Volume 8 Issue 2, February 2026

Kelly Fast, Acting Planetary Defense Officer for NASA, describes the global network working to detect and assess asteroids that could potentially threaten Earth.

Omokhuwele Umoru explains how generative adversarial networks can help to predict the phases of high-entropy alloys.

Nickelates have recently joined the cuprates and iron pnictides as unconventional superconductors with transition temperatures above 80 K. This Review looks for their shared superconducting mechanisms for building a coherent theoretical framework.

Yang–Mills theory is the basis of the standard model of particle physics. The Yang–Mills Millennium Prize problem, to show that the theory is mathematically well defined and that it has the mass gap property, is one of the great challenges of mathematical physics. This Review explores the problem from both physical and mathematical points of view and surveys promising approaches from recent years.

Event generators are used to simulate and describe hadronic collisions in accelerator experiments, but often struggle to describe data from astroparticle experiments that probe hadronic collisions at extreme energies. This Review highlights the complementarity between accelerator and astroparticle experiments that can be exploited, to gain new insights into the nature of hadronic collisions and increase model accuracy across both domains.

Quantum batteries are miniaturized energy storage devices that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics. This Perspective highlights major theoretical and experimental advances, promising directions and key challenges in this emerging field.