MIT researchers have designed a printable aluminum alloy that’s five times stronger than cast aluminum and holds up at extreme temperatures. Machine learning helped them zero in on the ideal recipe in a fraction of the time traditional methods would take. When 3D printed, the alloy forms a tightly packed internal structure that gives it exceptional strength. The material could eventually replace heavier, costlier metals in jet engines, cars, and data centers.

In collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, hotter than the Sun’s core by a staggering margin, scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery: how delicate particles like deuterons and their antimatter twins can exist at all. Instead of forming in the initial chaos, these fragile nuclei are born later, when the fireball cools, from the decay of ultra-short-lived, high-energy particles.

Using ultracold atoms and laser light, researchers recreated the behavior of a Josephson junction—an essential component of quantum computers and voltage standards. The appearance of Shapiro steps in this atomic system reveals a deep universality in quantum physics and makes elusive microscopic effects visible for the first time.

After a decade of painstaking measurements, scientists have delivered a major plot twist in particle physics: a long-hypothesized “mystery particle” likely doesn’t exist. Using the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab, researchers analyzed neutrinos from two powerful beams and found no evidence for a sterile neutrino, ruling it out with 95% certainty.