Physicists are quietly testing an audacious idea: that the mass of everything around us might not come from an invisible field, but from the hidden geometry of space itself. Instead of treating extra ...

Gravity is by far the weakest of nature’s four fundamental forces, and physicists have spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: why? One answer, first sketched a century ago and refined ...

Crystals, bacterial colonies, flame fronts: the growth of surfaces was first described in the 1980s by the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. Since then, it has been regarded as a fundamental model in ...

Active particles can form two-dimensional solids that are different from those formed by nonmotile particles, showing long-range crystalline order accompanied by giant spontaneous deformations. Figure ...

Experiments with structured light beams provide the first observation of “lump” solitons, shape-preserving solitary waves in a 2D setting. Solitons are solitary waves that travel like particles ...