Volume 6 Issue 8, August 2024

The abstract as a 200-word summary that readers click through to access a full article is a staple of scientific publishing. But as Aileen Fyfe explains, this is only one of the roles that abstracts have performed in the history of scientific communication.

The successes of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the Joint European Torus (JET) showcase how fusion energy research requires bold decisions, teamwork and strong partnership with funders.

Contagion dynamics in higher-order networks have witnessed a surge of research and concepts, offering new insights but also exposing many diverse functional forms of spread. This Review provides a focused overview and proposes a unified formalism covering most of these forms.

Quantum superpositions of orders of operations can be used to create an indefinite causal order. This Review covers experimental implementations of such processes, focusing on characterization techniques, and discusses their applications and limitations.

Speckle can be harnessed for a wide variety of metrology applications. This Expert Recommendation proposes a standardized metric to allow comparisons of the intrinsic sensitivity of different approaches, and it clarifies when multiple scattering can be beneficial in increasing sensitivity of measurements.

Ab initio theories of superconductivity allow characterizing and predicting phonon-mediated superconductors. This Technical Review provides an analysis of the different theories, highlighting the main sources of error, either due to inherent approximations or arising from improper practices, and provides a comparison against experimental results.