What’s the News: On a quest to discover at what size the kooky quantum physics that governs atoms (teleporting!) gives way to the ho-hum classical physics that governs humans (no teleporting), scientists have shown that if conditions are right, a molecule of a record 430 atoms can be in two states at once, like Schrödinger’s infamous cat. For the last three decades, researchers have been watching progressively larger objects under special conditions to see how big of an item they can catch showing quantum behavior. This molecule, which was created by a team at University of Vienna and their collaborators for the experiment and is larger than insulin, is the largest on record.

How the Heck: The researchers shot a beam of molecules through a series of three sets of slits—an updated and modified version of the classic double-slit experiment—and measured exactly where the molecules arrived at the end of the beam. Graphs of where the molecules arrived show a fluctuating pattern indicating interference between the parts of the beam going through different slits. Since the molecules interfered with each other (not something well-behaved classical molecules do) ...