This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features an interview with Panicos Kyriacou, who is chief scientist at the UK-based start-up Crainio. The company has developed a non-invasive way of using light to measure the pressure inside the skull. Knowing this intracranial pressure is crucial when diagnosing traumatic brain injury, which a leading cause of death and disability. Today, the only way to assess intracranial pressure is to insert a sensor into the patient’s brain, so Crainio’s non-invasive technique could revolutionize how brain injuries are diagnosed and treated.

Kyriacou tells Physics World’s Tami Freeman why it is important to assess a patient’s intracranial pressure as soon as possible after a head injury. He explains how Crainio’s optical sensor measures blood flow in the brain and then uses machine learning to deduce the intracranial pressure.

Kyriacou is also professor of engineering at City St George’s University of London, where the initial research for the sensor was done. He recalls how Crainio was spun out of the university and how it is currently in a second round of clinical trials.

As well as being non-invasive, Crainio’s technology could reduce the cost of determining intracranial pressure and make it possible to make measurements in the field, shortly after injuries occur.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features William Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms using laser light.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Physics World’s Margaret Harris, Phillips talks about his long-time fascination with quantum physics – which began with an undergraduate project on electron spin resonance. Phillips chats about quirky quantum phenomena such as entanglement and superposition and explains how they are exploited in atomic clocks and quantum computing. He also looks to the future of quantum technologies and stresses the importance of curiosity-led research.

Phillips has spent much of his career at US’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland and he also a professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

This podcast is supported by Atlas Technologies, specialists in custom aluminium and titanium vacuum chambers as well as bonded bimetal flanges and fittings used everywhere from physics labs to semiconductor fabs.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Global Physics Summit (GPS) in Anaheim California, where I rubbed shoulders with 15,0000 fellow physicists. The best part of being there was chatting with lots of different people, and in this podcast I share two of those conversations.

First up is Chetan Nayak, who is a senior researcher at Microsoft’s Station Q quantum computing research centre here in California. In February, Nayak and colleagues claimed a breakthrough in the development of topological quantum bits (qubits) based on Majorana zero modes. In principle, such qubits could enable the development of practical quantum computers, but not all physicists were convinced, and the announcement remains controversial – despite further results presented by Nayak in a packed session at the GPS.

I caught up with Nayak after his talk and asked him about the challenges of achieving Microsoft’s goal of a superconductor-based topological qubit. That conversation is the first segment of today’s podcast.

Up next, I chat with Atharva Lele about the physics of manu jumping, which is a competitive aquatic sport that originates from the Māori and Pasifika peoples of New Zealand. Jumpers are judged by the height of their splash when they enter the water, and the best competitors use a very distinctive technique.

Lele is an undergraduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, and is part of team that analysed manu techniques in a series of clever experiments that included plunging robots. He explains how to make a winning manu jump while avoiding the pain of a belly flop.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

When physicists got their first insights into the quantum world more than a century ago, they found it puzzling to say the least. But gradually, and through clever theoretical and experimental work, a consistent quantum theory emerged.

Two physicists that who played crucial roles in this evolution were Albert Einstein and John Bell. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast the theoretical crypto-physicist Artur Ekert explains how a quantum paradox identified by Einstein and colleagues in 1935 inspired a profound theoretical breakthrough by Bell three decades later.

Ekert, who splits his time between the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, describes how he used Bell’s theorem to create a pioneering quantum cryptography protocol and he also chats about current research in quantum physics and beyond.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Ileana Silvestre Patallo, a medical physicist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, and Ruth McLauchlan, consultant radiotherapy physicist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Physics World’s Tami Freeman, Patallo and McLauchlan explain how ionizing radiation such as X-rays and proton beams interact with our bodies and how radiation is being used to treat diseases including cancer.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, we explore how computational physics is being used to develop new quantum materials; and we look at how ultrasound can help detect breast cancer.

Our first guest is Bhaskaran Muralidharan, who leads the Computational Nanoelectronics & Quantum Transport Group at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. In a conversation with Physics World’s Hamish Johnston, he explains how computational physics is being used to develop new materials and devices for quantum science and technology. He also shares his personal perspective on quantum physics in this International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

Our second guest is Daniel Sarno of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, who is an expert in the medical uses of ultrasound. In a conversation with Physics World’s Tami Freeman, Sarno explains why conventional mammography can struggle to detect cancer in patients with higher density breast tissue. This is a particular problem because women with such tissue are at higher risk of developing the disease. To address this problem, Sarno and colleagues have developed a ultrasound technique for measuring tissue density and are commercializing it via a company called sona.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, online editor Margaret Harris chats about her recent trip to CERN. There, she caught up with physicists working on some of the lab’s most exciting experiments and heard from CERN’s current and future leaders.

Founded in Geneva in 1954, today CERN is most famous for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is currently in its winter shutdown. Harris describes her descent 100 m below ground level to visit the huge ATLAS detector and explains why some of its components will soon be updated as part of the LHC’s upcoming high luminosity upgrade.

She explains why new “crab cavities” will boost the number of particle collisions at the LHC. Among other things, this will allow physicists to better study how Higgs bosons interact with each other, which could provide important insights into the early universe.

Harris describes her visit to CERN’s Antimatter Factory, which hosts several experiments that are benefitting from a 2021 upgrade to the lab’s source of antiprotons. These experiments measure properties of antimatter – such as its response to gravity – to see if its behaviour differs from that of normal matter.

Harris also heard about the future of the lab from CERN’s director general Fabiola Gianotti and her successor Mark Thomson, who will take over next year.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features an interview with the theoretical physicist Jim Gates who is at the University of Maryland and Brown University – both in the US.

He updates his theorist’s bucket list, which he first shared with Physics World back in 2014. This is a list of breakthroughs in physics that Gates would like to see happen before he dies.

One list item – the observation or gravitational waves – happened in 2015 and Gates explains the importance of the discovery. He also explains why the observation of gravitons, which are central to a theory of quantum gravity, is on his bucket list.

Gates is known for his work on supersymmetry and superstring theory, so it is not surprising that experimental evidence for those phenomena are on the bucket list. Gates also talks about a new item on his list that concerns the connections between quantum physics and information theory.

In this interview with Physics World’s Margaret Harris, Gates also reflects on how the current political upheaval in the US is affecting science and society – and what scientists can do ensure that the public has faith in science.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology – or IYQ.

UNESCO kicked-off IYQ on 4–5 February at a gala opening ceremony in Paris. Physics World’s Matin Durrani was there, and he shares his highlights from the event in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast.

No fewer than four physics Nobel laureates took part in the ceremony alongside representatives from governments and industry. While some speakers celebrated the current renaissance in quantum research and the burgeoning quantum-technology sector, others called on the international community to ensure that people in all nations benefit from a potential quantum revolution – not just people in wealthier countries. The dangers of promising too much from quantum computers and other technologies, was also discussed – as Durrani explains.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at how climate and environmental change affect the efficiency of solar panels. Our guest is the climate scientist Sushovan Ghosh, who is lead author of paper that explores how aerosols, rising temperatures and other environmental factors will affect solar-energy output in India in the coming decades.

Today, India ranks fifth amongst nations in terms of installed solar-energy capacity and boosting this capacity will be crucial for the country’s drive to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 – when compared to 2005.

While much of India is blessed with abundant sunshine, it is experiencing a persistent decline in incoming solar radiation that is associated with aerosol pollution. What is more, higher temperatures associated with climate change reduce the efficiency of solar cells  – and their performance is also impacted in India by other climate-related phenomena.

In this podcast, Ghosh explains how changes in the climate and environment affect the generation of solar energy and what can be done to mitigate these effects.

Ghosh co-wrote the paper when at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and he is now at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain. His co-authors in Delhi were Dilip Ganguly, Sagnik Dey and Subhojit Ghoshal Chowdhury; and the paper is called, “Future photovoltaic potential in India: navigating the interplay between air pollution control and climate change mitigation”. It appears in Environmental Research Letters, which is published by IOP Publishing – which also brings you Physics World.