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An experiment has physicists arguing over how reality works in the quantum world. Plus: the distinct brain patterns of babies in bilingual homes. 

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Quantum Cheshire Cat

A new version of a strange experiment in which a particle’s properties are separated from its body or mass, called the quantum Cheshire Cat, has physicists arguing over whether these disembodied properties are quite what they seem and how reality works in the quantum world. In 2014, physicists experimentally demonstrated this strange effect – compared to the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which can disappear leaving only its grin – by apparently measuring a subatomic particle known as a neutron and one of its quantum properties, called spin, divorced from one another and in separate places. Now, researchers at Chapman University in California, have proposed a more general version of the experiment, in which a particle’s mass is separated from its momentum. Read more

Growing up bilingual

Babies as young as 4 months old who are born into a bilingual environment show distinct brain patterns related to how they process speech. Researchers compared how 31 babies who only heard Spanish and 26 babies who heard both Spanish and Basque, all aged 4 months, responded to Spanish recordings of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The areas of the brain that were activated were larger and wider in the latter babies, who also seemed to utilise both sides of their brains’ hemispheres. This may help these infants be sensitive to linguistic differences and enable them to learn to tell two languages apart at a younger age. Read more

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Takeshi Hosaka

As we contemplate our ever-more constrained future, living in small apartments in cities, we must surely consider our health, writes Simon Ings. Damp, mould and other problems endemic to small spaces aren’t easily addressed, especially in urban areas, where throwing open the windows and letting in air filled with particulates, spores, moulds and pollen can make matters measurably worse. But how exactly are we to live and thrive in the spaces cities afford us? Curator Clare Farrow’s new exhibition, Small Spaces in the City: Rethinking inside the box, at the ROCA London Gallery, brings together ideas and designs from around the world. Read more

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Kurt Jacobsen at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark on the weight-loss drug Wegovy’s popularity, reported by the BBC.

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Alexandra Thompson

Assistant news editor, New Scientist
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