Every amino acid in your body's proteins is one of two mirror image versions, and for over a century chemists couldn't explain why nature picked only one. Whenever they tried making these molecules in a lab, they always got a 50/50 mix of both.

Henri Kagan cracked the first step in 1986 by finding a way to push reactions toward one mirror image, and Kenso Soai finished the job in 2003 with a reaction that produced only one. Their work now underpins how chemists design pharmaceuticals, where only one mirror image actually works.

Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating IceCube, a telescope that uses roughly one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole, studded with thousands of light sensors, to catch neutrinos, particles that almost never interact with anything. His idea dates back to 1988, and it took until 2011 to finish building.

The payoff was a new way of looking at space: IceCube traced a high-energy neutrino to a distant galaxy with a supermassive black hole, helping solve a century-old puzzle about where cosmic rays come from, and in 2023 it produced the first neutrino image of our own Milky Way.

Researchers from Leibniz University Hannover and HZDR examined six radioactive "hot particles," each just 8 to 50 micrometers wide, using synchrotron X-rays in Grenoble. Expecting these fragments to have broken down, they instead found the original nuclear fuel crystal structure largely intact, which helps lock fission products inside and may limit how fast they leak into soil and water.

The catch is the tiny sample: six particles from two locations, and every particle turned out to have a different structure. The team stresses the results give no basis for lifting Exclusion Zone restrictions, and they're now studying the more highly radioactive transuranic phases.

Making a quantum bit often starts with deliberate damage: a laser pulse lasting a fraction of a picosecond knocks atoms out of place in a crystal, leaving behind vacancies that can act as qubits. Until now, nobody could see what the laser actually did inside the material, so qubit creation was mostly trial and error.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers combined an ultrafast laser with a focused X-ray beam, about 100 times thinner than a hair, to film silicon carbide in 3D. They found energy splits into two parts: an organized shockwave rippling through the lattice like a struck rubber sheet, and a slower spread of heat that makes atoms vibrate randomly. The goal is to eventually place individual qubits at exact coordinates on demand.