theSIGNAL SCIENCE
21 September 2026
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
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Science

Spooky Action Survives the LHC's Violent Collisions

Oxford physicists help prove quantum entanglement endures even in the heaviest, shortest-lived particles the LHC can produce.

Picture two particles born together in a flash of pure energy, spinning in perfect lockstep — even after they fly apart. That is quantum entanglement, and Albert Einstein hated it. He called it "spooky action at a distance," convinced nature could not possibly work that way. For decades, physicists have shown Einstein was wrong — but only in relatively calm, controlled systems involving photons or trapped ions.

What nobody knew was whether entanglement could survive something far messier: the most violent particle collisions ever engineered by human hands. That question has now been answered. An international team working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, has demonstrated entanglement between pairs of Z bosons — particles so massive and so fleeting that they vanish almost the instant they appear. The Z bosons in this experiment were born from an even more exotic source: a Higgs boson, the famous particle first detected at CERN in 2012.

When a Higgs boson decays, it can briefly split into two Z bosons, each of which then disintegrates further into pairs of electrons or muons. The protons that produce these Higgs bosons travel at 99.99% the speed of light, colliding at energies of thirteen trillion electron volts. These are not gentle laboratory conditions.

Here is the remarkable part.

Photo: Brandon Style / Unsplash
The ATLAS detector at CERN captures ghostly traces of particles that vanish in fractions of a second.
Discuss
  • Why did Einstein call entanglement 'spooky action at a distance,' and was he right to be sceptical?
  • How does entanglement allow quantum computers to perform multiple calculations at the same time?
  • Should scientists prioritise discovering new phenomena or finding practical uses for what they already know?
Science

Dying Younger: The Hidden Physical Toll

Here is a number that should stop you mid-sentence: adults with severe mental illness in England are 4.8 times more likely to die before the age of 75 than everyone else. That gap — up to 20 years of lost life — is being driven not by mental illness itself, but by preventable physical diseases. Cancer and cardiovascular disease each killed more than 24,000 working-age patients with mental illness between 2022 and 2024, the highest figures ever recorded. Researchers at Rethink Mental Illness point to one chilling reason: "diagnostic overshadowing," where doctors attribute physical symptoms to a patient's psychiatric condition and never investigate further. Poverty, poor housing, and medication-related weight gain all compound the problem.…
  • Does your country's healthcare system treat mental and physical illness equally?
∞
Entanglement has challenged physicists' understanding of reality for decades, and finding it here, in the heaviest and most short-lived particles we can produce, forces us to rethink just how fundamental this phenomenon really is.
ATLAS Collaboration Physicist, CERN
Science

Black Death never really left Europe

Most people think the Black Death ended in 1353. It did not. Plague hammered Europe repeatedly for four more centuries — and scientists at the University of Tartu have now reconstructed exactly how, by reading bacterial DNA recovered from 26 ancient skeletons across Estonia, Russia, England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The DNA tells a stranger story than expected. Plague did not creep outward from one hiding place. It reappeared in entirely different regions, apparently building fresh reservoirs in wild rodent populations each time. Around 1450–1500, one bacterial lineage split into three major branches — a fork that may have locked plague into Europe's landscape for generations, possibly nudged along by the Great Renaissance Drought.…
  • Did climate change then drive plague outbreaks the same way it might today?
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theSIGNAL IN THE LAB
1VOCABULARY
spooky action at a distancediagnostic overshadowing
entanglementfleetingcompound
reservoirstelltale signature
2GRAMMAR FOCUS
Discourse markers — contrast and concession (Nevertheless, Whereas, Despite, However, Although, Even though, In spite of)
Contrast and concession markers signal that two ideas are in tension or opposition. 'Despite' and 'in spite of' are followed by a noun phrase, 'whereas' and 'while' connect two clauses to highlight a difference, and 'nevertheless', 'however', and 'although' introduce a surprising or contrasting statement.
Nevertheless · Whereas · Despite · Although · However · In spite of · Even though
  1. Einstein believed entanglement was impossible; , decades of experiments have proved him wrong.
  2. the extreme violence of the LHC collisions, researchers were still able to detect the signature of quantum entanglement in the data.
  3. the Z bosons themselves disappear almost instantly, the ATLAS detector can reconstruct their spin states from the particles they leave behind.
  4. Entanglement has long been demonstrated in calm laboratory settings; , no one had tested whether it survived collisions at thirteen trillion electron volts.
  5. physical diseases are the leading cause of early death in people with severe mental illness, they are frequently overlooked by healthcare professionals.
  6. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are both preventable conditions; , they account for the highest recorded death tolls among working-age mental health patients.
3PHRASAL VERBS
Match the phrasal verb (1–6) to its definition (a–f). All six appear in today's articles.
  1. 1. fly apart
  2. 2. split into
  3. 3. give up on
  4. 4. compound the problem
  5. 5. creep outward
4CRITICAL THINKING
All three articles describe situations where established assumptions turned out to be incomplete or dangerously wrong — about quantum physics, healthcare equality, and the history of plague. To what extent is questioning received wisdom a responsibility of scientists alone, or does it also fall on journalists, policymakers, and the general public?
5CREATIVE · HEADLINES
Write a headline for the top story in each of the following styles. One line each, no explanation:
  • TABLOID NEWSPAPER
  • LUXURY MAGAZINE
  • ACTIVIST BLOG
6WRITING
The three articles all present data or experimental results to make a human argument — about wonder, inequality, or hidden history. Choose one article and write a paragraph explaining whether you found the evidence convincing, and what additional information you would need before fully accepting its conclusions.
7DEGREES OF EXTREMITY
Complete each ladder from mild to strong.
  • unusual→→
  • messy→→
  • brief→→
  • concerned→→
  • difference→→
  • spread→→
8SPEAKING
  1. What responsibility do particle physicists have toward the public?
  2. Could diagnostic overshadowing ever be completely eliminated from medicine?
  3. Should mental illness patients receive dedicated physical health screenings?
  4. What surprises you most about plague's four-century presence in Europe?