(Courtey: iStock/wildpixel) This year, the Physics World team selected a medical innovation as the Breakthrough of the Year: the development of a digital bridge that restores communication between the brain and spinal cord, enabling a man with paralysis to stand and walk naturally. We also reported on several other neural engineering advances, including a neuroprosthesis that restores communication to those who cannot speak and an award-winning implant that could help regulate blood pressure in people with spinal-cord injuries. And that’s just one example of the impact of physics-related research on the healthcare sector. In 2023, we wrote about a host…
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(Courtesy: Shutterstock/Roman-Sigaev) It’s been another banner year for quantum science and technology, with academic research groups and tech firms celebrating significant achievements in quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum metrology as well as fundamental quantum science. Three of these advances – a quantum repeater that transmits quantum information over a distance of 50 km; a double-slit experiment in time; and a simulation of an expanding universe in a Bose-Einstein condensate – appeared in our list of the year’s top 10 breakthroughs, but with so many exciting things going on, we can’t resist celebrating a few others. Here, in no particular…
Modified wood Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, have developed the world’s first electrical transistor made of wood. (Courtesy: Thor Balkhed) There are many physicists working on materials and every year we look forward to writing about some of the most exciting research in this field. This year was no exception and here are some of our favourite materials stories from 2023. In an era when new materials are devised using artificial intelligence, I find it comforting that we are also in the midst of a resurgence of interest in wood. It…
Sidney Perkowitz explains what Isaac Newton has to do with a huge, glitzy entertainment dome in Las Vegas Dome in the desert The Sphere in Las Vegas has the highest-resolution wrap-around LED screen in the world. (Courtesy: iStock/ALFSnaiper) Spheres, globes or orbs: call them what you like, they have always been part of physics even in its early days as â€Ånatural scienceâ€Â. The symmetric perfection of a sphere made it the obvious – though wrong – choice for Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos, which saw celestial bodies travel in circular orbits around the Earth carried by nested, rotating crystalline globes.…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. When compiling Recommended Reading’s most popular stories of the year, we noticed a trend. You like to read about sex—though not good sex, necessarily. The sex might be awkward or misguided, as in our most-read story by Michelle Lyn King,…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Residency programs provide a myriad of benefits to writers and artists: the chance to escape the pressing obligations of everyday life, to have a quiet space to work, to find inspiration in a new environment, and to draw on the…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. The day Sinead O’Connor died, I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in the swimming pool, gossiping with poet Erika Meitner about our favorite writers. The next evening, Erika read her brand-new poem “The Shape of Progress”…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Eight years ago, I pulled together a list of upcoming books of interest by women of color because, as a novelist, reader, and intermittent critic, I had trouble finding as many as I’d hoped. I published that list in Electric…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Last week, we asked our social media followers to vote for the cover of year from the best 32 designs of the year. This year’s tournament was fierce, with surprise twists and crowd favorites that bowed out early. The winner…
Acoustic touch A research team member who is blind uses the new smart glasses to locate and reach for an item on the table. (Courtesy: CC-BY 4.0/Lil Deverell at the Motion Platform and Mixed Reality Lab in Techlab at the UTS) Researchers in Australia are developing smart glasses for blind people, using a technology called â€Åacoustic touch†to turn images into sounds. Initial experiments suggest that this wearable spatial audio technology could help people who are blind or have significantly impaired vision to locate nearby objects. Recent improvements in augmented reality, practical wearable camera technology and deep learning-based computer vision…
Toluca Lake, CA – December 2023 – The Toluca Lake community celebrated its 100th anniversary with a dazzling Holiday Open House on December 1, 2023. This memorable event combined festive cheer and strong community bonds, showcasing a rich tapestry of joy, entertainment, and shared memories. The celebration began with holiday music, creating an enchanting atmosphere. The John Burroughs High School Muse Choir’s performance set a joyful tone for the evening. Fritz Coleman, Toluca Lake’s Honorary Mayor and an Emmy© Award-Winning Stand-Up Comedian, served as the emcee, introducing various dignitaries, community leaders, and celebrities. Attendees included Gabriela Agarie, representing U.S. Congressman…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. At a private Quaker high school in New York City, one year post-9/11, Fay and Nell have grown so close that they narrate their lives in unison, as F&N. F&N do everything together: they sip their matching caramel Frappuccinos; IM…
The QUANT-NET research consortium is building the first quantum network testbed for distributed quantum computing applications in the US. Joe McEntee visits Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in California to check out progress on the enabling quantum technologies Quantum engineering From left to right, QUANT-NET researchers Erhan Saglamyurek, Hartmut Häffner, Inder Monga and Wenji Wu demonstrate their ion-trap quantum processor, a key subsystem in the network testbed connecting Häffner’s UC Berkeley physics lab to Berkeley Lab. QUANT-NET is a broader collective effort, with other core contributions from Caltech’s Maria Spiropulu (polarization stabilization and quantum frequency conversion); UC Berkeley’s Alp…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Even years after the fact, I am still too embarrassed to admit the identity of my first love. But I will tell you this: I wanted him to be my father, my son, my best friend, my brother. I knew…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. In many ways, the world Naomi Alderman portrays in her newest novel, The Future, is not so different from our own: a few tech CEOs have possession of much of the world’s wealth; headlines in the news chronicle a litany…
(Courtesy: Shutterstock/Mr-Aesthetics) Physics isn’t a popularity contest, but the 10 most read articles published on the Physics World website in 2023 nevertheless make an interesting collection of highlights, lowlights and every kind of light in between. If you didn’t spot these stories when they first appeared, here’s your chance to find out what the fuss was about. We said in 2022 that the best was yet to come for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and we weren’t wrong. In 2023, NASA/ESA’s shiny new infrared eye in the heavens spotted an ionized molecule that could be involved in the emergence…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Housemates, the highly-anticipated debut novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which will be published by Hogarth on May 28th, 2024. You can pre-order your copy here. When Bernie answers Leah’s ad for…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. In one of Electric Lit’s most-read essays of the year, “Black Women Are Being Erased From Book Publishing,” Jennifer Baker examines the publishing industry in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. She holds the publishing industry…