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Nvidia is canning the Control Panel, and I can’t be the only one who’s slightly sad to see it go

And two, the Nvidia App can be quite an online-focused affair in a way the old Control Panel was not. Besides the greyed-out checkbox in the Privacy settings labelled “required data” (something Nvidia explains is “Data that is necessary for Nvidia App to operate and cannot be switched off”), it can also lag quite badly on an unstable connection. In my personal experience, anyway.

Still, change comes for us all. I’ll miss the Control Panel’s classic rotating 3D image preview, the charmingly old-school HDCP menu that shows a rendering of an ancient Nvidia GPU plugged into what looks suspiciously like a plasma TV, and of course, the old Global Settings and Program Settings tabs with all of their many intricacies.

But is it progress? Perhaps. You can pry the Windows Control Panel from my cold, dead hands, though. That old clunker simply refuses to die, although I don’t think it’ll be that long before I write a similar obituary.

The strange quantum property of tomorrow’s insulator

Ultra-fast data transfer and superconductivity: Quantum materials offer significant technological prospects—if we can understand them at the atomic scale. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Salerno, the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, and the National Research Council of Italy, has succeeded in observing the “quantum metric” in a topological insulator—a unique geometric property of these materials, which conduct electricity only on their surface.

Published in Nature Materials, this work represents a major step toward mastering the materials of the future.

Not all materials conduct electricity in the same way. These differences arise from the behavior of the electrons that make up the material. Among them, topological insulators—discovered in 2006—are of particular interest to scientists. Like conventional insulators, they block the flow of electric current through their interior, yet, remarkably, allow it to flow freely across their surface.

Structural plasticity of the membrane-bound protein degradation assembly supports bacterial adaptation to stress

Iqbal et al. show that HflK/C conformational dynamics regulate bacterial adaptation to aminoglycoside stress. Using disulfide crosslinking to constrain the closed state, they demonstrate that stabilizing a closed HflK/C assembly impairs stress recovery and reveal a stress-induced conformation with dual openings that may facilitate FtsH-dependent membrane proteolysis.

Prof. RHO Jun-seok Advances Metalens Technology from Manufacturing to Display Applications in Two Nature Papers

Nanoprinting imprinting metalenses 100x faster than lithography.

Professor RHO Jun-seok from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at POSTECH has gained international attention for developing a mass-production process for metalenses and a switchable 2D-3D display technology based on them. The two studies were simultaneously published in the April 30 issue of Nature. This marks the first case in Korea of a researcher publishing two separate papers as corresponding author in the same issue of the journal.

A metalens is a flat optical device that controls light using nanoscale structures rather than curved glass. By replacing bulky glass lenses with engineered surface patterns, optical systems become far thinner and lighter. Because this enables control of light at scales smaller than its wavelength, metamaterials are often regarded as a Nobel Prize–worthy field of research.

The first study addressed a key barrier to commercialization: large-scale manufacturing. Production has so far relied on expensive and complex semiconductor fabrication processes due to the extreme precision required, making it slow, costly, and largely limited to laboratory research. To overcome this, Prof. RHO’s team developed a Roll-to-Roll Nanoimprint process enabling continuous production using a cylindrical roller. Instead of fabricating nanoscale structures one by one on rigid molds, flexible polymer molds were used to imprint patterns onto thin films. This shifts fabrication from a one-at-a-time process to continuous factory-scale production. The team produced over 300 metalenses per second, about 100 times faster than conventional methods, while maintaining consistent performance over a 200-meter process.

Scientists say the hidden “third eye” inside your skull is the bizarre reason you can see

A newly published hypothesis suggests that human eyes evolved from a single “third eye” on an ancient ancestor’s head. This proposed evolutionary detour would explain why vertebrate vision is unique, leaving a functional remnant inside our brains.

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