Try bending your iPhone in half. Or roll up your tablet like a scroll. Or wrap a touchscreen TV around a pole. Didn't work out so well, did it? That's because the ceramic material used to make many of today's touchscreens has only two of three needed qualities: it's conductive, it's transparent—but it's not flexible. "It's brittle and so if you bend it, it breaks," says University of Vermont scientist Frederic Sansoz, a professor of me...

A team of scientists has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behaviour of black holes out in space is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories. "It's called an entanglement area law," says Adrian Del Maestro, a physicist at the University of Vermont who co-led the research. That this law appears at both the vast scale of outer space and at the tiny scale of atoms, "is weird," Del Maestro says, "and i...