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It only takes one fake web page to fool AI shopping bots, study finds

AI shopping assistants are popping up all over the internet, changing how we browse, compare and discover products. However, these helpful tools appear to have a serious security flaw. According to a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, a single manipulated web page can trick an AI assistant into promoting a fake product to unsuspecting customers.

Considering that fake goods and fake reviews are everywhere online, researchers Minghao Luo and Liang Chen decided to test how easily search-augmented AI systems can be tricked into promoting bogus brands.

Quantum waves reveal one-sided motion marking elusive critical states

Sound waves, light waves and other types of waves, generally spread freely through space and over time. In 1958, physicist Philip W. Anderson first described a phenomenon via which irregularities or other sources of disorder in materials would prevent waves from propagating freely, which is now known as Anderson localization.

In quantum systems, one can observe quantum states that are spread throughout a system (i.e., extended), confined to a small region (i.e., localized) or somewhere between the two (i.e., critical). Critical quantum states have so far proved to be very difficult to identify and study using Anderson’s localization theory.

Researchers at the International Quantum Academy and Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently set out to further explore critical quantum states in a quantum processor based on superconducting qubits.

Microscale hydrogel fibers could enable imaging inside tiny tissue structures

Researchers have developed light-transmitting hydrogel fibers that are just hundreds of micrometers in diameter. With further development, these soft fibers could one day make it possible to use imaging techniques to detect early breast cancer hidden inside very small breast ducts.

“While traditional, relatively rigid fiber probes may cause mechanical damage when entering narrow, curved or soft tissue spaces, our fibers are very soft with mechanical properties more similar to those of human soft tissues,” said research team leader Yu Zhang from Harbin Engineering University in China. “We made these fibers using a draw-spinning method that was inspired by spider-silk spinning.”

In research appearing in Optics Express, the researchers describe how they tested the new hydrogel fibers by incorporating them into an imaging system and using it to analyze standard pathology-stained breast tissue sections. The imaging system successfully reconstructed the microscopic features used by pathologists to evaluate tumors and, when combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, distinguished tumor subtypes with an accuracy of 93.97%.

Tiny water droplets transmutate aniline into pyridine in ambient and catalyst-free conditions

Aniline can now be transformed into pyridine without adding any catalysts, oxidants or toxic reagents. In a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers achieved skeletal editing, involving the reorganization of the carbon-nitrogen bonds within an aromatic ring, by turning an aqueous solution of aniline into a mist of microdroplets.

During its millisecond-long airborne lifespan, aniline underwent rapid molecular rearrangement, inserting nitrogen into the aromatic ring and forming pyridine, driven by the uniquely active air-water interface in microdroplets. The green, reagent-free reaction converted up to 80% of the starting material into the product under ambient conditions, eliminating the added energy cost often required to carry out such conversion reactions.

By testing droplets of different sizes, charges and acidity levels, researchers found that the reaction is boosted at the droplet’s interface, a zone that is rich in protons and highly polarized. The smaller the droplet, the larger its reactive surface area relative to its volume, and the better the reaction outcome.

Ultra-fast light-shaping technology could be ‘game-changer’ for future imaging

Scientists have developed a new type of “virtual” metasurface—capable of controlling light in ways traditional lenses and optics can’t—which they say is superior to the current approach, which relies on ultrathin engineered materials. The Nottingham Trent University team says the work will help fully optimize metasurface potential for a range of real-world applications and paves the way for a move from physical to virtual platforms in nanotechnology.

Metasurfaces are many times thinner than a human hair and can bend and focus light, change its color and steer it in different directions, meaning they can replace bulky optical elements in small devices such as lenses, mirrors and filters.

While they are powerful, however, the materials and dimensions of physical metasurfaces are fixed—once built, they can’t change their shape, which can limit how useful they are in real-world technologies.

Ultra-precise technology can count damaged DNA fragments

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science has developed an ultrasensitive immunoassay-based analytical platform that can detect and quantify trace amounts of “Small Excised Damaged DNA (sedDNA)” fragments generated during cellular DNA repair. This technology enables highly sensitive detection with quantification down to the level of several thousand molecules, measuring up to 22 times more DNA fragments than conventional methods. It provides a new analytical foundation for comparing DNA repair capacity between individuals and studying cellular responses to anticancer drugs and carcinogenic agents.

Human DNA is continuously exposed to damage from ultraviolet light, chemical agents, smoking and normal metabolic processes. If such damage is not properly repaired, mutations can accumulate and lead to aging and diseases such as cancer. To maintain genomic stability, cells activate the Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) system, which removes damaged DNA segments and replaces them with newly synthesized DNA. The small excised DNA fragments generated during this process serve as important indicators of DNA repair efficiency and kinetics, providing a valuable tool for studying disease mechanisms and predicting treatment responses.

Scientists develop predictive roadmap to boost performance in next-gen spintronics

Chiral 2D metal halide perovskites (MHPs) are among the most promising materials for future technologies that exploit the spin of electrons in spin-based optoelectronics, or spintronics, but getting them to perform consistently has proven difficult. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a data-driven approach that identifies and models key synthesis parameters to optimize their performance.

The difficulty stems in part from the sheer number of factors involved in making these materials. Although chiral 2D MHPs are low-cost and easy to fabricate as thin films, optimizing those films for optoelectronic technologies such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or photodetectors is a formidable challenge. Advanced spin-based optoelectronics use circularly polarized light to encode and transmit data. For several years, scientists have searched for ways to enhance these materials’ selectivity for circularly polarized light, but progress has been hampered by a reproducibility problem: Reported performance values for nominally the same material vary by more than two orders of magnitude across different laboratories.

A new study published in the journal Matter offers a roadmap for solving that problem. Scientist Carolin Sutter-Fella and her team at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry show how systematically tuning several “knobs” in the fabrication process—such as solvent choice, annealing temperature and film thickness—can reliably improve the material’s chiroptical properties, or its ability to interact with circularly polarized light.

Nearly isotropic superconducting property revealed in trilayer nickelate

A research team led by Prof. Zhang Jinglei from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that the trilayer nickelate La4Ni3O10-δ exhibits a nearly isotropic upper critical field under high pressure. This finding provides important experimental insight into the superconducting mechanism of nickel-based materials.

The study is published in Physical Review X.

Since the discovery of superconductivity with a transition temperature (Tc) approaching 80 K under high pressure in the bilayer Ruddlesden–Popper (RP) nickelate La3Ni2O7-δ, bulk superconductivity (Tc≈20 K) has also been verified in single crystals of the trilayer isostructural compound La4Ni3O10-δ under pressure. However, probing its properties remains technically demanding, as experiments must simultaneously achieve ultra-high pressure, strong magnetic fields and cryogenic temperatures.

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