Fortnight ending Saturday 15th August 2026. Read time: about 7 mins

A Level results day has landed in the middle of a fortnight in which the proton became less cartoonable, a black hole acquired something resembling a stellar atmosphere, Voyager 2 was granted another stay of execution and British fusion researchers persuaded a particularly troublesome plasma to behave itself. There is also a useful warning from pupils about AI: many want it in lessons, but rather fewer want it doing the thinking for them. Sensible lot.

New Scientist’s headline is unusually justified. A team has made the first direct extraction from experimental data of “twist-three” parton distributions that encode interference between quark–gluon–quark states inside the proton. The correlations came out non-zero at roughly the 2 − 3⁢𝜎 level. In other words, the familiar picture of independently distributed quarks and gluons is missing measurable quantum correlations. The underlying work was published in Physical Review Letters on 3 August.

For A-level particle physics, this is a useful corrective to the inevitable three-balls-in-a-bag proton picture: valence quarks remain useful bookkeeping, but the actual proton is a QCD many-body system involving quarks, antiquarks, gluons and interference between quantum states. Nobody needs twist-three PDFs on the board. The important bit is knowing where the simple model stops.

Source: Physical Review Letters

The Guardian reported this week on MoM-BH*-1, observed by JWST at redshift z ≈ 7.76. The open Nature paper is more interesting — and more cautious — than the headline. Its enormous Balmer break is stronger than the researchers can explain with a normal stellar population, while broad hydrogen emission, dense-gas absorption and its compactness point towards a black-hole-powered source.

Their model puts an accreting black hole inside an extraordinarily dense, turbulent gas envelope tens of astronomical units across. That produces some distinctly star-like spectral features without requiring the light to come mainly from stars. The authors explicitly call the modelling simplified, so “black-hole star” remains an interpretation rather than a new box to add permanently to the taxonomy. The physics lesson is excellent nevertheless: spectroscopy can eliminate an apparently obvious model before it tells you what the replacement must be.

Source: Nature

UKAEA’s latest MAST Upgrade campaign produced more than 1,100 plasmas and reached the machine’s highest plasma pressure while suppressing the edge instabilities that can dump substantial stored energy into tokamak walls. Researchers operated in several stable regimes, including QCE, QH and I modes, and used resonant magnetic perturbations to control edge-localised modes.

There is some particularly teachable engineering here. The team demonstrated a world-first control system that uses visible deuterium emission to detect tiny vertical plasma imbalances in real time, while adding nitrogen near the edge makes part of the exhaust power leave as radiation before it reaches solid surfaces. Fusion is not simply “make it hotter”; it is increasingly “make it hot, keep it stable, measure it quickly and stop it cooking the machine”.

Notable headings from this press release include: The Only Way Is Up, Depeche Mode, Under Pressure, and my personal favourite, Drop It Like It’s Hot!

Source: UK Atomic Energy Authority

NASA’s Swift observatory has helped confirm a tidal disruption event more than 30,000 light-years from the centre of its apparent host galaxy. The flare came from a black hole of roughly one million solar masses in a system about 750 million light-years away. It is one of only a very small number of confirmed off-centre events of this kind.

The interesting bit is not merely another unfortunate star. Tidal disruption events can reveal otherwise dark black holes, so finding one this far from a galactic nucleus offers a way to search for supermassive black holes displaced during galaxy mergers. Swift measured the ultraviolet emission at around 30,000 degrees Celsius; future Rubin and Roman surveys should find substantially larger samples. The tidal physics also gives us this fortnight’s derivation below.

Source: NASA

Curiosity has entered a landscape covered in polygonal fractures around 4–8 cm across. Similar features can be produced by old mud cracks, repeated heating and cooling, or compression of buried sediment forcing water out. Curiosity’s team is therefore measuring both the geometry and chemistry rather than simply declaring “ancient water” and going home.

That makes the image unusually useful for teaching the distinction between observation, mechanism and inference. The observation is polygonal cracking. Several mechanisms can produce it. Further measurements are needed to discriminate between them. Who this is for: GCSE space physics or particle-model enrichment, and A-level materials/thermal physics where students are ready to discuss stress, contraction and evidence for competing models.

Source: BBC Sky at Night Magazine

The new Hubble analysis of Andromeda combines two surveys covering roughly two-thirds of the galaxy’s disc and measurements of about 200 million stars. NASA’s original release includes two labelled regions that make the physics especially clear: populations containing more massive, short-lived stars look bluer and reveal more recent star formation.

The analysis finds Andromeda’s star-formation rate declining over roughly 500 million years, with much recent activity concentrated in a ring about 32,000 light-years from its centre.

Who this is for: A-level astrophysics/space options, or GCSE space as extension material when you want an astronomical image to carry information rather than merely decorate the slide.

Source: NASA Hubble

Across the UK, 28.5% of A-level entries received A or A*, up slightly from 28.3% last year, while 97.5% received A*–E. Ofqual’s assessment of England is that outcomes in most large subjects remained broadly stable, with movements of less than one percentage point. So this is not a year in which the grading system itself has suddenly wandered off.

For physics departments, the participation figure is worth noticing. Provisional England entries for A-level Physics rose from 42,025 to 42,765, an increase of 1.8%. That is welcome in absolute terms, but England’s 18-year-old population grew more quickly — by about 4.3% — so physics has not quite kept pace with cohort growth. That is probably the more useful recruitment statistic to carry into September than a triumphant “entries are up”.

Source: Ofqual

Oxford University Press’s Navigating AI in Education draws on a survey of 3,100 UK 13–18-year-olds plus qualitative work with more than 700 pupils. Only 44% regarded using AI to complete an entire homework assignment as cheating, and just 15% said they had received enough guidance from school. Yet when pupils in the qualitative study were actually offered AI for a task, 72% of those with access chose not to use it.

More interestingly, pupils preferred AI that helps them think: 44% selected systems that suggest tasks to build understanding and 41% preferred being asked questions that lead them towards an answer; only 22% chose simply being given the answer. OUP’s practical teacher guidance recommends starting with low-risk tasks, providing the model with the actual resource/specification/mark scheme it should work from, and treating output as a first draft because confident errors and misconceptions remain entirely possible.

One classroom move in the report is particularly defensible for physics: give pupils an AI-generated answer and ask them to locate the errors, improve it or compare it against the mark scheme. That makes the AI output the thing being evaluated rather than the thing replacing the evaluation. The caveat is important: this is publisher-led research based substantially on reported attitudes, and OUP itself warns against feeding pupil data into unapproved tools or letting AI become the final authority on curriculum or assessment.

Source: Oxford University Press

Wednesday’s total solar eclipse produced some spectacular images across Europe, from the solar corona hanging over crowds in Spain to the sudden darkness of totality in Iceland. Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain and a small part of Portugal sat inside the path of totality, while the UK got a deep partial eclipse — with more than 90% of the Sun covered across much of the country.

The timing made some of the photographs particularly good. Across Spain the eclipse arrived with the Sun already low in the western sky, putting the thin solar crescent, Baily’s beads and corona against landscapes rather than an otherwise empty patch of midday sky. AP’s gallery is well worth a look even if you spent yesterday evening staring through eclipse glasses yourself. Sometimes the photograph does rather better than the phone held hopefully against them.

Source: Associated Press

The CNN account has the appealing phrase “Big Bang fix”; NASA’s engineering update explains what it means. Voyager 2’s radioisotope generators produce a little less electrical power every year, so controllers periodically reconfigure which devices are powered and replace higher-power functions where possible. The latest changes should allow its three remaining science instruments to keep operating for at least another year rather than losing another instrument by the end of 2026.

It is a lovely piece of real engineering: the mission is no longer constrained principally by propulsion, but by an ever-tightening electrical power budget aboard hardware launched in 1977.

Source: NASA

IBM and University of Chicago researchers report a verified computation beyond the practical reach of leading classical simulation methods. Their encoded circuit used 70 logical qubits, 2,415 logical two-qubit operations and 468 logical T gates; the quantum calculation took about 15 minutes. The clever part is verification: the circuit structure lets the researchers estimate whether the hard-to-simulate output is nevertheless being produced faithfully.

The asterisk is the useful bit for students. “Quantum advantage” does not mean quantum computers have suddenly replaced ordinary ones, or that this task has immediate commercial value. It means a carefully defined quantum computation has crossed a particular classical-simulation threshold while remaining experimentally checkable. Also, the paper was released as a preprint. Big milestone; keep the bunting proportionate.

Source: Phys.org

Deep imaging of IC 1101 has finally allowed astronomers to place its outer stellar edge at about 260 kiloparsecs from the centre, giving a diameter of roughly 520 kpc — around 1.7 million light-years. The researchers estimate about 3.4 trillion solar masses in stars, although defining exactly where a brightest-cluster galaxy ends and diffuse intracluster light begins is part of the measurement problem.

The Phys.org write-up is worth keeping simply because it explains how astronomers measure something whose “edge” is not an edge at all: ultra-deep imaging, careful modelling of scattered starlight and a radial brightness profile. The underlying work is currently a preprint.

Source: Phys.org

The Economist noted the gathering, but the useful free route is the ICHEP 2026 site and experiment pages. The field’s flagship biennial conference ran in Natal, Brazil, from 30 July to 5 August — the first ICHEP held in Latin America.

For a manageable skim, ATLAS has a single page collecting its new ICHEP results, including work on Z-boson-pair polarisation, double-Higgs production and searches beyond the Standard Model, using the completed Run 2 and Run 3 datasets. This is a much better route into “what is particle physics actually doing now?” than trying to read an entire conference programme before breakfast.

Source: ATLAS Collaboration at CERN

This one is for the teacher rather than the Friday-afternoon Year 10 class. The ICHEP session on particle-physics frontiers and future strategy is a useful way to hear the field discussing what comes after the current LHC programme, with the conference itself arriving just as Run 3 gives way to the long upgrade period. It is the sort of background watch that makes the A-level particle chapter feel rather less like physics ended after the Higgs discovery.

Source: ICHEP 2026

A Maltese cross tube lets pupils see that cathode rays travel in straight lines, respond to magnetic fields and consist of charged particles. It is also exactly the sort of apparatus that looks straightforward until an EHT lead appears and everyone suddenly remembers an urgent photocopying job.

The Collins AQA A-level teacher pack contains unusually useful technician notes. Its arrangement earths the anode, marks the cathode with an EHT warning, uses shrouded leads where necessary, and tells the demonstrator to switch off the filament and return the anode voltage to zero immediately afterwards. It also explains the useful “clover-leaf” effect when the cross is disconnected and becomes negatively charged.

The important early-career point is to understand which terminal is at high potential relative to earth, not simply to think “red lead dangerous”. Follow the instructions for your own tube and supply, alongside your school’s practical-safety procedures; EHT arrangements are not a place for improvisation.

Source: Collins AQA A-level Physics Teacher Pack/ CLEAPSS

Misconception: A star is shredded because a black hole exerts an overwhelmingly large gravitational force on the whole star.

Better framing: The crucial quantity is the difference in gravitational acceleration across the star. The near side is accelerated more strongly than the far side; when that tidal difference exceeds the star’s own ability to hold itself together, disruption begins. NASA’s newly reported off-centre event is a particularly neat real example.

Why students get stuck: Black-hole language tends to emphasise “pull” or “suction”, while the physics of disruption is really about a field gradient. The same distinction is why the Moon raises tides on Earth without dragging Earth itself apart.

Source: NASA

Source: NASA

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” — Michael Faraday

Faraday wrote the fuller thought in his laboratory journal on 19 March 1849, adding that experiment is what ultimately decides whether an idea is consistent with nature. A fitting note to end an issue featuring black-hole stars, quantum protons and several reminders that physics is often stranger than the simplified version we teach.

Source: Oxford Reference

The Physics Staffroom is a human–AI collaboration. AI helps gather and format material, but each issue’s selection, verification, editing, design, and regular features are all done by a humble, human physics teacher! 🤓

You're spending 40 hours a week writing code that AI could do in 10.

While you're grinding through pull requests, 200k+ engineers at OpenAI, Google & Meta are using AI to ship faster.

How?

The Code newsletter teaches them exactly which AI tools to use and how to use them.

Here's what you get:

Sign up and get access to the Ultimate Claude code guide to ship 5X faster.

Join 200K+ engineers

The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

Sign Up Free