Mirroring the mechanisms that make human faces and bodies—and those of many multicellular organisms—symmetrical, bee colonies build symmetrical nests when they are placed on either side of a ...

Symmetry often governs condensed matter physics. The act of breaking symmetry spontaneously leads to phase transitions, and various observables or observable physical phenomena can be directly ...

If you want to fully describe how the Universe works at a fundamental level, you have to look at it in two different — and incompatible — ways. To describe the particles and their electromagnetic and ...

Forget solid, liquid, and gas: there are in fact more than 500 phases of matter. In a major new article scientists reveal a modern reclassification of all of them. Forget solid, liquid, and gas: there ...

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Almost 10,000 galaxies. Looking back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. Source: Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team/Public ...

Symmetry attracts us. Studies comparing people’s reactions to different faces have shown, for example, that they find highly symmetrical faces more attractive than less symmetrical faces. The symmetry ...

Distinct phases do not always differ from each other in their symmetries as expected in the Ginzburg-Landau paradigm. Two gapped phases having the same symmetry may be distinguished by a set of global ...

We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does that really mean? Intuitively we have a sense of symmetry as a kind of mirroring. Suppose we draw a vertical line through the middle of a ...

The picture shows ytterbium ions in an ion Coulomb crystal, taken with an EMCCD camera (electron multiplying CCD camera). The ionized atoms fluoresce in the laser light; the distance between the ions ...

The vast majority of organic molecules (based on a carbon structure) are not flat, but have a three-dimensional geometry. Various results can be obtained depending on the way the atoms are arranged ...