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A little Big Bang: Bowling-pin-shaped nuclei shed new light on the universe’s first moments

What happened in the first moments of the universe—before the building blocks of life and the world we know today came into existence? Physicists at the CERN research facility in Switzerland are trying to answer this question by recreating some of the extreme conditions that prevailed in the universe during its earliest history. Now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration, have come one step closer to understanding those conditions.

At CERN, researchers can make atomic nuclei collide at almost the speed of light, creating tiny droplets of the primordial matter that filled the universe during its first millionth of a second. This matter is known as quark-gluon plasma and is thought to have been the earliest form of matter in the universe.

For many years, scientists have assumed that creating this plasma required collisions between very heavy atomic nuclei such as lead. But physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute have now succeeded in creating the primordial matter by smashing the much smaller nuclei of oxygen-16 and neon-20 together.

Dark energy and quantum gravity may be deeply intertwined

For close to a century, physicists have pursued a way to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. Known as quantum gravity, this goal has remained frustratingly out of reach so far. Similarly elusive is the force of dark energy, which is believed to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But through new research published in Physical Review D, physicist Savvas Koushiappas of Brown University has proposed a new explanation suggesting that these two phenomena might not be separate at all. Instead, dark energy could be a natural side effect of quantum gravity, acting on the geometry of space itself.

RNA droplets may have helped start life on Earth

It’s one of the origins-of-life chicken-or-egg problems: How could RNA have helped give rise to the first cells before there were cells to contain it?

Without the compartmentalization of a cell, it would have been extremely difficult for these vulnerable molecules to have found enough of each other in the proverbial primordial soup, let alone survive the harsh conditions of the early Earth.

The answer could lie in RNA’s ability to assemble into liquid-like droplets, or condensates. These membraneless compartments could have concentrated RNA molecules, increasing opportunities for them to interact and potentially sheltering them from a hot and acidic environment.

Hypersonic impact rapidly transforms diamond into graphite, revealing energy-absorbing mechanism

Rice University researchers have developed a way to stabilize diamond during high-temperature and low-pressure processing, creating a strong bulk composite and discovering that high-speed collisions can rapidly transform diamond into graphite. Their study is published in Materials Today.

Diamond is one of the hardest known materials, with high thermal conductivity, properties that make it valuable for technologies that operate under extreme conditions. The findings could help researchers design tougher materials for aerospace, defense and other demanding environments by showing how diamond changes and absorbs energy under extreme force.

“This was quite an exciting outcome as it is nearly impossible to sinter diamond at lower pressures, and this new process we have developed could lead to the large-scale manufacturing of diamond-based composites,” said Pulickel Ajayan, the lead author of the study and the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering.

New measurements explain how silicon and diamond achieve extreme reversible stretching

A research team led by Yang Lu from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has uncovered the microscopic physical nature of ultralarge elasticity in covalent semiconductors such as silicon and diamond. The discovery provides quantitative guidance for deep elastic strain engineering (DESE), paving the way for the development of next-generation electronic, optoelectronic and quantum devices.

Despite the potential of DESE, the underlying deformation mechanisms of these covalent crystals have long remained elusive. The research team was the first to directly observe the pure lattice evolution of single-crystal silicon and diamond under tension at the atomic scale.

By precisely quantifying the resulting lattice strains, the researchers bridged macroscopic mechanical strain with microscopic lattice strain, establishing a physical foundation for the design of advanced semiconductor devices. The research team also includes PhD student Jiayi Li and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Heyi Wang.

Electronic skin improves temperature and pressure sensing for personalized prosthetics

An electronic skin with a sensing system that can detect pressure and temperature could someday help amputees gain feeling in their prosthetics. The work, led by Washington State University researchers and published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, can sense at a scale 10 times finer than current commercial glove sensors.

“This approach democratizes the production of medical-grade e-skins, making advanced tactile feedback viable for widespread clinical adoption,” said Hongyi Shen, a graduate student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and first author on the paper. “This work lays a crucial foundation for a full bionic skin with both sensing and haptic stimulation functions on prosthetics.”

Haptic stimulation replicates the sense of touch. Providing even partial sensation for amputees could greatly improve their ability to perform tasks.

When people of different generations create together, brain activity changes

When people of different generations create art together, their brains initially show more synchrony, and the synchrony can predict feelings of loneliness or social connection, according to a study published Aug. 20 in the journal PLOS Biology by Ryssa Moffat from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues.

Loneliness—a perceived feeling of social isolation—is a growing health risk. Policymakers and health practitioners are working on methods to create meaningful social interactions that bring people together, especially between generations. But while intergenerational interactions can increase well-being in older adults, the physiological changes resulting from them are unknown.

To better understand changes in the brain that might come as intergenerational relationships are formed, the authors of this pre-registered study collected data from 31 intergenerational pairs, recruiting adults older than 70 and pairing them with adults between 18 and 35, and comparing them with 30 same-generation pairs of younger adults.

Illuminating the limits of the international unit of light, the candela

The candela, the international unit of light in use for almost a century, forms the basis of photometry. According to a new study, measurements derived from it systematically misjudge the brightness of colored light sources and depart markedly from human perception.

An international team led by perception researcher Karl Gegenfurtner at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) has found a surprisingly simple rule for how bright colored surfaces actually appear: Perceived brightness can be predicted almost completely by taking only the highest of the three weighted color components: red, green and blue. The rule accounts for more than 95% of the judgments observed and outperforms all established photometric models.

“The candela is the only SI unit that rests not on physics alone but on human perception,” Gegenfurtner says.

Intense light bent out of shape—ultrafast lenses made from gas

Researchers from the MPIK in Heidelberg used an atomic gas as a time-dependent lens to shape and spectrally manipulate intense high-frequency laser pulses. This gas-based optical element could pave the way toward better XUV- and X-ray pulse control for applications such as chemical reaction steering, quantum computing, and advanced spectroscopy methods for fundamental science. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Magnetically levitated quantum bit could address design flaws

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, headquartered at Florida State University, have designed a new quantum computing architecture that uses magnetic levitation to smooth over design flaws in the intricate components necessary to run a quantum computer.

Quantum bits, or qubits, can be as small as a few nanometers, and manufacturing them inevitably introduces random flaws on their surfaces. By using superconducting magnets to levitate neon particles, the research addresses a challenge in electron-on-neon qubit devices: the tendency for electrons to become trapped by tiny random bumps on the neon surface, making them function unpredictably.

The study, published in PRX Quantum, could help pave the way for more reproducible and scalable quantum computing technologies.

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