For millennia, humans have looked up towards the life-giving Sun and sought to understand its nature. One of its earliest features noticeable before the age of technology was the presence of small dark patches scattered across its surface – sunspots. These blemishes appeared to wax and wane on a regular 11-year cycle, which was thought for over a century to be a fundamental time period governing the Sun’s magnetic activity. But new discoveries suggest a radically different understanding where sunspots are merely peak phases of two, more fundamental 22- year magnetic cycles present simultaneously in different bands of latitude.

At Boston University, Professor Tian Yu Cao is rethinking the foundations of modern physics. His work builds on twistor theory which demonstrates that spacetime is secondarily derived from twistor constructions, but goes further to highlight the most important implication of the Penrose transform in that the primary physical agents can only be mathematically described by elements of cohomology with the defining feature having roots in spin. This view of primary agents combines with Cao’s other major claim that quantum behaviour itself may arise from the physical property of spin leads to a new consistent framework of quantum gravity in which long-standing puzzles in black holes (evaporations) and cosmology (transitions between cycles of cosmos) can be adequately addressed, with the crucial help from the on-going development of operator product expansion formular defined on twistor space.

In environments where magnetic fields exceed even the limits of classical physics, such as magnetars and next-generation laser experiments, plasma behaviour is fundamentally altered by quantum effects. Professor Mikhail V. Medvedev and colleagues have developed a framework to understand how these extreme conditions reshape plasma waves, revealing that while familiar wave structures persist, their properties are significantly modified. These insights provide a foundation for interpreting astrophysical observations and advancing high-energy plasma experiments.