Physics World Weekly Podcast

My guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast is Liz Martin, who is sustainability lead at IOP Publishing. We chat about how the scholarly publisher has reduced its carbon emissions by 36% when compared to a 2020 baseline – and the challenges and opportunities for achieving further reductions. Martin talks about the importance of cooperation and partnerships – both internal and external – to achieving environmental goals. This includes engaging with both suppliers and employees on how to reduce carbon emissions. IOP Publishing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institute of Physics, which is the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland. It produces over 100 scholarly journals, around half of which are published jointly with or on behalf of partner societies and research organizations. Physics World is also brought to you by IOP Publishing. You can download a PDF of IOP Publishing’s Sustainability Report 2025 here.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features a conversation with Dave Robertson, who was elected member of the UK parliament for Lichfield in 2024. Robertson spent eight years teaching physics after studying the subject at the University of Liverpool. He then worked for a teachers’ union, which inspired him to become a candidate for the Labour Party. He chats with Physics World’s Matin Durrani about his transition from the classroom to the committee room and how parliament “is a truly bonkers and truly bizarre workplace”. Robertson has already sponsored three physics-related events at the Palace of Westminster and he talks about his membership of various cross-party parliamentary groups – including those on nuclear energy and space. Robertson has not forgotten his roots in education and is adamant that the UK must address its nationwide shortage of physics teachers. He also urges physicists to speak out about how they can help address many of the world’s problems, notably climate change.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, we hear from a trio of scientists with a common interest in the physics of droplets. Specifically, Joe Forth, Rob Malinowski and Giorgio Volpe share a fascination with droplets that are “animate” – that is, capable of responding to their surroundings in ways that resemble the behaviour of living organisms. As they explain in the podcast, systems must tick three boxes to qualify as animate. First, they must be active, able to use energy from their environment to do work and perform tasks. Second, they must be adaptive, able to move between different dynamical states in response to changes to their environment or their own internal states. Finally, they must be autonomous, able to process multiple inputs and choose how to respond to them without intervention from the outside world. Incorporating all these behaviours into a droplet – or a system of many droplets – is challenging. The boundary between autonomous and non-autonomous systems is proving especially hard to overcome, and Volpe, Malinowski and Forth have a friendly disagreement over whether any droplet-based system has managed it yet. Crosses disciplinary borders Part of the challenge, they say, is that the field crosses disciplinary borders. Although Volpe thinks the community of droplet researchers is getting better at finding a common vocabulary for discussions, Forth jokes that it is still the case that “the chemists are scared of physics, the physicists are scared of chemists, everyone is scared of biology”. The potential rewards of overcoming these fears are great, however, with possible future applications of animate droplets ranging from consumer products such as deodorant to oil spill clean-up. This discussion is based on a Perspective article that Volpe (a professor of soft matter in the chemistry department at University College London, UK), Malinowski (a research fellow in soft matter physics in the same department) and Forth (a colloid scientist and lecturer in the chemistry department at the University of Liverpool, UK) wrote for the journal EPL, which sponsors this episode of the podcast.

“Surround sound for biological cells,” is how Luke Cox describes the ultrasound technology that Impulsonics has developed to solve the “unsticking problem” in biomedical science. Cox is co-founder and chief executive of UK-based Impulsonics, which spun-out of the University of Bristol in 2023. He is also my guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. He explains why living cells grown in a petri dish tend to stick together, and why this can be a barrier to scientific research and the development of new medical treatments. The system uses an array of ultrasound transducers to focus sound so that it frees-up and manipulates cells in a way that does not alter their biological properties. This is unlike chemical unsticking processes, which can change cells and impact research results. We also chat about Cox’s career arc from PhD student to chief executive and explore opportunities for physicists in the biomedical industry. The following articles are mentioned in the podcast: “Materials probed by ultrasound…” podcast with Bruce Drinkwater “Portable imaging system targets eye diseases…” podcast with Siloton “Holographic acoustic tweezers could be used to create 3D displays” research done in Bruce Drinkwater’s lab

Later this year, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its huge experiments will shutdown for the High Luminosity upgrade. When complete in 2030, the particle-collision rate in the LHC will be increased by a factor of 10 and the experiments will be upgraded so that they can better capture and analyse the results of these collisions. This will allow physicists to study particle interactions at unprecedented precision and could even reveal new physics beyond the Standard Model. Earlier this year, however, the UK government announced that it will no longer fund the upgrade of the LHCb experiment on the LHC, which is run by a collaboration of more than 1700 physicists worldwide. The UK had promised to contribute about £50 million to the upgrade – which is a significant chunk of the overall cost. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I am in conversation with the particle physicist Tim Gershon, who is based at the UK’s University of Warwick. Gershon is spokesperson-elect for the LHCb collaboration and is playing a leading role in the upgrade. Gershon explains that UK participation and leadership has been crucial for the success of LHCb and cautions that the future of the experiment and the future of UK particle physics have been imperilled by the funding cut. We also chat about recent discoveries made by LHCb and look forward to what new physics the experiment could find after the upgrade.

Developing practical technologies for quantum information systems requires the cooperation of academic researchers, national laboratories and industry. That is the mission of the  Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), which is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. The QSA’s director Bert de Jong is my guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. His academic research focuses on computational chemistry and he explains how this led him to realise that quantum phenomena can be used to develop technologies for solving scientific problems. In our conversation, de Jong explains why the QSA is developing a range of  qubit platforms − including neutral atoms, trapped ions, and superconducting qubits – rather than focusing on a single architecture. He champions the co-development of quantum hardware and software to ensure that quantum computing is effective at solving a wide range of problems from particle physics to chemistry. We also chat about the QSA’s strong links to industry and de Jong reveals his wish list of scientific problems that he would solve if he had access today to a powerful quantum computer.   This podcast is supported by Oxford Ionics.

Science fiction became science fact in 2022 when NASA’s DART mission took the first steps towards creating a planetary defence system that could someday protect Earth from a catastrophic asteroid collision. However, much more work on asteroid deflection is needed from the latest generation of researchers – including Rahil Makadia, who has just completed a PhD in aerospace engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, Makadia talks about his work on how we could deflect asteroids away from Earth. We also chat about the potential threats posed by near-Earth asteroids – from shattered windows to global destruction. Makadia’s stresses the importance of getting a deflection right the first time, because his calculations reveal that a poorly deflected asteroid could return to Earth someday. In November, he published a paper that explored how a bad deflection could send an asteroid into a “keyhole” that guarantees its return. But it is not all gloom and doom, Makadia points out that our current understanding of near-Earth asteroids suggests that no major collision will occur for at least 100 years. So even if there is a threat on the horizon, we have lots of time to develop deflection strategies and technologies.

Margaret Harris, a Physics World journalist who steers the conversation, chats with Amanda Randles, a Duke computer scientist and biomedical engineer known for physics-based, high-performance simulations of the circulatory system. They discuss medical digital twins, building patient-specific vascular models from imaging and wearables, tackling multiscale physics and petabyte-scale data, and using simulations to study metastasis and blood disorders.

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features Todd McNutt, who is a medical physicist at Johns Hopkins University and the founder of Oncospace. In a conversation with Physics World’s Tami Freeman, McNutt explains how an artificial intelligence-based tool called Plan AI can help improve the quality of radiation therapy plans for cancer treatments. As well as discussing the benefits that Plan AI brings to radiotherapy patients and cancer treatment centres, they examine its evolution from an idea developed by an academic collaboration to a clinical product offered today by Sun Nuclear, a US manufacturer of radiation equipment and software. This podcast is sponsored by Sun Nuclear.

Debbie Callahan, plasma physicist and chief strategy officer at Focused Energy with 35 years at the National Ignition Facility. She explains laser-driven inertial fusion, the LightHouse pilot plant and the Pearl fuel capsule. Discussion covers laser efficiency, target manufacturability at high shot rates, tritium breeding and engineering a pathway to a commercial fusion power plant.