vision that extends well beyond the university.”
Quantum excellence
The UTC Quantum Initiative got under way in 2022 and, two years later, was followed by the establishment of UTC Quantum Center. The latter provides the engine-room for UTC’s quantum ambitions, bringing together a cross-disciplinary mix of departments and colleges across the university to support targeted development efforts in research infrastructure, translational R&D and education. “Ultimately, we want UTC Quantum Center to be recognized as a destination for top quantum talent,” says Sartipi. “A virtuous circle that will see us attracting outstanding faculty, students and research partners from across the country and internationally.”
Mina Sartipi “Ultimately, we want UTC Quantum Center to be recognized as a destination for top quantum talent.” (Courtesy: Angela Foster/UTC)
As the inaugural director of UTC Quantum Center, Rick Mukherjee is tasked with implementing and delivering UTC’s quantum growth plan. “The priority is to put Chattanooga on the map in terms of quantum science and technology innovation,” he notes. “We’re creating a quantum centre-of-excellence at UTC where interdisciplinarity underpins everything we do, engaging associated faculty and research students from core disciplines like physics, mathematics, electrical engineering and computer science.”
Entangled pathways
If that’s the back story, what of the detail? The research effort at UTC Quantum Center is organized around four headline themes: quantum networking; quantum imaging and sensing; quantum information theory; and quantum simulation of many-body phenomena (using one quantum system to emulate another).
The collaboration with EPB is pivotal in each case, with UTC Quantum Center providing one of the nodes on the utility’s metro-area quantum network (the first commercial quantum network of its kind in the US) and, by extension, gaining priority access to EPB’s in-house quantum computer (an IonQ trapped-ion system with 36 physical qubits).
The EPB network, which runs across a pre-installed fibre-optic base, is effectively a proof-of-principle testbed for national and international quantum connectivity. “This is one brick in the wall towards next-generation quantum networking applications – from quantum key distribution and quantum cryptography to distributed quantum computing and the quantum Internet,” notes Mukherjee.
A case in point: one of the first experiments that UTC Quantum Center performed in collaboration with ORNL involved the development of an automatic system that continuously corrects for distortions in fibre-optic cables and, in so doing, allows quantum information to transit reliably across a city-scale network. The system maintained high-quality quantum entanglement for more than 30 hours, demonstrating a key capability for future quantum communication networks.
Rick Mukherjee “We’re creating a quantum centre-of-excellence at UTC where interdisciplinarity underpins everything we do.” (Courtesy: Angela Foster/UTC)
“Currently, our researchers are transmitting pairs of entangled photons across EPB’s fibre network and characterizing multipartite entangled states,” explains Mukherjee. “This work represents the next step toward realizing the potential of quantum networks for advanced communication, sensing and distributed quantum computing applications.”
Alongside his leadership role, Mukherjee remains an active researcher and oversees a group of research faculty, postdocs and graduate/undergraduate students who specialize in theoretical quantum physics, quantum algorithms and quantum machine-learning applications. Crucially, the team’s algorithms are designed to be hardware-agnostic, allowing them to run across diverse quantum computing architectures – from superconducting and neutral-atom systems to photonic platforms – regardless of the vendor.
By avoiding dependence on any one technology, the research is positioned to adapt versus a rapidly changing quantum landscape. “Whatever modality ultimately wins the race to deliver at-scale quantum computing,” Mukherjee says, “we’ll be ready to deploy our algorithms and unlock quantum advantage on those machines.”
The quantum connector
Alignment with industry is a defining theme at UTC Quantum Center, evidenced by a twin-track approach that aims to engage both technology developers and future end-users. On the one hand, Mukherjee and colleagues are initiating traditional academic-industry partnerships with hardware and software companies at all levels of the quantum supply chain; on the other, they are positioning UTC as a “quantum connector” to help businesses and public-sector organizations de-risk the early-stage adoption of quantum technologies and applications.
“Universities have an important role to play here,” says Mukherjee. As such, he sees UTC Quantum Center as an “honest broker”, providing specialist information in an unbiased manner to help engineering and management teams understand the commercial upsides of quantum technologies across sectors as diverse as finance, healthcare, telecoms and energy.
“We are working with the future adopters of quantum on their early-stage orientation and upskilling,” he explains. “Our professional development programmes – ‘Quantum 101’ if you like – will ensure Tennessee has a ‘quantum-ready’ workforce.”
Proof-of-concept R&D studies represent a natural progression of such partnerships, with UTC researchers addressing real-world problems that could potentially be better solved using quantum methods and applications. Joint projects with utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, are developing quantum algorithms for power grid optimization and load management. Elsewhere, UTC Quantum Center recently published work on the gate-assignment problem (another quantum optimization challenge) with Lufthansa Industry Solutions (the research arm of Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines). A similar research collaboration is underway with the consultancy Deloitte.
Network effects
That engagement with industry is matched by UTC Quantum Center’s efforts to build bridges with other academic institutions. Over the past two years, Mukherjee and his team have put in place a network of collaborations with quantum researchers at top-tier universities, among them Harvard, Purdue, Texas A&M and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the US as well as the University of Hamburg in Germany.
Quantum discovery UTC Quantum Center’s research programme covers four main themes: quantum networking; quantum imaging and sensing; quantum simulation of many-body phenomena; and quantum information theory. (Courtesy: Angela Foster/UTC)
The recently announced UTC/ORNL Governor’s Chair in Quantum Information Science and Engineering reflects the momentum of these efforts. This senior faculty position will further strengthen ties between UTC and ORNL, with the eventual post-holder overseeing a joint team across both institutions to create new opportunities for collaborative research, student engagement and workforce development.
So what does success look like for UTC Quantum Center in 2030? “Ultimately,” concludes Sartipi, “success means that when people think about the future of quantum technologies in the US, they think of Chattanooga as the Quantum Capital of the South – a place where talent is cultivated, partnerships flourish and discoveries translate out of the laboratory into societal and economic impact.”
