Researchers are using surprising ideas and mathematical tools originating in string theory to guide research into strange materials that are cropping up in condensed matter laboratories.
The unusual arrangement of cells in a chicken's eye constitutes the first known biological occurrence of a potentially new state of matter known as "disordered hyperuniformity."
Tiny crystals, probed with a device called a resonant ultrasound spectrometer, are helping solve the long-time mystery of “pseudogap behavior” in copper oxide superconductors.