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What deep sea mud is revealing about giant earthquakes along the Pacific Coast

Marine turbidites are layers of mud and sand deposited on the deep ocean floor by massive underwater landslides and are often used as a historical record for reconstructing earthquake histories.

However, they can be unreliable because it is difficult to show they were not triggered by a storm or flood rather than a quake. In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers detail a new way to link these mud layers to the specific landslides that caused them. This could mean much more accurate earthquake timelines.

World’s smallest capacitor paves way for next-generation quantum metrology

Nanomechanical systems developed at TU Wien have now reached a level of precision and miniaturization that will allow them to be used in ultra-high-resolution atomic force microscopes in the future. Their new findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

A major leap in measurement technology begins with a tiny gap of just 32 nanometers. This is the distance between a movable aluminum membrane and a fixed electrode, together forming an extremely compact parallel-plate capacitor—a new world record. This structure is intended for use in highly precise sensors, such as those required for atomic force microscopy.

But this world record is more than just an impressive feat of miniaturization—it is part of a broader strategy. TU Wien is developing various hardware platforms to make quantum sensing easier to use, more robust, and more versatile. In conventional optomechanical experiments, the motion of tiny mechanical structures is read out using light. However, optical setups are delicate, complex, and difficult to integrate into compact, portable systems. TU Wien therefore relies on other types of oscillations that are better suited for compact sensors.

Twisted 2D materials get an ultraclean, scalable upgrade for future quantum devices

Exciting electronic characteristics emerge when scientists stack 2D materials on top of each other and give the top layer a little twist.

The twist turns a normal material into a patterned lattice and changes the quantum behavior of the material. These twisted materials have shown superconductivity—where a material can conduct electricity without energy loss—as well as special quantum effects. Researchers hope these “twistronics” could become components in future quantum devices.

But creating these extremely thin stacked structures, called moiré superlattices, is difficult to do. Scientists usually peel off single layers of material using Scotch tape and then carefully stick those layers together. However, the method has a very low success rate, often leaves behind contamination between layers and produces tiny samples smaller than the width of a human hair.

Benchmarking framework reveals major safety risks of using AI in lab experiments

While artificial intelligence (AI) models have proved useful in some areas of science, like predicting 3D protein structures, a new study shows that it should not yet be trusted in many lab experiments. The study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, revealed that all of the large-language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) tested fell short on lab safety knowledge. Overtrusting these AI models for help in lab experiments can put researchers at risk.

LabSafety Bench for AI use in labs

The research team involved in the new study initially sought to answer whether LLMs can effectively identify potential hazards, accurately assess risks and make reliable decisions to mitigate laboratory safety threats. To help answer these questions, the team developed a benchmarking framework, called “LabSafety Bench.”

An ultrathin coating for electronics looked like a miracle insulator, but a hidden leak fooled researchers

When your winter jacket slows heat escaping your body or the cardboard sleeve on your coffee keeps heat from reaching your hand, you’re seeing insulation in action. In both cases, the idea is the same: keep heat from flowing where you don’t want it. But this physics principle isn’t limited to heat.

Electronics use it too, but with electricity. An electrical insulator stops current from flowing where it shouldn’t. That’s why power cords are wrapped in plastic. The plastic keeps electricity in the wire, not in your hand.

Inside electronics, insulators do more than keep the user safe. They also help devices store charge in a controlled way. In that role, engineers often call them dielectrics. These insulating layers sit at the heart of capacitors and transistors. A capacitor is a charge-storing component—think of it as a tiny battery, albeit one that fills up and empties much faster than a battery. A transistor is a tiny electrical switch. It can turn current on or off, or control how much current flows.

Catalyst selectivity as a balancing act: Co₃O₄ ‘trapped’ in transition shows peak activity

In a study appearing in Nature Catalysis, researchers from the Inorganic Chemistry Department of the Fritz Haber Institute reveal how structural changes on the surface and in the bulk region of the cobalt oxide catalyst Co3O4 influence its selectivity in the production of industrially relevant chemicals like acetone.

They discovered that a metastable, structurally “trapped” state exhibits the highest catalytic activity—an important finding for catalyst design.

Vibrational spectroscopy technique enables nanoscale mapping of molecular orientation at surfaces

Sum-frequency generation (SFG) is a powerful vibrational spectroscopy that can selectively probe molecular structures at surfaces and interfaces, but its spatial resolution has been limited to the micrometer scale by the diffraction limit of light.

In a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, investigators overcame this limitation by utilizing a highly confined near field within a plasmonic nanogap and successfully extended the SFG spectroscopy into a nanoscopic regime with ~10-nm spatial resolution.

The team also established a comprehensive theoretical framework that accurately describes the microscopic mechanisms of this near-field SFG process. These experimental and theoretical achievements collectively represent a groundbreaking advancement in near-field second-order nonlinear nanospectroscopy, enabling direct access to correlated chemical and topographic information of interfacial molecular systems at the nanoscale.

How pointing errors impact quantum key distribution systems

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is an emerging communication technology that utilizes quantum mechanics principles to ensure highly secure communication between two parties. It enables the sender and receiver to generate a shared secret key over a channel that may be monitored by an attacker. Any attempt to eavesdrop introduces detectable errors in the quantum signals, allowing communicating parties to detect if communication is compromised via QKD protocols.

Among the various parameters that influence the performance of QKD systems, pointing error, a misalignment between the transmitter and receiver, is one of the most important. Such misalignment can arise from mechanical vibrations, atmospheric turbulence, and/or inaccuracies in the alignment mechanisms.

Despite its importance, very few studies have examined pointing error in a comprehensive manner for QKD optical wireless communication (OWC) systems.

New structural insights reveal how human respiratory chain complexes assemble

A new study shows how one of the cell’s most important energy-producing machines is built. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have mapped late steps in the formation of the human respirasome, a large protein assembly that drives mitochondrial respiration. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The respirasome is made up of several protein complexes that work together to transfer electrons and support the production of ATP, the cell’s main energy source. Although scientists have known that these complexes can join to create larger structures, it has remained unclear whether they assemble as finished units or form step by step.

Using high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy, the research team at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics captured previously unknown intermediates of the respirasome. Their findings suggest that the final stages of assembly occur while one of the key components, complex IV, is still maturing. This indicates that the respirasome may act as a platform that helps guide the correct order of assembly.

Nanoscopic raft dynamics on cell membranes successfully visualized for first time

A collaborative team of four professors and several graduate students from the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemical Science and Technology at National Taiwan University, together with the Department of Applied Chemistry at National Chi Nan University, has achieved a long-sought breakthrough.

By combining atomic force microscopy (AFM) with a Hadamard product–based image reconstruction algorithm, the researchers successfully visualized, for the first time, the nanoscopic dynamics of membrane rafts in live cells—making visible what had long remained invisible on the cell membrane.

Membrane rafts are nanometer-scale structures rich in cholesterol and sphingolipids, believed to serve as vital platforms for cell signaling, viral entry, and cancer metastasis. Since the concept emerged in the 1990s, the existence and behavior of these lipid domains have been intensely debated.

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