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Pollen-replacing feed strengthens honey bee colonies, long-term study confirms

A man-made food source provided honey bees a nutritious diet at a commercial scale over the course of two winter seasons, according to a new study led by Washington State University researchers. The study, published in the journal Insects, looked at the new feed as used by five commercial beekeepers in California and Idaho from fall 2022 to spring 2024. This study is a follow-up to an initial paper describing the bee feed.

The nutritionally complete feed, which resembles an oversized, very thin granola bar, was developed by APIX Biosciences, a biotech company based in Belgium with a U.S. subsidiary. The company worked with WSU’s Honey Bee Program to test the nutritional supplement.

“The first paper was a trial during the spring and summer pollination season to make sure the feed worked in real-world field conditions,” said Brandon Hopkins, WSU’s P.F. Thurber Endowed Distinguished Professor of Pollinator Ecology and a corresponding author on the paper. “This study happened during the other half of the year when beekeepers tend to see the biggest losses and depend the most on supplemental feeding. It was also done on a significantly larger scale than our previous study.”

NASA’s DART Impact Actually Changed an Asteroid System’s Orbit Around the Sun

NASA’s DART mission proved that a spacecraft can nudge an asteroid system in space, offering a real test of planetary defense. NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft changed the motion of an asteroid system in space, demonstrating that a kinetic impactor could be a viable way t

New DNA tools outperform traditional methods for detecting genetic risk in wildlife

Wildlife populations that become small and isolated, often due to habitat loss, inevitably experience inbreeding which can lead to the loss of fitness and eventual extinction. One solution is to perform a genetic rescue: a management intervention where new blood is brought in by introducing outsiders to a population to reduce inbreeding and restore diversity. But how do researchers know the inbreeding problem has been solved?

A new long-term study from Western, led by biology professor and chair David Coltman, shows DNA-based tools detected changes in inbreeding more accurately than traditional pedigree methods in a wild population of bighorn sheep that was recently genetically rescued. The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Applications.

Pedigree approaches estimate genetic health from family history, whereas genomic approaches directly analyze DNA.

A 100-solar-mass black hole merger ripples spacetime, and may flash in gamma rays

An international team from China and Italy has reported a possible cosmic encore to the landmark 2017 multi-messenger discovery. In November 2024, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories detected gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, designated S241125n. Remarkably, just seconds later, satellites recorded a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) from the same region of the sky.

Typically, binary black hole mergers are not expected to produce electromagnetic counterparts. S241125n could be a very rare gravitational-wave event that has been linked to a GRB across multiple wavelengths, extending multi-messenger astronomy into a new regime. Although the association is not yet definitive and will require further follow-up, the probability of a chance coincidence appears low, making the result statistically intriguing while warranting caution.

Quantum dots generate entangled photon pairs on demand

For the first time, researchers in China have demonstrated how quantum dots can be engineered to consistently generate pairs of entangled photons. By carefully tailoring the photonic environment surrounding a single quantum dot, the team showed that it is possible to produce highly correlated photon pairs with remarkable efficiency, potentially opening new opportunities for emerging quantum technologies. The work, led by Zhiliang Yuan at the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, is reported in Nature Materials.

In recent years, technologies capable of generating single photons on demand have advanced at an impressive pace. Already, these sources have led to substantial progress in fields ranging from quantum computing and secure communications, to advanced sensing and biomedical imaging.

A natural next step will be the ability to produce pairs of photons that are identical and strongly entangled. Even when separated by large distances, the properties of entangled photons remain linked: an effect that lies at the heart of many quantum technologies.

Quantum computers must overcome major technical hurdles before tackling quantum chemistry problems

Although the potential applications of quantum computing are widespread, a new feasibility study suggests quantum computers still face major hurdles in solving quantum chemistry problems. The study, published in Physical Review B, evaluates what criteria are needed for a quantum advantage in searching for the ground state energy of molecules. The researchers attempt this feat using two different algorithms with differing strengths and weaknesses.

The team first determined the criteria for the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, which is used for noisy, near-term devices and sets an upper bound to the level of imprecision or decoherence in quantum hardware. The researchers derived quantitative criteria for VQE and QPE based on error rates, energy scales, and overlap with the ground state.

Results showed that VQE is extremely sensitive to hardware errors and decoherence. The team says that achieving chemical accuracy would require error rates far below current hardware capabilities. Available error mitigation techniques offer only limited improvement and scale poorly with system size.

Researchers realize room-temperature two-dimensional multiferroic metal

Multiferroic metals are materials that exhibit both electric polarization and magnetic order in the same crystal—a state known as multiferroicity. Because these properties coexist, they can interact through magnetoelectric (ME) coupling, allowing electric fields to influence magnetism.

Unfortunately, bulk multiferroic materials face limitations, including relatively small spontaneous polarization, weak ME coupling coefficients, and limited operational stability under ambient conditions due to oxygen-vacancy-induced leakage currents, which restrict their practical applications.

Now, however, researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with their collaborators from Zhejiang University, have realized electric-field control of magnetic states using a two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals material, while demonstrating intrinsic room-temperature (RT) multiferroicity with strong ME coupling.

From guesswork to guidance: How machine learning speeds dopant design for water-splitting photocatalysts

MLIP calculations successfully identify suitable dopants for a novel photocatalytic material, report researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo. As demonstrated in their study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a materials informatics approach could predict which ions can be stably introduced into orthorhombic Sn3O4, a promising and recently discovered photocatalytic tin oxide.

Their experiments revealed that aluminum-doped samples achieved 16 times greater hydrogen production than the undoped material, paving the way for next-generation clean energy applications.

Building a sustainable hydrogen economy requires clean and efficient ways to produce hydrogen at scale. One particularly attractive approach is photocatalysis—using materials called photocatalysts to split water into hydrogen and oxygen utilizing sunlight.

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