gshc2020.com

Bidding for a record 25th Grand Slam title, having been tied with Margaret Court since the 2023 US Open, it seemed like Djokovic's latest bid was on the brink when he pulled up with a leg injury in the first set.

But a medical time-out and a massage appeared to solve the problem and the 39-year-old was still fighting hard four sets later against third seed Auger-Aliassime.

After entertaining a packed Centre Court for five hours and 15 minutes, it was Djokovic who stood with his arms aloft in triumph after a 7-6 (12-10) 3-6 6-3 6-7 (4-7) 7-6 (10-4) victory.

"I won that match with a racquet and a lot of heart," an exhausted Djokovic said.

"What can I say? These are the kind of moments I still play tennis for.

"I wish it was the final so I don't need to worry about how the body will feel tomorrow, but I'm happy that I won."

Djokovic is now, once again, two wins away from claiming the standalone record for the most Grand Slam singles titles in history.

World number one Sinner, who defeated Jan-Lennard Struff earlier on Tuesday, will be hoping to derail the Serb's efforts in a repeat of last year's semi-final.

The Italian dismissed Djokovic effortlessly on Centre Court 12 months ago - a defeat that left the seven-time Wimbledon champion lamenting his age.

"I don't think it's bad fortune. It's just age, the wear and tear of the body," he said at the time.

But Djokovic, who claimed revenge on Sinner in the semi-finals of January's Australian Open, showed on Tuesday why he remains a Grand Slam contender by overcoming a man 14-years his junior in the toughest of durability tests.

After coming through the longest match of his career at Wimbledon, Djokovic stood with his arms aloft, soaking in the applause, before doing a dance routine in tribute to his daughter.

There were concerns for Djokovic when he pulled up and immediately called for the trainer after injuring his lower left leg at 4-4 in the first set.

He had to see his service game through before he could receive treatment and, after holding to love, grimaced through a massage before returning to play.

After missing two set points at 5-4 on the Canadian's serve, Djokovic started moving freely again and the pair engaged in a thrilling 22-point tie-break that saw them take turns at missing multiple set points, until Auger-Aliassime gifted his opponent the opener with a skewed volley.

A lapse in concentration saw Djokovic drop serve towards the end of the second set and Auger-Aliassime levelled the tie - at which point the roof was closed, despite both players protesting against it.

"You are so proud of your rules and you're not sticking to any kind of rule. We have no idea what the rule is," Djokovic said as he argued with tournament referee Denise Parnell.

"We can play a whole other set outdoors. We're an outdoor tournament."

There was little to separate the pair in third set as Auger-Aliassime made it through a marathon 13-minute service game that contained seven deuces, but Djokovic broke to love for a 4-2 lead and maintained that advantage to wrap up the set.

Djokovic won eight straight points to claim the opening two games of the fourth - causing Auger-Aliassime to smash his racquet on his chair - but momentum suddenly shifted and the Canadian replied with a run of three games.

Auger-Aliassime clinched the resulting tie-break to force a decider- to the delight of the crowd on a rowdy Centre Court.

With both players staying strong on serve in the fifth, a match tie-break became inevitable. When it arrived, Djokovic whipped up support, pointing to his ear as he asserted his dominance to seal his place in a record-extending 15th Wimbledon semi-final.

The stats behind Djokovic's quarter-final triumph

• At five hours and 15 minutes, Djokovic and Auger-Aliassime played the longest Wimbledon quarter-final in history

• Djokovic (39 years and 38 days) is the oldest player to reach a men's singles semi-final at Wimbledon since Ken Rosewall (39 years and 234 days) in 1974

• Djokovic played his 50th five-setter in men's singles Grand Slams, surpassing Stan Wawrinka for the most of any player in the Open era

• He is the third player in the Open era to reach 15 men's singles semi-finals at a single Grand Slam event, after Roger Federer (Australian Open) and Rafael Nadal (Roland Garros)

• Djokovic extended his all-time record for most Wimbledon men's singles match-wins to 107

• Djokovic reached his 55th Grand Slam semi-final, extending his all-time record

Sinner's title defence continues with Struff win

Sinner, meanwhile, moved a step closer to defending his Wimbledon title with a composed 7-5 7-6 (7-4) 6-3 win over Germany's 74th-ranked Struff.

The Italian showed no signs of being affected by the 30C temperatures, following his struggles with the heat in his shock second-round exit at this year's French Open.

Asked about struggling in the scorching conditions at Roland Garros, Sinner dryly responded: "Thanks for reminding me!

"We worked a lot after Paris trying to understand what went wrong and prepared in the best possible way.

"It was a huge test today. I felt comfortable on the physical side, a good step forwards."

Alexander Zverev was also victorious on Tuesday as he returned for his fourth-round tie against Czech Jiri Lehecka after the match was stopped on Monday night because of the Wimbledon curfew.

Zverev led by two sets to love when play was suspended, but Lehecka forced a fourth set on the resumption.

German second seed Zverev ultimately came through 6-4 7-5 3-6 7-6 (8-6) to reach his first Wimbledon quarter-final, where he will face American sixth seed Taylor Fritz. %!s()

The “Street of Dreams” video was shot when the band were in Mexico City to attend the Street Child World Cup Finals Tournament at Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco. They filmed near the Plaza Santo Domingo in the middle of a rainstorm, and were invited onto an apartment balcony by a family after the band’s generator failed in the rain.

U2 have yet to announce the title for their new album, but it’ll be their first proper LP of new songs since 2017’s Songs of Experience. In the years that followed, U2 played arenas across North America and Europe, brought their Joshua Tree 30 tour to overseas markets, cut stripped-down versions of their classic songs on the 2023 LP Songs of Surrender, and became the first band to perform at Sphere in Las Vegas. Earlier this year, they also shared two six-song EPs, Days of Ash and Easter Lily, that dealt with weighty matters of politics and spiritual renewal. 

When they released Easter Lily in April, Bono told fans that the upcoming album would strike a different tone. “We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, ‘unreasonably colorful’ album to play LIVE … which is where U2 lives,” he said. “We still look to vivid rock & roll as an act of resistance against all this awfulness on our small screens.”

U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. sat out the Sphere residency as he recovered from neck surgery. But he returned for the sessions that produced the two EPs, and the upcoming album. “I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t easy missing the Sphere residency through injury,” Mullen said in February. “But I ignored my symptoms over a few years and just pushed through. Turns out I’m not invincible, and when you don’t listen to your body the consequences are inevitable.”

Trending Stories

There has been no talk in public of a tour, but U2 have never once released an album they didn’t support with shows all across the planet. They would mark Larry Mullen Jr.’s first time playing live with the band since 2019.

In late September, U2 will celebrate the 50th anniversary of their formation. They’re essentially the only major band from that time that’s kept its original lineup completely intact.  %!s()

I confess, I've not paid much attention to The Mound, hitherto – there are a lot of Lovecraft adaptations, many of them pretty abysmal – but that was before I realised that it's the work of Ace Team, developers of Zeno Clash, The Eternal Cylinder and Clash: Artefacts of Chaos. Aside from being a terrific studio, Ace Team are based in Chile, a culture that has seen more than its fair share of Spanish conquistadors. I'm interested to see what they do with this particular setting. I'm also interested to see what they do with Lovecraft, whose presentation of people and spaces beyond North America and Europe could charitably be described as "a wee bit biggoty".

The Mound is actually the name of a Lovecraft novella. The original book is set in 1920s Oklahoma, so copious liberties are evident even before you get to all the sexy chat of mission tiers and XP. Here is how it works: you start on a galleon owned by an avaricious Captain, whom I suspect of harbouring tentacles somewhere about his person. Each mission sees you rowing to the mainland and searching for treasure, while running errands such as rescuing stranded sailors and gathering Dihuene mushrooms for the evening repast.

Then it all goes wrong. People start puking up centipedes. The dead walk. Giant bats get all up in your grill. Worse, your senses begin to betray you. You'll take a swing at a lunging horror and realise you've just murdered the expedition's priest. The sky rains blood. Layouts glitch, with some players seeing spike pits where others detect solid ground. The gaps between certain trees become somewhat... detached from the rest of the environment. Dreadful wrigglebeasts appear from behind one trunk and disappear behind the next, like Cheshire Cats decked in demon spaghetti.

The jungle broadly consists of open-ended areas and trashed colonial forts that serve as spawn points, once you've acquired their logbooks. Somewhere at the heart of it all lies the Mound, source of the greatest plunder. Fark me, I'm not going in there. I'm just here to pick mushrooms. The vibe and handling at large put me in mind of Left 4 Dead – in place of Valve's auld AI director, the jungle itself is framed as a sleeping presence. Sooner or later, all your blundering and thrashing is going to wake it up.

You can find a demo for The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu on Steam – the full game launches on 15th July. If absolutely nothing else, this should give good munster. Ace Team have created some amazing grotesques. One big question is whether the project can weather the decline of publishers Nacon, who filed for bankruptcy in February. %!s()

Areas of Expertise

Read Full Bio

July 7, 2026

Table of Contents

Attention Apple fans: If you make a habit of following the leaks and rumors concerning Apple's upcoming product announcements, you're in luck. Lifehacker, in partnership with the other CNET Group sites, is hosting the second round of its Big Guessing Game. By making your guesses, you'll put yourself in the running to win a brand-new Apple Watch.

If you already participated in Round 1, you know how this works. For new players, here's the gist: Lifehacker is running a guessing game throughout 2026, inviting readers to make predictions about what Apple may be announcing this year. The contest has three rounds.

• Round 1, which ended on June 2. This round was focused on Apple's software announcements (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, visionOS, etc.).

• Round 2, which will run from July 7 through July 21. This round has questions about Apple hardware (iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, Vision Pro and so on.).

• Round 3, which will span Aug. 18 through Sept. 1. This round focuses on Apple's fall event.

Each round has five questions about what Apple may reveal during its keynotes and announcements. We won't know the answers until Apple confirms them, but each correct answer earns you one entry into the grand-prize drawing. CNET Group will hold this drawing at the end of the third round. If you win that drawing, you'll receive the latest version of an Apple Watch.

To be eligible, an entrant must be at least 18 years old, and a resident of the 50 U.S. states or Washington, D.C. You don't just have to play Lifehacker's guessing game, either: All CNET Group sites (CNET, Mashable, PCMag, ZDNET) are also hosting their own questions, which means there will be 75 possible queries to answer across all CNET Group sites and all three rounds. You can answer any or all of the questions on these sites during each round, but note that each entrant is only eligible to win one prize. Each of the five websites will announce the winner of its contest shortly after Apple's fall event.

What do you think so far?

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY to enter or win the "CNET Group Big Guessing Game" Giveaway. Open to legal U.S. residents in the 50 U.S. & D.C., 18+ yrs of age. Other restrictions apply. Begins May 19, 2026 at 12:01 p.m. ET and ends Sept. 1, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Void where prohibited. Subject to Official Rules. Sponsor: Ziff Davis, LLC.

Apple is not a sponsor of, affiliated with, or endorser of this sweepstakes. Apple Watch is a trademark of Apple Inc.

Lifehacker has been a go-to source of tech help and life advice since 2005. Our mission is to offer reliable tech help and credible, practical, science-based life advice to help you live better.

• Our Mission
• Our Team
• Newsletter

© 2001-2026 Ziff Davis, LLC., A ZIFF DAVIS COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Lifehacker is a federally registered trademark of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of Lifehacker. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant. %!s()

Amid all the fuss, it was easy to overlook another odd property of the new materials. Even when they were too warm to actually superconduct, they still conducted electricity in an odd way, with an unusual type of resistance that no theory could explain. What became known as strange-metal behaviour was an intriguing mystery for many researchers in the field, but was nonetheless a sideshow to the main drama of resistance disappearing entirely.

Fast forward 40 years, and we still don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, nor have we managed to find materials that exhibit this property at room temperature and pressure. But the associated strange-metal behaviour has been steadily coming to the fore. Attempts to understand it have forced physicists to question key assumptions about how electricity flows – employing a raft of outlandish concepts along the way, from quantum soups to black holes.

Now, experiments might finally be inching us closer to a resolution. And increasingly, it seems that this will take us beyond strange metals themselves – and that understanding their peculiar conductivity will help us explain superconductivity, too. “There must be something about it that gives the answer,” says theorist Subir Sachdev at Harvard University.

The usual explanation for why metals conduct electricity is that they are full of individual, negatively charged particles known as electrons, which can freely roam. There are a lot of them: just 1 centimetre of ordinary household wire contains roughly as many free-flowing electrons as there are grains of sand on a beach. Attach a battery, and those electrons will be repulsed from the negative terminal and attracted towards the positive one, generating a current.

That is the rough picture many of us learned at school. For physicists, a more nuanced conception of current derives from work by theorist Lev Landau in the 1950s involving the concept of quasiparticles. To imagine these, think of a crowd in a stadium doing a Mexican wave: any one individual is moving only up and down, but, collectively, they create a swoosh that sweeps longways. Landau’s ideas say that the thing that conducts electricity isn’t an electron, pure and simple, but rather an electron-like quasiparticle – an excitation that sweeps through materials thanks to the way all the internal particles interact.

Like their fundamental counterparts, electron quasiparticles can collide and scatter like billiard balls, but calculations involving them are much easier – and phenomenally accurate. For 70 years, quasiparticles have helped us correctly predict pretty much any property of materials we like, from their heat capacity to their electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility. Their success has led theorists to believe that all material physics, including conduction and resistance, must boil down to the interactions of individual particle-like objects. “The entire electronics industry – including the iPhone in your pocket – is based on the success of this theory,” says Sachdev.

Quasiparticles don’t travel unimpeded through a material. At room temperature or thereabouts, vibrations in the atomic structure interrupt them, generating resistance, while at lower temperatures, resistance instead mostly comes from the quasiparticles scattering off each other. The exciting discovery in the 1980s was that certain materials could superconduct even at temperatures where quasiparticle scattering should still have been significant.

Strange metals

The strange-metal behaviour was more subtle. In most conductors in cold conditions, resistance rises with the square of the temperature – that is to say, doubling the temperature gives four times the resistance. To the average materials scientist, this seems intuitive because temperature should determine two key factors that influence resistivity: the number of electrons available to collide and the number of places those electrons can end up afterwards. Two temperature dependencies, hence temperature squared.

As such, if you plot a graph of how a metal’s conductivity should vary with temperature, you inevitably get an upward-sweeping curve. Yet in strange metals, the resistance-temperature plot is a straight line (see chart below). There was no obvious quasiparticle-like behaviour that could generate such a trend, and the more physicists dwelled on it, the more mystified they became. There is “no operator or process that would [be able to give] this power of the temperature”, the late theorist Joseph Polchinski once wrote. It was, he added, “the conductor from Hell”.

There are some who think the answer isn’t actually that complicated. After all, linear temperature behaviour isn’t totally unheard of: copper exhibits the trend at room temperature, when vibrations running through the metal are by far and away the dominant source of resistance. These vibrations are generally seen as simple attenuators, and the higher the temperature, the more the material vibrates – hence a linear relationship. Last year, Eric Heller at Harvard University and others argued forcefully that these vibrations could be behind strange metals. But most other physicists remain unconvinced: at low temperatures, where strange-metal behaviour persists, the vibrations have long been predicted to freeze out.

A slightly more radical approach to explaining strange metals involves their electrons being caught between different forms of order. This can happen close to a phase transition, when a material reorganises itself – for instance, in such a way that a quantum property of electrons called spins collectively point in one direction, as in a magnet. On the brink of such a transition, when there is no definite preference for one order over another, the electrons are thought to produce fleeting patterns, like the murmurations of starlings in flight. And, crucially, the strength of these critical fluctuations is usually driven by temperature, linearly. “It could be the fluctuations that produce resistance,” says Stephen Hayden at the University of Bristol, UK.

This year, Hayden and his colleagues used a beam of neutrons at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, UK, to study electron-spin fluctuations in a strange metal. Having angular moments themselves, but no charge to complicate matters, neutrons are excellent probes of electron spin. Hayden’s team found that the spin fluctuations speed up and slow down in lockstep with temperature – providing some of the strongest evidence to date that critical fluctuations are behind strange-metal behaviour.

It may have been a telling result, but this case is far from closed. “The big question for us is whether it can be put into a theory,” says Hayden. This is where it gets tricky – and indeed where strange-metal behaviour challenges our deepest notions of what electricity and electrical resistance should be. A murmuration isn’t about individual starlings; it is about the behaviour of the flock as a whole. Likewise, if fluctuations are driving resistance in strange metals, the crucial actors are no longer quasiparticles – or, for that matter, anything particle-like – but collective patterns involving all the electrons at once. What, then, is electrical resistance if not individual collisions of some sort?

Sachdev’s attempts to answer that question with an alternative theory originate in the early 1990s, in collaboration with Jinwu Ye, who is now at Mississippi State University. The two theorists imagined a deliberately simplified system with no spatiality, no atomic structure at all – basically just a dot, in which every electron is connected to every other. In their model, any electrical disturbance fades at a rate proportional to temperature, despite there being no individually acting particles, or indeed any space for them to travel through. But it hardly resembled a real metal, and Sachdev recalls the idea being met with some scepticism: “My colleagues would think, is this just some curious thing Subir is amusing himself with?”

While Sachdev and Ye’s model languished, the strange-metal problem became ever more urgent. In the beginning, it was limited to “cuprates”, or copper-oxide materials. Then, in 2009, Louis Taillefer at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and his colleagues spotted it in another class of materials called iron pnictides. Ten years later, a team led by Andrea Young at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Cory Dean at Columbia University in New York spotted it in twisted layers of graphene. Then, just a few years ago, compounds called nickelates were added to the list by Harold Hwang at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and his colleagues. But theorists were still struggling to come up with descriptions of resistance that didn’t involve particles.

Then, a hint of progress came from an unexpected corner of theoretical physics. In the late 1990s, string theorists discovered a mathematical trick that allows everything in a certain volume of space to be perfectly described by the physics taking place on a shell enclosing it. This “holography” was a strange idea, but it provided a new window onto some very difficult problems, including the nature of black holes. According to holography, everything happening inside a black hole can be completely encoded on its event horizon – the threshold within which even light is sucked in.

Black holes are a far cry from strands of metal in the lab, yet theorists such as Sean Hartnoll at the University of Cambridge believed there could be a link. Beginning in the late 2000s, he and others showed that in certain holographic models, an electric current inside a strange metal could be treated akin to light travelling around an event horizon, steadily losing some of its momentum to the inner black hole.

Nobody thought strange metals were black holes, but all this did suggest that holography might give us a foothold in terms of finding out how they work. In 2015, Alexei Kitaev, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology, presented a talk about one particular holographic model that, others later realised, looked remarkably similar to Sachdev and Ye’s early work. Now taking that work more seriously, theorists built on it, creating a family of “SYK” models – after the initials of Sachdev, Ye and Kitaev – that increasingly resembled real materials. “Suddenly, our original paper started getting several hundred citations every year,” says Sachdev.

Intriguingly, SYK models didn’t only predict a resistance that rises linearly with temperature. At a deeper level, they suggested that in strange metals, electrical current somehow loses momentum at a rate depending merely on temperature and Planck’s constant, the fundamental quantity that sets the scale of quantum effects. It was as though resistance was butting up against a universal quantum speed limit. The chemistry of a particular strange metal didn’t seem to matter at all.

The discomfiting implication of this is that there may not be an easily interpretable answer to what electricity is in strange metals. At best, the SYK model requires physicists to be content to think of it as a kind of “quantum soup”, beholden only to distant, universal laws that don’t involve individual particles. In a way, this is a return to a 19th-century picture of conduction, when scientists thought that electricity was like a fluid. In time, atomic theory filled in the details of that view, showing how to predict certain key properties such as viscosity; since then, physicists have grown accustomed to all macroscopic behaviour resting on a clear and intuitive foundation of microscopic physics. Removing the latter now, says Sachdev, “is like the rug being pulled out from under our feet”.

The question is whether conduction in strange metals really is indifferent to individual particles, or whether holographic physics is a mask for something more fundamental and particle-like that we have yet to uncover. And it turns out there may be a way to know for sure.

Typically, when a small current passes through a conductor, it should create a certain level of electrical crackle, or “shot noise”. The idea is that each charge-carrying particle arrives like the pitter-patter of raindrops on a window – if the current is indeed carried by particles. If not, “you’ve got a very soupy situation,” says experimentalist Doug Natelson at Rice University in Texas. “You should basically get no shot noise at all.”

In 2023, Natelson’s group tried to measure shot noise in very pure wires of a well-known strange metal. However, the result was slightly ambiguous: the shot noise was far less than they would have expected, but not zero. A quantum soup with the occasional electron crouton, you might say. “It’s really interesting,” says Natelson. Other research groups, such as Anindya Das at the Indian Institute of Science and his colleagues, are currently attempting to repeat the experiment for different materials. Theorists remain divided over what it means. Some, such as Sachdev, see the suppressed shot noise as evidence that strange metals really are a quantum soup. Others argue that it can still be explained in terms of fleeting patterns, as implied by Hayden’s experiments.

And then there is the bigger question, the one that had scientists so excited back in the 1980s. If we are reaching for a new picture of conduction in strange metals, can that tell us anything about how to obtain room-temperature superconductivity?

Maybe. A few years ago, Sachdev and colleagues found that a refined SYK model was able to predict both strange-metal resistance and a colder superconducting phase in the same system. Sachdev is now trying to reintroduce physics specific to certain materials, such as cuprates, in the hope that it will show that strange-metal behaviour and superconductivity are two manifestations of the same underlying quantum soup. But, crucially, his model doesn’t yet predict at what temperature superconductivity will kick in, or what sort of material will exhibit it closest to room temperature.

Still, 40 years after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity and strange metals, physicists have a raft of ways to think about them. From collective fluctuations to holography, the mystery no longer looks quite as impenetrable as it once did. “Hopefully, some combination of these, put together in the right way, will ultimately shed some light on what is going on,” says Hartnoll. %!s()