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Missing technosignatures? Turbulent plasma may blur ultra-narrow signals before they leave their home star systems

A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests that stellar “space weather” could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect. Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency—signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system.

In most technosignature searches, scientists account for distortions that happen as radio waves travel across interstellar space. This study focuses on what can happen closer to the source. Plasma density fluctuations in stellar winds, as well as occasional eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections, can distort radio waves near their point of origin, effectively “smearing” the signal’s frequency and reducing the peak strength that search pipelines rely on.

Electric field tunes vibrations to ease heat transfer

New research from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with The Ohio State University and Amphenol Corporation, challenges conventional understanding about controlling heat flow in solid materials. The study, published in PRX Energy, shows that applying an electric field to a ceramic material changes how phonons (tiny vibrations that carry heat) behave.

Phonons with atoms moving along the field direction (poling direction) last longer than those with atoms moving perpendicular to the field. As a result, the material conducts heat almost three times more efficiently along the field direction than in perpendicular directions. This promising approach could lead to new solid-state devices that control heat flow in everyday technologies.

“Being able to control both how fast and in what manner heat flows could lead to devices that manage thermal energy far more efficiently,” said Puspa Upreti, an ORNL postdoctoral research associate.

Researchers create a never-before-seen molecule and prove its exotic nature with quantum computing

An international team of scientists from IBM, The University of Manchester, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, EPFL and the University of Regensburg have created and characterized a molecule unlike any previously known—one whose electrons travel through its structure in a corkscrew-like pattern that fundamentally alters its chemical behavior. The work appears in Science.

This is the first experimental observation of a half-Möbius electronic topology in a single molecule. To the scientists’ knowledge, a molecule with such topology has never before been synthesized, observed, or even formally predicted.

Understanding this molecule’s behavior at the electronic structure level required something equally fundamental: a high-fidelity quantum computing simulation. The discovery advances science on two fronts. For chemistry, it demonstrates that electronic topology—the property governing how electrons move through a molecule—can be deliberately engineered, not merely found in nature.

Why Large Hadron Collider predictions can miss the mark, and a new way to fix it

Estimating things that exist is generally easy, but when it comes to estimating things that do not exist, it’s more difficult. This is something physicists from Poland and the UK are well aware of. To improve current simulations of high-energy particle collisions, they have developed a more accurate method for estimating the impact of calculations that are not performed.

Prediction can be difficult, especially when it comes to the future, as Niels Bohr—one of the fathers of quantum mechanics—once said. The fundamental problem with predicting the future lies in the simple fact that we just do not know it. A somewhat similar challenge arises in the calculations used to model high-energy particle collisions: For them to be useful, one must be able to estimate the impact of calculations that are not performed.

Physicists Matthew A. Lim from the University of Sussex in Brighton and Dr. Rene Poncelet from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow have presented a new approach to this issue in the journal Physical Review D.

Polymers that crawl like worms: How materials can develop direction without being told where to go

Researchers at the University of Vienna have uncovered a surprising phenomenon: polymer chains with segments that simply fluctuate at different intensities can spontaneously develop directional, persistent motion when densely packed—even though nothing in the system points them in any particular direction. This “entropic tug of war,” driven by fundamental physical constraints, could help explain how DNA organizes and moves inside living cells and may lead to new materials. The study is published in Physical Review X.

“Think of a chain threaded through a dense forest of trees, which represent obstacles posed by the other chains in the system. One end of the chain is being shaken much more vigorously than the other,” explains lead author Jan Smrek from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna. “You might expect it to just wiggle randomly in place. But we found that because the chain has to find its way by going in-between the trees, the difference in shaking intensity creates an imbalance that actually propels the entire chain forward through the forest.”

This analogy can be conferred to a polymer, a large molecule consisting of many units linked together in a long chain, such as DNA. The Viennese research team—Adam Höfler, Iurii Chubak, Christos Likos and Jan Smrek—used computer simulations and analytical theory to show that this directed motion arises purely from topological constraints. When polymer chains are entangled and cannot pass through each other, segments with stronger fluctuations generate larger entropic forces. This creates an imbalance that pushes the entire chain forward along its own contour, with the stronger fluctuating part acting as the “head of the snake” moving through the forest of obstacles.

Molecular ‘catapult’ fires electrons at the limits of physics

Electrons can be “kicked across” solar materials at almost the fastest speed nature allows, scientists have discovered, challenging long-held theories about how solar energy systems work. The finding could help researchers design more efficient ways of harvesting sunlight and converting it into electricity. The research is published in Nature Communications.

In experiments capturing events lasting just 18 femtoseconds —less than 20 quadrillionths of a second—researchers at the University of Cambridge observed charge separation happening within a single molecular vibration.

“We deliberately designed a system that—according to conventional theory—should not have transferred charge this fast,” said Dr. Pratyush Ghosh, Research Fellow, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and first author of the study. “By conventional design rules, this system should have been slow, and that’s what makes the result so striking.

AI-designed diffractive optical processors pave the way for low-power structural health monitoring

A team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has introduced a novel framework for monitoring structural vibrations using diffractive optical processors. This new technology uses artificial intelligence to co-optimize a passive diffractive layer and a shallow neural network, allowing the system to encode time-varying mechanical vibrations into distinct spatiotemporal optical patterns.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems are vital for assessing the condition of civil infrastructure, such as buildings and bridges, particularly after exposure to natural hazards like earthquakes. Traditional vibration-based methods rely on sensor networks of accelerometers and strain gauges, which demand significant power, generate large datasets requiring complex digital signal processing, and can be expensive to install and maintain.

Furthermore, achieving high spatial resolution for accurate damage localization often requires a costly, dense sensor deployment.

Making mini-lightning in a block of plastic

Lightning formation and the conditions triggering it have long been shrouded in a cloud of mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists is lifting the fog. Using mathematical calculations, the researchers have discovered that lightning-like discharge doesn’t require a storm cloud—it could be made inside everyday material on a lab bench. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“We applied the same exact models that we use for lightning research but shrank down the scale to slightly larger than a deck of cards,” said Victor Pasko, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State and lead author on the paper. “We calculated that when supplied with a high-powered electron source, lightning can be triggered in everyday insulating materials like glass, acrylic and quartz.”

The team used detailed numerical simulations to show that lightning-like radiation bursts could form inside small solid blocks, under conditions achievable in the lab. The work, if proven experimentally, could have implications for more compact and potentially safer X-ray sources in doctors’ offices and security checkpoints, the researchers said. The primary benefit, however, would be to enable the study of a powerful natural phenomenon on a lab bench.

Quantum Memory Isn’t What We Thought: Physicists Reveal a Hidden Duality

An international team of scientists has taken a closer look at how memory functions in quantum systems and their time evolution. Their study reveals that whether a quantum process appears to have memory depends on how it is examined. From one angle, the process may seem completely memoryless. From another, traces of past behavior remain visible. The findings open new paths for research in quantum science and emerging technologies.

In classical physics, memory is defined in a straightforward way. If a system’s future behavior depends only on its current condition, it is considered memoryless. If earlier states continue to influence what happens next, the system is said to have memory.

Quantum physics complicates this picture. Quantum systems can store and transmit information in ways that have no counterpart in classical science. In addition, measurement is not just a passive observation. It plays an active and fundamental role in how quantum systems evolve.

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