Writing about quantum entanglement is always a challenge. There are so many clichés to avoid: It’s mysterious, ghostly, spooky, and weird. Entanglement is none of those things, and yet it is also all of those things—a superposition of clichés, you might say. So, having gotten all of my clichés out of the way in the second sentence, let’s take a look at how a group of researchers managed to entangle a light beam with a glass bead, which is, frankly, quite an achievement.

Cliché-free entanglement

Quantum entanglement is nothing more or less than the idea that if two objects are linked, then their behavior will, in some ways, be correlated. To take a terrible example: My upper and lower arm are very strongly correlated in terms of relative position because they are connected at the elbow. No one is surprised by this because we can see that they are actually a single object called an arm.

Two photons can be, in a sense, joined together, meaning that they have correlations, too. In this case, we are (naively) surprised for three reasons. First, we think of photons as separate objects that cannot be joined—this is a mistake of understanding. Second, when we connect two photons, we only connect them in limited ways: The two photons may be wholly uncorrelated in terms of polarization, but strongly correlated in terms of energy.

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This year’s Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine have celebrated work that has been used to develop countless drugs and transform modern medicine, allowed physicists to observe one of the most mysterious particles, and provided a tool that could act as an on/off switch for brain cells. To find out more, Madeleine Finlay talks to our science editor, Ian Sample, and correspondents Nicola Davis and Linda Geddes

Nobel prize in medicine 2026 awarded for research into mysteries of brain

Nobel prize in physics goes to Francis Halzen for south pole work on neutrinos

Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for work on mirror-image molecules

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© Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP Pool/AP

© Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP Pool/AP

© Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP Pool/AP

By measuring the squishing and unsquishing of thorium-229 nuclei, two teams created a new type of clock that could someday beat the precision of atomic clocks.

Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Halzen spearheaded the development and construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, enabling physicists to capture high-energy neutrinos created in the distant universe.

“It was a great surprise, and I obviously didn’t expect it,” Halzen said during a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden, speaking by phone from Italy. While the Nobel was awarded to Halzen, he emphasized that his work was the result of a “large collaboration” with other researchers.

“This reflects on the really courageous people who joined me in this project when really no respectable conservative physicist would have joined me. But many talented people did, and that’s why I’m here,” he said.

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The Nobel Committee honored Francis Halzen for his “vision and scientific leadership” of a telescope within the ice at the South Pole.

© Christine Olsson/TT News Agency, via Reuters

We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.

© Photo illustration by Jane Stockdale for The New York Times

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.

A hint of dark matter?

Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest (but not only) candidate being so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). But directly detecting WIMPs, or other alternative hypothetical dark matter particles, has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, however, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota. Those potentially exciting results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint available on the arXiv. (It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer review.)

The announcement came with strong caveats: the signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might just be a statistical fluke. Anyone who regularly follows dark matter news knows that past tantalizing anomalies evaporated as more data came in. But the LUX-ZEPLIN team was unable to account for this event and decided to report their result to the broader physics community. They are still collecting data, as is the XENONnT at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And China's PandaX detector is currently being built.

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© Greg Stewart, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

When looking back on the physics awards, it's clear they have missed some of the most important discoveries in the field. In fact, for various reasons, several foundational concepts in modern physics were never honored with a Nobel.

Here is a list of five seminal developments in physics that did not earn a Nobel Prize—at least, not yet—in increasing order of obviousness, by Adrian Cho

An attempt to save NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from dropping out of orbit fell short, but the behind-the-scenes machinations required just to make a rescue possible deserve recognition, government and commercial space officials said in a recounting of the mission.

The rescue mission was developed by Katalyst Space Technologies, working under a $30 million contract awarded by NASA last September. NASA gave Katalyst nine months to build and launch a satellite to capture Swift flying some 200 miles above the Earth and boost it into a higher orbit.

Katalyst's rescue spacecraft, known as Link, successfully launched July 3 and completed some of its initial checkouts before a malfunction caused it to spin out of control a few weeks later. NASA announced in August that Link would not be able to reach Swift as intended, and the rescue mission was aborted.

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© NASA/Sophia Roberts

Physics simulator game: Nuclear Design Bureau (Steam) Kerbal Space Program for nuclear kaboom, if much, much less cute. Design your own nuclear weapon.

Draw the cross section of a nuclear weapon of your own design. Brick of U-235 goes here, explosives go there, etc. Hit the detonate button and get a realistic physics simulation (oops, K less than 1, subcritical, try again). Don't worry, the game's tutorial will walk you through the details of the science. Absolutely not the cuteness of Kerbal. Lots of charts and graphs. Interesting charts and graphs if you like this sort of thing, or want to learn by doing. $6.50 CDN on Steam. I'm sure you are doing this only with peaceful purposes in mind, like a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft or a nuclear bomb civil engineering project (Project Orion and Project Plowshares)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, will dismantle the Large Hadron Collider, which helped discover the so-called God Particle, in order to build a more powerful particle accelerator.

A lone signal from an experiment in South Dakota doesn’t fit the profile of any other known particles, physicists say.