MOST people don’t get confused until after they have finished their beer. For physicists, however, the problems begin before they have even taken a sip.
Just ask Arnd Leike, a particle physicist at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Last year, in what is probably the best experiment in the world, Leike took a careful look at the foaming head on top of his glass of beer. This wasn’t just a bit of fun: the idea was that by measuring how quickly the foam fades away, his students would learn how to analyse scientific data. But it appears to have reached the parts of physics that other experiments can’t reach: Leike and his students unwittingly uncovered a disturbing puzzle.
We already know that things like forest fires, Alzheimer’s disease and the stock market are underpinned by a single universal rule. Physicists call it a power law – a relationship between two quantities such that one is proportional to a fixed power of the other. Power laws are held in high regard because they can describe all sorts of complicated phenomena, from the behaviour of neutron stars to the way traffic jams form. So you might expect that fading froth would behave the same, right? Wrong. Beer foam, according to Leike’s experiment, lives by its own rules.
It’s an experiment that earned him this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for physics. The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded for scientific achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced. But at New ÒÁÈ˾þà we couldn’t give a Castlemaine XXXX about that. Armed with a measuring cylinder and stopwatch – and some beer, of course – we dared to repeat Leike’s experiment. Our mission: to find a beer whose…
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)