Thermodynamic origin of the phonon Hall effect in a honeycomb antiferromagnet

October 22, 2026| Source: Science

The underlying mechanism of the thermal Hall effect generated by phonons in a variety of insulators is yet to be identified. In this work, we report on a sizable thermal Hall conductivity in nickel phosphorus trisulfide (NiPS 3 ), a van der Waals stack of honeycomb layers with a zigzag antiferromagnetic order. The longitudinal (κ aa ) and the transverse (κ ab ) thermal conductivities peak at the same temperature, and the thermal Hall angle, at this peak, respects a previously identified bound. T

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Historical trends show more declining than increasing species among European pollinators.

Anthropogenic global change presents a growing threat to insect pollinators. Yet, long-term, continental-scale assessments of their population trends remain limited. Here, we leveraged a curated database of over four million occurrence records, covering 88% of extant bee and hoverfly species in Europe, to assess persistence, richness, and occupancy trends over the past century. Species persistence at the European level was relatively high, with modern records available for 87% of bee and 89% of

Physical/TechOctober 27, 2026

Extensive glacier loss in the coterminous United States.

Glaciers populate the mountain ranges of the western conterminous United States and despite their importance to alpine hydrology, their area and volume change have never been comprehensively evaluated. Our study shows that since the mid-twentieth century about one-quarter of the glaciers have disappeared and the overall area and volume are reduced by one-third. The pattern of glacier shrinkage suggests most glaciers in the conterminous United States are largely maintained by local topographic in

Physical/TechOctober 27, 2026

Scientists disrupt less but more persistently with career aging.

Disruption describes the extent to which a scientific work overturns the prior knowledge on which it builds and leads to a new line of research. A scientist's tendency to produce disruptive work has been found recently to decline over the career. However, the disruption index captures only how strongly a paper overturns prior work and ignores whether that disruption is later accepted or overturned by subsequent research. The persistent disruption (PD) framework adds this second perspective, iden

Physical/TechOctober 27, 2026

Geography of groundwater use and depletion in internationally shared aquifers.

Transboundary aquifers (TBAs) underlie 35% of global groundwater-irrigated cropland, yet few are covered by formal cooperative arrangements. Whether this limited cooperation is consequential depends in part on where groundwater is used within shared aquifers, because pumping far from international borders may generate little cross-border impact. Combining [Formula: see text]116,000 well observations with global irrigation data across all 426 known TBAs, we assess how groundwater use and depletio

Physical/TechOctober 27, 2026

Programmable chemoenzymatic synthesis of a keratan sulfate N -glycan library for glycocode decoding.

Keratan sulfate (KS) is a unique and widely distributed glycosaminoglycans family implicated in diverse biological processes. KS features branched glycan architectures with diverse sialylation and sulfation patterns, encoding a vastly expanded chemical and biological space. The limited accessibility of well-defined structures has hindered precise investigations into the KS biological functions. Here we report a programmable chemoenzymatic platform for assembling a 106-membered library of KS N -g