Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed
Also: Spooky action at the LHC, Ice Age psychoactive use, yeast for building homes on Mars, and more.
Also: Spooky action at the LHC, Ice Age psychoactive use, yeast for building homes on Mars, and more.
The short version
- David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as “the closest thing we have to magic,” since it means that disturbances in one part of the universe can instantly affect distant other parts of the universe, somehow bypassing the cosmic speed-of-light limit.
- Albert Einstein memorably dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” Today, entanglement is the foundation for quantum computing and next-generation sensors, among other applications.
- Z bosons are produced when a Higgs boson decays and are themselves extremely short-lived particles, decaying into pairs of electrons and muons.
What happened
The ATLAS detector precisely tracks those decay patterns. The physicists used that data to reconstruct the angles at which electrons and muons were emitted to infer the spins of the original Z bosons that preceded them.
Why it matters
The authors claim that this is the highest-energy example of entanglement observed to date Physical Review Letters, 2026.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.