Latest press releases
Radiotherapy of cancer: Toward better control of the proton beam
18 July 2025
Modern methods of radiotherapy would fight cancer more effectively and safely if treatments could be planned taking into account the radiation quality of the therapeutic proton beams. An achievement by physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow brings us closer to this goal.
Wound dressings made of drug-releasing polymers
4 June 2025
Electrospinning has been used to produce polymer fibres containing the well-known antibacterial drug metronidazole. The mats formed from them at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences could potentially be used as wound dressings, thanks to an appropriately selected polymeric structure capable of releasing the drug into the body in a controlled manner.
Flavor symmetry of the high-energy world does not work as expected
7 May 2025
In collisions of argon and scandium atomic nuclei, scientists from the international NA61/SHINE experiment have observed a clear anomaly indicative of a violation of one of the most important symmetries of the quark world: the approximate flavor symmetry between up and down quarks. The existence of the anomaly may be due to hitherto unknown inadequacies in current nuclear collision models, but the potential connection to the long sought-after ‘new physics’ cannot be ruled out.
A cosmic chameleon escapes classification
12 March 2025
Blazars are active galaxies that emit narrow jets of ionised matter from their centres, aimed towards Earth. Depending on properties of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the jets, astronomers divide such objects into different, clearly defined classes. However, with the BL Lacertae blazar, located in the background of the Lizard constellation, things turn out to be not quite so simple.
Entanglement inside proton ‘X-rayed’ with quantum information tools
5 February 2025
In recent years, there have been attempts to describe the inside of a proton using quantum information tools, with partial success. It has been discovered that quantum entanglement in the proton is maximal, and that its main sources are constantly ‘boiling’ seas of virtual gluons and quarks. In the article just published, this new formalism has already become so universal that it correctly reproduces, for the first time, all currently available experimental data.