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Djokovic was hurt in the first set, but the former champion played through the pain for the rest of a breathtaking 7-6 (12/10), 3-6, 6-3, 6-7 (4/7), 7-6 (10/4) victory lasting five hours and 15 minutes in sweltering temperatures on Tuesday.

The indefatigable 39-year-old will meet world number one Sinner on Friday for a place in the final.

While Sinner beat German veteran Jan-Lennard Struff in straight sets, Djokovic had to dig deeper before subduing Canadian third seed Auger-Aliassime in one of the all-time gutsiest Wimbledon performances.

The question now is whether the Serb will have anything left in the tank to beat the defending champion.

Asked how he saw off Auger-Aliassime, Djokovic said: “With a racquet and a lot of heart. I have management of the nerves and the extreme tension you feel in these kinds of matches.

“Towards the end, it was really anyone’s game. What can I say? These are the kinds of moments that I still play tennis for, for sure.

“I was telling the kids to go to sleep. I’m glad they stayed because it was one of the best matches I was part of on this court in my career.”

Bidding to win a record 25th Grand Slam title and equal Roger Federer’s record of eight Wimbledon crowns, Djokovic has won five of his 11 clashes with Sinner.

Two of those victories over Sinner came at Wimbledon in 2022 and 2023, but he lost to the Italian in the 2025 semifinals before avenging that defeat in the last four at the Australian Open in January.

“I wish it was the final so I don’t need to worry about how the body will feel tomorrow, but yeah, I’m happy,” an exhausted Djokovic said.

As ever for the seven-time Wimbledon champion, each match brings another deluge of statistics that underline Djokovic’s remarkable longevity and incredible thirst for success.

He has advanced to a record-extending 15th Wimbledon semifinal and 55th at the Grand Slams.

He is into the Wimbledon last four for an eighth consecutive time, setting a new record ahead of Roger Federer for the longest streak of men’s singles semifinal appearances at the All England Club.

Djokovic is only the second player in the Open era to reach the men’s semifinals at Wimbledon aged 39 or older, after Ken Rosewall in 1974.

“It’s just another semifinal for me. I’m going to look at all the numbers and everything when I finish my career,” Djokovic said.

Muchova downs Osaka to set up Gauff semifinal

Karolina Muchova overcame four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka 7-6(4) 6-4 in an absorbing contest of athleticism, shot variety and tight margins to set up a Wimbledon semifinal against American Gauff.

The evenly matched pair had a 3-3 head-to-head record coming into the tie, and both produced high-quality tennis despite sizzling temperatures on Court One.

The 29-year-old Czech, seeking a first Grand Slam title, proved the steadier player, producing 21 unforced errors to Osaka’s 42, while the pair sent down 24 winners apiece.

The encounter drew roars of delight from the crowd, despite a nervous start with four successive breaks of serve.

Muchova countered her Japanese rival’s ferocious hitting with some delicate touches at the net, using serve and volley as well as drop shots to mix up her game.

She said she tried to match Osaka’s speed, with the 14th seed hitting hard to the lines.

“Once she would shorten the ball, I just tried to maybe go for the slice or go to net to change it up a little bit,” Muchova said.

Love the grass

The Czech, who reached the final of the French Open on clay in 2023 but says she now loves grass, stayed in front in the tie-break, taking the set on her third set point with a forehand winner.

Osaka, 28, had downed top seed Aryna Sabalenka in the fourth round. But consistency deserted her as she served two double faults alongside two aces in the ninth game of the second set and missed a drive volley to drop her serve.

“I feel like it’s hard because I played so well in my last match, then today I just feel like I didn’t play well at all and I didn’t have any energy,” Osaka said.

“It felt like my legs were completely gone. Then I felt like I couldn’t really push off any more. It was a really weird feeling, like my legs were disconnected from the upper half of my body.”

Tenth seed Muchova served out the match, finishing with an ace, to reach her first Wimbledon semifinal.

She is ready to be pushed hard by seventh seed Gauff, who has won six of their seven matches on the tour and beat compatriot Pegula earlier on Tuesday.

“She is a great athlete overall,” Muchova said. “One of the best in the world in our sport.

“I’m happy we have 0-0 on the grass. That’s a bit better balance for me there. %!s()

Not all applications are suitable for a direct switch, but the price gap, measured as the copper-to-aluminum price ratio, has blown out to one of the highest on record.

From an investment perspective that means the copper boom of the past five years might have been issued a ‘best by’ notice as metal substitution kicks in.

One of the best examples of swapping aluminum for copper can be found in the latest cars produced by Ferrari and BMW which have a higher proportion of aluminum wiring, following a move started by Chinese electric vehicle makers and Tesla.

Major air-conditioning makers such as Japan’s Daikin are also trimming costs by increasing the use of aluminum.

The copper-to-aluminum ratio has a long-run average of 3.7, meaning a pound of copper is traditionally 3.7 times more expensive than aluminum.

The latest reading of the ratio is 4.3 with copper at $6.11 a pound and aluminum at $1.41/lb.

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Thicker Wire Needed

A switch to aluminum is not simply financial. It also brings a weight saving though aluminum wiring needs to be thicker than copper wiring because it has only 61% of the electrical conductivity as copper.

Investment banks are watching the widening of the copper to aluminum ratio as a guide to future possible price moves as well as looking for a reversal in the current trend.

UBS said in a note to clients earlier this week that since 2020 the ratio had averaged 3.7 but over the last two months as the copper price has eased back by around 8% and aluminum has dropped by 16% the ratio has blown out to 4.3.

“A high copper to aluminum ratio could drive copper-to-aluminum substitution, providing support for aluminum demand relative to copper,” UBS said.

Mean Reversion

But the bank added that the ratio tends to mean revert, but it can take some time to do so.

“This reflects that behavioral substitution takes time to play through supply chains both from a manufacture’s perspective and from a customer preference perspective," UBS said.

“While it is hard to identify catalysts ahead of time, we highlight that an elevated copper-to-aluminum ration rarely remains that way for long.” %!s()

Emmy rules state that television shows financed by production companies outside of the U.S. are ineligible for the Primetime Emmy Awards. Heated Rivalry, unfortunately for the show and its many fans, falls into that ineligible bucket, as it hails from Canadian media company Bell Media and airs on its streaming service Crave. The show is, however, eligible for the International Emmy Awards.

The show has already had a lucrative awards run in its home country. Heated Rivalry took home 16 awards at the 2026 Canadian Screen Awards, including best drama series, best lead performer for Hudson Williams, best direction and writing for a drama series for Jacob Tierney, best supporting performer for Sophie Nélisse and more.

Heated Rivalry’s other leading man, Connor Storrie, was not eligible for the Canadian Screen Awards, as he’s American. Meaning his performance is ineligible for both award shows; however, fans might still see his name pop up during Wednesday morning’s nomination announcements.

Storrie just might earn a nomination in the best guest actor in a comedy series for his Saturday Night Live hosting gig earlier in the year. The actor hosted the Feb. 28 episode of the long-running sketch comedy series, which featured Mumford & Sons as the musical guest. He brought out his pal and onscreen beau Williams for a sketch in the episode.

Heated Rivalry, which airs on HBO Max in the U.S., centers on a fictional hockey universe based on the popular romance books by Reid. The show’s first season is based on the second novel, Heated Rivalry. Tierney created, wrote and directed the series.

Heated Rivalry focuses on two rival professional players — Canada-born Shane Hollander (Williams) of the fictitious Montreal Metros and Russia-born Ilya Rozanov (Storrie) of the fictitious Boston Raiders — as they navigate a near-decade-long situationship-turned-relationship. The show has made certified stars out of both Storrie and Williams.

Crave renewed Heated Rivalry for a second season early into the show’s first season run. HBO Max has confirmed it will continue to air the series. The show is slated to shoot the second season this summer and is aiming for a spring 2027 release. The upcoming season will be based on the next installment of Shane and Ilya’s story in Reid’s novels, The Long Game, along with the fifth book in the series, Role Model.

Reid announced earlier this year that she’ll be publishing her seventh book in the Game Changers series. The book, Unrivaled, will be the next chapter in Shane and Ilya’s story, which is set to be released in June 2027. %!s()

Most starburst galaxies are experiencing a merger or have in the recent past. Centaurus A is no exception, and new JWST observations have revealed evidence of a past merger.

Galaxy mergers can take hundreds of millions of years to play out—even longer. At first, two or more galaxies on a collision course interact gravitationally, and a first pass can form long streams of gas and stars called tidal tails or bridges. Friction between the galaxies' stars and dark matter creates drag, and that reduces orbital energy on each pass. The galaxies loop back on each other and collide again, and this process repeats itself.

Eventually, violent relaxation takes hold. This is when the gravitational potential of the dark matter in the galaxies changes, and the orbits of stars change. What was once orderly becomes more random.

All of this change can drive star-forming gas to greater density, triggering rapid star formation, and the result is a starburst galaxy like NGC 5128.

Near the beginning of a merger, telltale tidal tails make the merger obvious to any observer.

But over time, those obvious visual signs of a merger become obscured.

In visible-light images of NGC 5128, thick dust lanes obscure much of the galaxy's center. Those lanes hold not only dust, but stars and gas, too. Signs of mergers are still there, in the form of bright young star clusters and red, glowing clouds of star-forming hydrogen. But they're not as obvious and aren't definitive signs of a merger.

Only a deeper look beyond visible light can provide definitive proof of a merger so long after its first passes. That's what the JWST did with NGC 5128, capturing images that mark the space telescope's fourth year of observations.

"No single telescope tells the whole story," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, division director of astrophysics at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Discoveries build over time, and new observatories expand on the foundations laid by earlier missions. Webb represents the most powerful step forward yet, opening a window into wavelengths and details never before accessible. This allows astronomers to examine structures and processes that other telescopes could not see."

The JWST's MIRI highlights the unexpected dust formations in Centaurus A. Wispy filaments stretch out on either side of the galaxy, while an odd parallelogram-shaped feature runs across the center. There's also the strange, looping S-shaped feature that's wrapped around the galactic center. Astronomers aren't certain what created it. The galaxy has an active black hole emitting powerful jets that are visible in X-rays. Could they be responsible?

Overall, evidence of a merger has been building for decades. Centaurus A's globular clusters (GC) have a bimodal distribution of metallicities, which can often indicate a merger. One of the populations, the metal-poor one, is about as old as the Milky Way's GCs, while the other is billions of years younger and is metal-rich.

The JWST does more than capture images. It also has a powerful spectrograph, and scientists use that to measure how gas moves around in the galaxy. In Centaurus A, ionized gas is moving rapidly outward, probably driven out by the active SMBH. Nearer the galactic center, warmer molecular hydrogen rotates in a warped disk. Spectroscopic data like this can illuminate a black hole's effect on its galaxy, even though exactly how it all works is not yet clear. Black holes can both trigger star formation and slow it.

While the JWST can't provide answers to all of our questions about galaxies, their mergers and their black holes, the powerful telescope can at least nudge those questions toward answers. With its ability to trace dust and the structures it forms, its ability to measure gas movement, and its ability to resolve millions of individual stars in NGC 5128, it's delivering progress on the scientific questions it was designed and built to address.

The telescope's fourth-anniversary images of Centaurus A are proof of that.

Who's behind this story?

Lisa Lock

BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator. Editing for Science X since 2021. Full profile →

Andrew Zinin

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

Citation: Galaxy mergers aren't always obvious (2026, July 7) retrieved 14 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-galaxy-mergers-obvious.html

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“Why would anyone buy one when you can stream everything?”

I laughed. Then I realized, I wasn't entirely sure how to answer that question.

After all, they weren’t wrong. Streaming gives us access to nearly every song ever recorded. It’s cheaper, faster, more portable, and infinitely more convenient than vinyl. By almost every measure, it is better technology. Which makes the resurgence of vinyl so unexpected.

What struck me wasn’t that my children didn’t know what a record was. It was that they couldn’t imagine why someone would want one.

To them, music is immediate. Infinite. Effortless. The idea of listening to an album from beginning to end seemed almost irrational. This friction between convenience and engagement is exactly what I’ve been wrestling with as AI has become more prevalent in the classroom.

Vinyl records and AI are actually similar technologies. Both seem to provoke a human response to technology: the easier something becomes via technology, the more we begin questioning what was valuable about the underlying use in the first place.

In my own experience with AI, I can’t remember another issue that has prompted so many conversations about what learning is actually for. But as I listen to educators wrestle with these questions, I increasingly hear another one emerging beneath them.

It’s not a question about technology. Rather, it’s a question about learning: What should students still need to do themselves?

I found myself thinking about that question recently while sitting in on rehearsals for our ninth grade capstone presentations.

This capstone project brings together English, science, and global studies and asks students to partner with local nonprofits, investigate real-world challenges, and develop ideas for meaningful action. Their final task is to synthesize everything they’ve learned into a TED-style presentation.

As Director of Innovation at an all-boys middle school outside of Boston, I spend a lot of time thinking about what learning should look like in the age of AI. I work closely with teachers as they design projects, assessments, and learning experiences that ask students to do meaningful work.

As I listened to students rehearse their talks, I was struck by something: Students had access to research, interview notes, statistics, and AI tools capable of generating polished drafts in seconds. Their challenge was deciding what mattered. Which story should they tell? Which evidence was most compelling? Which ideas deserved an audience’s attention?

Watching those students, I found myself feeling unexpectedly hopeful.

The tools sitting on their laptops could summarize articles, generate outlines, and draft paragraphs in seconds. But none of those tools could decide which story deserved to be told. That work still belonged to the students.

As someone whose role in education is focused on the intersection of innovation, learning, and emerging technologies, I expected to leave those rehearsals thinking about technology. Instead, I left thinking about judgment.

I didn’t see technology replacing thinking. I saw technology making a different kind of thinking more important.

For all the anxiety surrounding AI, that moment reminded me that some of the most important work of learning still resists automation.

In Imaginable, futurist Jane McGonigal argues that one of the best ways to prepare for the future is to distinguish between trends and signals. Trends are the large, visible forces reshaping society. Signals are the smaller observations that reveal how people are responding to those forces.

Artificial intelligence is clearly the trend. But the resurgence of vinyl felt like a signal.

The more I thought about it, the less interested I became in whether vinyl sounds better than streaming services.

What interested me was why people were choosing vinyl at all.

Streaming solved the problem of access. It put nearly every song ever recorded in our pockets. By almost every measure, it is the more efficient technology.

And yet, people continue buying records.

Maybe it is because a record asks something of the listener.

You choose an album.

You place the needle.

You stay with it.

The music becomes the activity, not the backdrop to something else.

As technology becomes increasingly good at solving problems for us, I wonder whether we will begin to value experiences that ask something of us in return.

I found myself wondering whether schools were wrestling with a similar tension.

This search for participation over efficiency is the same tension surfacing in our schools. I’ve heard the phrase “cognitive offloading” more in the past year than I have in my entire life.

Not just at conferences or in articles.

I’ve heard it while sitting around tables with teachers trying to make sense of what AI means for learning.

Those conversations have led us to rethink assignments, assessments, and even where some learning takes place. We’ve debated when students should brainstorm with AI, when reflection should happen without it, and which assessments require students to show their thinking in real time.

Not because we’re opposed to AI. Because we’re trying to better understand what learning requires.

At first glance, these decisions seem contradictory. But, in reality, they are not.

When educators ask students to write by hand, discuss an idea face-to-face, wrestle with a difficult text, or work through a problem without immediate assistance, they are often protecting something more than academic integrity.

They are protecting opportunities for students to think.

Learning requires students to do some of the cognitive heavy lifting.

And I can’t help wondering if that’s the signal hidden beneath many of today’s educational debates.

As AI becomes more capable, what humans contribute may matter even more.

The ability to discern.

To judge.

To create.

To remain present long enough to make meaning.

If Jane McGonigal is right that signals reveal how people respond to larger forces, then the resurgence of vinyl may be telling us something about the future of learning.

It’s not about what AI technology can do. Rather, it’s what humans may continue to value alongside it.

None of this is an argument against AI. Quite the opposite.

At my school, we’ve spent the past couple of years exploring AI literacy, assessment, academic integrity, and responsible use. Those conversations matter deeply.

But the conversations that have stayed with me most weren’t really about AI.

They were about learning.

I’ve found myself sitting with teachers and asking questions that feel both surprisingly new and strangely familiar.

Why are we asking students to write? 

Why are we asking them to read?

Why are we asking them to discuss, solve, create and reflect?

The more I listen, the more I realize those questions aren't really about technology. They’re about purpose.

AI didn’t create those questions. It simply makes them harder to avoid.

Streaming won the battle for access, but vinyl has survived because it offers something access cannot: participation.

Watching these conversations unfold at my school, I can’t help but wonder whether learning is forcing us to confront a similar distinction.

AI can increasingly provide answers. The question is whether students still need the experience of arriving at them.

My children thought vinyl records were obsolete. In some ways, they were right. Streaming solved the problem, and yet, records returned.

Watching students navigate AI has left me less interested in what technology can do and more interested in what learners still need to do themselves.

The value of vinyl was never the music.

The value of writing was never the essay.

The value of learning may not be the answer.

It may be the experience of arriving at one.

And as AI becomes increasingly capable of producing answers, that experience may become more valuable, not less.

That’s the signal I hear beneath the crackle of a record player. It’s a reminder that in an age of instant digital access and gratification, the most valuable things that will remain are those that ask us to show up. 

And this may be one of the most important educational conversations of the next decade. %!s()