Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

New optical centrifuge unlocks the secrets of frictionless superfluids

Physicists have developed a new way to control the rotation of molecules inside tiny droplets of liquid helium, marking an important advance in the study of superfluids. By using a specially designed optical centrifuge, the team was able to precisely spin molecules suspended in liquid helium nano-droplets, giving scientists a powerful new tool for exploring these unusual frictionless materials.

The achievement represents the first successful demonstration of controlled molecular rotation inside a superfluid. Researchers can now directly adjust both the direction and speed of a molecule’s rotation, making it possible to investigate how molecules interact with their quantum surroundings at different rotational frequencies. The work, led by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in collaboration with the University of Freiburg, was published in Physical Review Letters.

“Controlling the rotation of a molecule dissolved in any fluid is a challenge,” said Dr. Valery Milner, associate professor with UBC Physics and Astronomy and author on the paper.

Plug-and-play single-photon source can work at room temperature

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) has developed a room-temperature single-photon source built into a compact 19-inch rack-mounted device that operates without cryogenic cooling. Designed as a plug-and-play system that works as soon as it is powered on, the device moves quantum light source technology beyond the laboratory and closer to practical, onsite use.

The study is published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.

A single-photon source is a device that generates particles of light, or photons, one at a time. It serves as the starting point for photon-based quantum technologies such as quantum communication, quantum sensing and quantum measurement.

Ultrafast scanning tunneling microscopy reaches the quantum mechanical space-time limit for the first time

Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle describes one of the most intriguing features of quantum physics: certain pairs of physical quantities describing a particle, such as position and momentum, cannot simultaneously be determined with arbitrary precision—not because of imprecise measuring instruments, but because nature forbids it. Between position and time, however, there is no Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

A research team comprising several groups at RUN led by Profs. Jascha Repp, Rupert Huber, Franz Giessibl, and Klaus Richter, as well as a team from the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg led by Angel Rubio, has now observed for the first time that the location and time evolution of an electron cannot be measured with arbitrary precision simultaneously. This so-called space-time limit has important implications for future applications. The work is published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Many future technologies, from green tech and quantum technologies to high-performance electronics for artificial intelligence, require a precise understanding of how matter functions at the microscopic level: how chemical reactions occur, how light interacts with matter, and how electrons move through electronic components. High-resolution still images of the microscopic building blocks of matter are not sufficient for this; rather, time-resolved slow-motion movies from the nanocosmos are needed.

Invisible threads: How our environment quietly shapes disease

From the air we breathe to the food we eat, we are constantly exposed to thousands of chemicals—yet how these exposures affect our health has remained surprisingly difficult to understand. A new study led by researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna, published in Nature Communications, offers a unifying view: Diverse substances can disrupt the same biological systems and thereby contribute to disease risk in predictable ways.

Environmental pollution is estimated to contribute to around one in six deaths worldwide, but scientists have long struggled to connect specific exposures to specific diseases. One reason is the sheer complexity of the “exposome” —the totality of all environmental influences a person encounters over a lifetime. Traditionally, chemicals have been grouped by their structure or origin, but this says little about what they actually do inside the body. Two nearly identical molecules can have completely different effects, while entirely unrelated substances may trigger the same illness. This has made it difficult to move from observation to understanding.

A new study, led by Jörg Menche, CeMM adjunct PI and director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine, and first authored by former Ph.D. student at CeMM and LBI NetMed (now a postdoc at Harvard Medical School) Salvo Danilo Lombardo, takes a different route: Instead of asking what chemicals look like, the researchers asked what they do. They compiled nearly 10,000 environmental exposures, ranging from pollutants and food components to medications, and mapped how each affects human genes. The result is a large-scale network that links exposures based on shared biological effects.

New “Bad Epoll” Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Gain Root, Hits Android

A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw called Bad Epoll (CVE-2026–46242) lets an ordinary user with no special access take full control of a machine as root. It affects Linux desktops, servers, and Android, and a fix is out.

Bad Epoll sits in the same small stretch of kernel code where Anthropic’s most powerful AI model, Mythos, recently found a different bug.

The AI caught one flaw and missed this one. A researcher, Jaeyoung Chung, found it and built a working attack.

/* */