
Physics
No player can return this killer shot. Physics explains how it works
Squash’s killer “nick shot” has a formula. It’s all about height and timing, a new study shows.
By Celina Zhao
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Squash’s killer “nick shot” has a formula. It’s all about height and timing, a new study shows.
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
In chess as in life, people use memory as a shortcut for decision-making. That strategy can backfire when the present doesn’t resemblance the past.
Salto the jumping robot can take a flying leap and land on a narrow pipe — just like a squirrel soaring from branch to branch.
Time-lapse video shows how a mushroom coral polyp pulses and inflates, flinging its soft body into micro-hops to slowly move itself to a new location.
A deep-sea detector glimpsed a particle with 220 million billion electron volts of energy — around 20 times as energetic as any neutrino seen before.
Humankind accomplished new feats in space this year, including scooping up some of the moon’s farside and launching a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
An experiment reveals that a bio-solution to humans’ microplastics mess is likely to fall short, but could inspire other ways to attack the problem.
A solar wind event days before the NASA probe flyby in 1986 may have compressed the planet’s magnetosphere, making it look odder than it usually is.
The mutant of the lab-studied Synechococcus elongatus has traits good for ocean carbon storage.
David Baker figured out how to build entirely new proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI tool to predict protein structures.
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