About 400 million years ago, our early ancestors took their first hesitant steps out of the primordial seas on to land.

Quantum physics is moving out of the laboratory and into everyday life. Despite headline results about quantum computers solving problems impossible for classical computers, technical challenges are standing in the way of getting quantum physics into the real world. New research published in Nature Communications from teams at Aalto University and Lund University could provide an important tool in this quest.

Engineers at Duke University have devised a model that can predict the early mechanical behaviors and origins of an earthquake in multiple types of rock. The model provides new insights into unobservable phenomena that take place miles beneath the Earth's surface under incredible pressures and temperatures, and could help researchers better predict earthquakes—or even, at least theoretically, attempt to stop them.

A new computational model shows how different patterns of crop rotation—planting different crops at different times in the same field—can impact long-term yield when the crops are threatened by plant pathogens. Maria Bargués-Ribera and Chaitanya Gokhale of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany present the model in PLOS Computational Biology.

Experimental physicists have combined several measurements of quantum materials into one in their ongoing quest to learn more about manipulating and controlling the behavior of them for possible applications. They even coined a term for it— Magneto-elastoresistance, or MER.