Considering we didn’t know of their existence just a century ago, our current knowledge of the structures and dynamics of galaxies is extraordinarily impressive. Among those who have enhanced our understanding of these building blocks of the Universe is Dr Uli Klein, a former researcher at the University of Bonn who spent 45 years as a radio astronomer. Now retired, Dr Klein is dedicated to sharing his extensive knowledge with students of astronomy and astrophysics, and with the wider public.

How did we get here? How could a universe with such simple physical laws have created something as complex as us? These questions are so fundamental that even after millennia, neither scientists nor philosophers have reached a universally satisfying answer. Dr Simon Friederich, a philosopher at the University of Groningen, focuses his attention on one particular suggested response to the mystery of our existence: that it can be explained by the hypothetical existence of many universes beyond our own. But like any worthy philosopher, he is aware of the limits of our ability to determine the truth in such fundamental matters.

For decades, physicists have struggled endlessly with the problem of quantum many-body systems – systems containing multiple quantum particles. Because of quantum properties, the ways in which these systems behave are unpredictable when using conventional mathematics, making theoretical simulations virtually impossible. Now, Dr Román Orús at the Johannes Guttenberg Universität in Germany (soon moving to the Donostia International Physics Centre in Spain) believes that tensor networks will become a vital tool when exploring these unconventional properties. He hopes that the cutting-edge mathematical technique will have implications in fields from artificial intelligence to quantum gravity.

Carbon nanotubes are a remarkable material – more conductive than copper and stronger than steel, yet just a billionth of a metre wide. Their application has already proven invaluable across science and engineering, but only recently have scientists looked into expanding their functionality even further as a unique source of light. Dr YuHuang Wang and his research group at the University of Maryland have now synthetically created ‘quantum defects’ in carbon nanotubes that luminesce brightly in the near infrared. This work has opened up opportunities for experiments in fields ranging from biochemistry to quantum physics.