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MIT Scientists Break a 20-Year Rule And Unlock Never-Before-Seen Crystal Structures

One of the key methods through which scientists develop and enhance new materials is by getting more control over their structure at the smallest scales, and microscopic nanoparticles can be incredibly useful for this kind of detail.

Now researchers led by a team from MIT have overturned the conventional thinking of the last couple of decades when it comes to how these nanoparticles are connected together.

Previously, the connectors – or ligands – between the nanoparticles have mostly been designed as rigid and fixed.

New Modeling Attempts to Reconcile Modified Gravity with the Bullet Cluster

Modified gravity theories have a long and somewhat controversial history in scientific literature. Typically, these theories are put forth in an attempt to explain the observations we ascribe to dark matter by slightly tweaking either general relativity or Newton’s laws. While some have been successful at matching our observations of particular systems, these theories are often criticized for failing to generate consistent predictions about systems at different scales. For example, in the traditional formulation of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), Newton’s second law is modified to boost the effect of gravitational forces once an object’s acceleration drops below a certain value. With the right choice of cutoff, MOND can reproduce galactic rotation curves fairly well — but this same cutoff, when applied to galaxy clusters or cosmology, leads to faulty predictions.

One system that has been framed as particularly tricky for MOND is the Bullet Cluster. This structure consists of two subclusters that once passed through each other at high speeds, leaving an extended blob of hot gas strewn across the space between the subclusters. While this central gas is estimated to contain the majority of the system’s baryonic mass (e.g., stars, gas, and dust), gravitational lensing signatures remain strongest around the subclusters and suggest the presence of extra non-baryonic mass. If this excessive lensing were the result of a modification to Newton’s laws, it should be seen everywhere throughout the structure, not just around the subclusters. While dark matter halos provide a natural explanation for the separation, traditional MOND struggles to account for these observations.

Could a Clean Room Tour Spark Your Next Career Move?

2030, semiconductor facilities will create demand for 189,000 new full-time jobs. On our current trajectory, there will not be enough trained workers to fill them. Community colleges are stepping in to fill the gap.

The semiconductor worker shortfall is the kind of challenge that community colleges were built for, Taylor-Mendoza says. Community colleges have a long history of helping train people quickly and affordably for critical jobs such as nursing, court reporting, or making computer chips. Community colleges in regional semiconductor hubs are now offering apprenticeships, certificates, and other training to enable people to update their skills or pivot to new career paths in the industry. They funnel some graduates into engineering programs at nearby universities to get four-year degrees and recruit and train high school students.

In response to the 2022 U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, companies have announced 140 new projects and investments of more than US $640 billion in the country, according to a September report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), for instance, plans to invest $165 billion in the US. Its chip fabrication plant in Arizona began production in 2024, and the company plans to open 3 more fabs and two packaging facilities. The Arizona fab employs about 3,500 people, and when another two open, the company will need about 6,000 employees in the region, including thousands of technicians.

“‘Build it and they will come’ doesn’t work” with semiconductor fabs, says Palmer of Maricopa Community Colleges (MCC), which collaborates with TSMC, Intel, and other companies on its semiconductor curricula. MCC recruits high school students and performs marketing in the region, educating people about jobs in the semiconductor industry and the training they need to get a foot in the door. Then they provide that training, often at no cost to students.

NASA funds ion-powered flying drones to explore Saturn’s largest moon

NASA is funding an ambitious new concept that could send swarms of tiny, silent, spherical “aerobots” floating through the eerie underground caves of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

The project is called SPARK or Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst. Led by Daniel Drew, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, SPARK uses electrohydrodynamic (EHD) propulsion, commonly known as atmospheric ion thrusters.

As EHD thrusters are solid-state and silent, the tech offers omnidirectional maneuverability without generating heavy downwash that could disturb delicate surface layers.

Quantum Information Systems for Networking and Sensing

ICYMI: 🚀 HISTORIC FIRST FOR U.S. QUANTUM NETWORKING 🇺🇸⚛️

NASA just achieved a major milestone in high-security aerospace communication: sending a quantum signal from a flying aircraft directly to a ground station for the very first time in U.S. history.

During flight tests over Ohio, researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center locked onto single-photon quantum signals transmitted from a moving NASA Pilatus PC-12 aircraft to a optical receiver on the ground.

Why is this a big deal?

⚡ Uncrackable Physics: Traditional RF communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping and jamming. In a quantum network, information is encoded on individual particles of light (photons). Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, any attempt to intercept or observe the signal fundamentally alters its state—making covert tapping mathematically impossible.

📡 Breaking Out of the Fiber Trap: Fiber optic cables can only stretch so far before signals degrade. To build an unhackable, global quantum internet, we have to go wireless through open air—linking aircraft, high-altitude drones, and deep-space satellites directly to ground nodes.

Continue reading “Quantum Information Systems for Networking and Sensing” | >

A proof of the Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture

A proof of Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture.

* Physical Superintelligence (PSI) announced that its automated research system used an unreleased, non-public Anthropic model to prove the conjecture—a major open problem in quantum complexity theory and computing speedups that had remained unsolved since 2008.

* According to PSI, the AI system successfully generated a complete proof by its third day of operation, and the final proof was formally checked and verified using the Lean interactive theorem prover.

* The result sheds light on the exact conditions under which quantum computers hold an exponential advantage over classical computers, while also highlighting the performance gap between advanced internal AI research models and those currently available to the public.

Notes:

The (AA) conjecture, posed by Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis in 2008, addresses a fundamental question in theoretical computer science: When can a quantum computer run exponentially faster than a classical computer, and when is that exponential speedup impossible?

To understand the conjecture without getting lost in mathematical physics, it helps to look at how computer scientists evaluate quantum speedups through the Query Model (or “black-box” model).

Continue reading “A proof of the Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture” | >

Inspired by honeycombs, a low-cost cooling structure lasts over 100 million cycles

As global demand for cooling continues to grow, the urgent need for sustainable refrigeration technologies is becoming increasingly evident. Conventional vapor-compression systems remain energy-intensive, while the refrigerants can contribute to the greenhouse effect. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) research team has manufactured a low-cost, ultradurable elastocaloric refrigerant structure, inspired by the stacked porous architecture of honeycombs, that operated for more than 100 million cooling cycles with an estimated service life of more than 10 years.

This manufacturing approach substantially increases production efficiency and reduces costs, paving the way for the practical deployment of elastocaloric cooling. The findings have recently been published in the journal Science under the title “Stacked porous NiTi structure with low cost and ultrahigh fatigue life for elastocaloric cooling.”