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Category: physics

Shaping Dance with Physics

A physics grad student waltzed away with the top prize in the 2026 Dance Your PhD contest.

Dance is the art of human movement. It combines motion and spin, energy and balance, synchronization and cadence. Many of these concepts are familiar to physicists—even those who might panic at the mere thought of being on a dance floor. Sofia Papa can give a lesson or two on the connections between physics and dance. A physics graduate student and professional dancer, Papa won the top prize this month in the annual Dance Your PhD contest, run by the journal Science. In the winning video, she and six other dancers mimic the internal workings of a piezoelectric, a type of material that turns atomic movement into electricity.

Papa has always loved dancing. “It was my first way to express myself,” she says. For several years now, she has complemented her physics education with dance training. While the dancing has served as a break from the rigors of studying, she has also used it as a way to work through difficult physical concepts. “I’ve always needed something creative to help understand complex ideas,” she says.

Hydrogen atmosphere could keep exomoons habitable for billions of years

Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around freefloating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.

Planetary systems often form under unstable conditions. If young planets come too close, they can fling each other out of their orbits. This creates free-floating planets (FFPs) that wander through the galaxy without a parent star. An earlier study by LMU physicist Dr. Giulia Roccetti had shown that gas giants ejected in this way do not necessarily lose all of their moons in the process. The new study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Tidal heating keeps oceans liquid The ejection does, however, alter the orbits of the moons. They become highly elliptical, such that their distance from the planet constantly changes. The resulting tidal forces rhythmically deform the lunar body, compress its interior, and generate heat through friction. This tidal heating can be sufficient to maintain oceans of liquid water on the surface—even without the energy of a star, and in the cold of interstellar space.

Strained liquid crystals steer soliton ‘bullets’ along two diagonal paths

In physics, some waves behave in a surprising way: instead of spreading out and fading, they hold their shape as they travel at constant speeds. These unusual waves, called solitons, have interested scientists since they were first observed in canals in the 19th century. Today, researchers study solitons in everything from optical fibers to biological systems.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that these stubborn waves can be guided and steered through materials by carefully designing internal strain, offering new ways to move energy or information at microscopic scales.

In wrangling dark matter, some scientists find inspiration in the Torah, Krishna and Christ

When an invisible entity making up 85% of the universe’s mass stumps the greatest scientific minds of our time, awe is an understandable response.

Physicists call it dark matter, a substance they describe as the cosmic glue, the scaffolding, a web that uses gravity to corral, shape and hold together stars, planets and galaxies. Yet nobody knows exactly what it is.

Dark matter’s existence is only inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter. Together with dark energy—a mysterious force causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate—they are the biggest scientific mysteries of our time.

14 JEPA Milestones as a Map of AI Progress

Tx, Yann LeCun.

• JEPA / H-JEPA: avoids predicting every single pixel (too expensive) and rather predicts in latent space. H-JEPA adds hierarchy — short term details vs long term planning ie. how humans actually learn.

• I-JEPA: built for very efficient vision models. Masks image patches and predicts the semantics and in doing so bypasses heavy compute of traditional autoencoders.

• MC-JEPA & V-JEPA: both of these are built for videos. MC-JEPA separates content (what an object is) vs motion (how it moves). V-JEPA masks video features with no text labels making it perfect of action tracking at scale.

• Audio-JEPA: filters out background noise by treating sounds like visuals.

• Point-JEPA & 3D-JEPA: used primarily in AVs. Uses LiDAR point clouds & volumetric grids.

• ACT-JEPA: filters out real world noise to learn manipulation tasks efficiently via imitation learning.

Continue reading “14 JEPA Milestones as a Map of AI Progress” | >

Space launches are changing the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, studies warn. Here’s what can be done

Look up on a clear night and you’ll see the streaks of our new space age. What you don’t see is the growing fallout for the atmosphere that keeps us alive.

A wave of satellite launches and reentries is changing the chemistry and physics of the middle and upper atmosphere.

Studies warn of ozone depletion, stratospheric heating and new metal aerosols from burning spacecraft. The pace is accelerating fast and unless we redesign how we use and retire satellites, we risk swapping one environmental problem (congestion in Earth orbit from too many spacecraft) for another (an atmosphere seeded with rocket soot and satellite ash).

Reduce Energy Consumption In Unity Games With This Plug-In

Over the past few months, we’ve covered plug-ins for both Unreal Engine and Godot that optimize power use, making games more energy-efficient and helping players get more out of their battery life. They work by detecting when a player goes idle, then lowering the frame rate and rendering resolution, and during longer periods of inactivity, even pausing rendering entirely.

Now, thanks to Oliver Stock, who felt like somebody should step up and do the same for Unity, there’s a similar plug-in available for developers. It’s free and open-source, and you can get it by clicking here. It monitors player input, and when nothing’s happening, it automatically switches between different energy profiles. These profiles control which settings are adjusted, like frame rate, resolution, or physics updates. You can easily tweak or create your own profiles to suit your project’s needs.

Oliver recommends using Unity 2022.3.62f2 or newer. The plug-in currently only works with Unity’s URP or HDRP.

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