If it hadn’t been for a shortfall in the supply of random numbers, one of history’s most infamous spy rings might never have been exposed. The shortage occurred in late 1941, two years after the start ...

"As blocks are added, random misalignments gradually modify the stack's centre of gravity. When this exceeds a critical limit, the stack collapses." This approach revealed two main areas of ...

Physicists in France are the first to create a random laser in a cloud of cold atoms under laboratory conditions. The effect was first seen decades ago in stellar clouds and the team believes that its ...

As someone whose primary claim to fame is writing physics books starring a talking dog, I am obviously often on the lookout for pop-physics books that take a different slant on the subject. I ran ...

In September 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that American and British intelligence agencies had successfully cracked much of the online encryption internet users used to keep their ...

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was handed out to people for pulling off what Marvel writers only pretend to understand: showing that quantum weirdness isn’t confined to subatomic particles. They ...

Random numbers are used in several important technologies including cryptography and numerical simulation. However, large sequences of truly random numbers are notoriously difficult to generate – and ...

'Random lasing' in disordered materials was first shown over 20 years ago, but the mechanism by which it occurs is much debated. High-resolution imaging correlated to the excitation of random lasing ...