Physics Duo Finds Magic in Two Dimensions By CHARLIE WOOD In exploring a family of two-dimensional crystals, a husband-and-wife team is uncovering a potent variety of new electron behaviors.
Read the article | | | | |  | Help Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura Overcome Astronomical Odds By PRADEEP MUTALIK In honor of the actor and activist Nichelle Nichols, this month's puzzle imagines a
Star Trek adventure in which her character, Lieutenant Uhura, faces a life-and-death conundrum.
Solve the puzzle
|  | Secrets of the Moon's Permanent Shadows Are Coming to Light Podcast hosted by SUSAN VALOT;
Story by JONATHAN O'CALLAGHAN Robots are about to venture into the sunless depths of lunar craters to investigate ancient water ice trapped there, while remote studies find hints about how water arrives on rocky worlds.
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Read the article | | Good Things Come in Threes
Physicists observed 270 rare "WWW" events in which the W boson particle appears in trios. This was slightly above the prediction by the Standard Model of particle physics, but not enough to overturn the theory, reports Emily Conover for Science News. If the Standard Model does eventually fail, there are clues that the W boson will be what breaks it. In April, physicists found that the particle is 0.1% heavier than the influential theory predicts, as Charlie Wood covered for Quanta.
Resurrecting Tasmanian Tigers
Scientists announced plans to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction by gene-editing stem cells from a closely related species of marsupial alive today, the fat-tailed dunnart. The researchers hope to see the first baby thylacines born within 10 years, reports Adam Morton for The Guardian. De-extinction efforts can't perfectly resurrect lost species, in part because it's often impossible to get the animals' full genetic code. The resulting creature is kind of a proxy — and that may be good enough for the envisioned purposes, as Yasemin Saplakoglu wrote for Quanta in May. | | | |
