PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The winless Philadelphia Flyers have signed gritty winger Michael Bunting in the hopes that he can give them a spark following some alarming early season struggles.
General manager Daniel Briere announced the agreement Tuesday in the aftermath of a 4-1 loss at Tampa Bay on Monday night. Bunting’s contract is worth a prorated $1.2 million after he went unsigned over the summer as an unrestricted free agent.
It was not immediately clear how soon the 31-year-old would be able to join the team. Philadelphia next plays at Ottawa on Thursday night.
The Flyers have been outscored 17-5 through four games. Opponents have attempted 246 shots to their 122, a margin of minus-124 that is by far the worst in the NHL, with San Jose next at minus-53.
Bunting is an aggressive energy player who has had a scoring touch over his career and brings some much-needed toughness to the situation. He is a veteran of 432 games, counting the playoffs, since making his debut in the league in 2018 and spent last season with Nashville and Dallas.
Philadelphia is his seventh NHL organization after previously spending time with Arizona, Toronto, Carolina and Pittsburgh.
See AP’s full NHL coverage here
FILE - Dallas Stars left wing Michael Bunting (58) waits for a faceoff during the first period of an NHL hockey game between the Dallas Stars and the Detroit Red Wings, March 14, 2026, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Belgian-born scientist Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that researchers believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.
Halzen said he had been told he was among the favorites for the prize since he first published about cosmic neutrinos in 2013. In any given year, he thought he had a 1 in 20 chance to win a Nobel.
“And I just had to live long enough, so here I am,” the 82-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview in Turin, Italy.
Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S., said the research was a huge collaborative effort. He was working on a new research proposal when the Nobel Physics Committee called.
“I hope that this prize will help getting it approved,” he told the committee by phone from Italy, in a call broadcast at the news conference announcing the winner. The comment elicited chuckles from the audience.
Neutrinos are tiny cosmic particles with no electric charge and extraordinarily small mass, making them difficult to detect. Yet they are everywhere: They spew from stars like the sun, and trillions zip through our bodies every second.
Scientists cannot glimpse the mysterious ghost particles zooming around on their own, so they measure what happens when the particles collide with other bits of matter. Neutrinos bump into other particles only rarely, so scientists build large detectors to improve their odds of catching collisions.
Halzen had the idea to turn the vast Antarctic ice into such a detector. The Nobel committee said his work was instrumental to the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, which glimpsed the first high-energy neutrinos from faraway galaxies.
“This experiment in the Antarctic is a revolutionary way of understanding the universe that we didn’t have before,” said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer for the American Institute of Physics.
When a neutrino interacts with ice in the detector, it produces a flash of light that’s picked up by sensors. The transparent ice makes it easier for scientists to find faint signals from the particles, and the sensors are buried about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) deep to protect against interference from cosmic rays and radiation.
“People always thought this was a cute idea, right, but it would never work,” Halzen said at a news conference hosted by his university. “The greatest surprise is that we did make it work.”
Halzen helped pull back the curtain on an elusive crew of neutrinos that scientists say carry clues about the development of other galaxies and the universe as a whole.
He said the work was painstakingly slow because the team had to differentiate between neutrinos from the cosmos and neutrinos that are emitted in Earth’s atmosphere.
“We actually detect 3,000 charged particles every second, and in these 3,000 a second, we have to find one every day, then like one a month we are totally sure of. That is the mathematics of the problem.”
The research showed “that neutrino astronomy is possible — that it exists and it can be done,” Halzen told AP. “Where it leads, we will see. But no window on the universe has ever been a disappointment.”
He likened the Antarctic observatory to “a big eye made out of ice that can look at the universe in neutrinos, rather than in light.”
Supported by the National Science Foundation and run by Halzen's university in Wisconsin, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory involves more than 400 scientists in 14 countries.
“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” the university’s interim chancellor, Eric M. Wilcots, said in a news release. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”
In a post on social media, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said Halzen is the 11th Belgian to win a Nobel Prize. De Wever called the award “recognition for a lifetime dedicated to shedding light on the great mysteries of the cosmos through its smallest components.”
Ellen Moons, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the award in Stockholm. She is the first woman to head the prestigious academy and present the award.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, a small group of laureates or an organization.
Last year, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for research on the strange behavior of subatomic particles called quantum tunneling that enabled the ultrasensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines and laid the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers.
The announcements of this year's prizes began Monday with the Nobel Prize in medicine being awarded to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.
This week's awards continue Wednesday with the chemistry prize and literature on Thursday. After Friday’s peace prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
Dazio reported from Berlin, and Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Associated Press journalists Alexa St. John in Detroit; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; Colleen Barry in Milan; and Luca Bruno in Turin, Italy, contributed to this report.
AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
Physicist Francis Halzen reacts in his hotel in Turin, Italy, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Physicist Francis Halzen reacts in his hotel in Turin, Italy, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Physicist Francis Halzen flashes a victory sign in his hotel in Turin, Italy, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
A portrait of Francis Halzen is shown on the screen during the announce of the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, Oct. 6, 2026. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
A portrait of Francis Halzen is shown on the screen as Eva Olsson, Ellen Moons, and Mark Pearce announce as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, Oct. 6, 2026. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
FILE - A Nobel diploma and medal are displayed, Dec. 8, 2020, during a ceremony in New York. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference to announce the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)
