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Instructions help you remember something better than emotions or a good night’s sleep, scientists find

A good night’s sleep has long been understood to help us consolidate new memories, but we don’t understand how. Associations with negative feelings like fear or stress can improve recall, but intentionally trying to remember can also be effective. But these two mechanisms are very different—one involuntary, one deliberate. Which influences memory most?

To investigate, researchers asked participants to remember or forget words, some of which had negative emotional associations. They found that instructions improved recall more than emotion.

“What we intend to remember and to forget can be powerful,” said Dr. Laura Kurdziel of Merrimack College, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. “We have more control over our memories than we often think we do.”

Scientists reverse Alzheimer’s in mice using nanoparticles

A research team co-led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU), working with partners in the UK, has demonstrated a nanotechnology strategy that reverses Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

Unlike traditional nanomedicine, which relies on nanoparticles as carriers for therapeutic molecules, this approach employs nanoparticles that are bioactive in their own right: “supramolecular drugs.” The work has been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.

Instead of targeting neurons directly, the therapy restores the proper function of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the vascular gatekeeper that regulates the brain’s environment. By repairing this critical interface, the researchers achieved a reversal of Alzheimer’s pathology in animal models.

Epigenetic shifts link maternal infection during pregnancy to higher risk of offspring developing schizophrenia

The health of mothers during pregnancy has long been known to play a role in the lifelong mental and physical health of offspring. Recent studies have found that contracting an infection during pregnancy can increase the risk that offspring will develop some neurodevelopmental disorders, conditions that are associated with the atypical maturation of some parts of the brain.

An infection is an invasion of pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites, which can then multiply and colonize host tissues. Findings suggest that when an expecting mother contracts an infection, her immune system can respond to it in ways that could impact the development of the fetus.

Researchers at University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University recently carried out a study aimed at further investigating the processes through which maternal infections during pregnancy could increase the risk that offspring will develop schizophrenia later in life. Schizophrenia is a typically debilitating mental health condition characterized by hallucinations, false beliefs about oneself or the world (e.g., delusions) and cognitive impairments.

Synaptic changes in the brains of patients with frontotemporal dementia can be modeled in the laboratory

Neurons produced from frontotemporal dementia patients’ skin biopsies using modern stem cell technology recapitulate the synaptic loss and dysfunction detected in the patients’ brains, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows.

Frontotemporal dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. The most common symptoms are , difficulties in understanding or producing speech, problems in movement, and psychiatric symptoms.

Often, has no identified genetic cause, but especially in Finnish patients, hexanucleotide repeat expansion in the C9orf72 gene is a common genetic cause, present in about half of the familial cases and in 20% of the sporadic cases where there is no family history of the disease.

Thin solar-powered films purify water by killing bacteria even in low sunlight

Around 4.4 billion people worldwide still lack reliable access to safe drinking water. Newly designed, thin floating films that harness sunlight to eliminate over 99.99% of bacteria could help change that, turning contaminated water into a safe resource and offering a promising solution to this urgent global challenge.

In a recent study, researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, China, presented a self-floating photocatalytic film composed of a specially designed conjugated polymer photocatalyst (Cz-AQ) that generates oxygen-centered organic radicals (OCORs) in water.

These OCORs are efficiently formed due to the strong electron-donating and accepting groups incorporated into the polymer design, resulting in lifetimes orders of magnitude longer than those of conventional reactive oxygen species. With more time to act, the radicals enable the film to break down and suppress bacterial regrowth for at least five days.

Researchers integrate waveguide physics into metasurfaces for advanced light control

Ultrathin structures that can bend, focus, or filter light, metasurfaces are reshaping how scientists think about optics. These engineered materials offer precise control over lights behavior, but many conventional designs are held back by inefficiencies. Typically, they rely on local resonances within individual nanostructures, which often leak energy or perform poorly at wide angles. These shortcomings limit their usefulness in areas like sensing, nonlinear optics, and quantum technologies.

A growing area of research looks instead to nonlocal metasurfaces, where interactions between many elements create collective optical effects. These collective behaviors can trap light more efficiently, producing sharper resonances and stronger interactions with matter. One of the most promising possibilities in this field is the development of photonic flatbands, where resonant behavior stays uniform across a wide range of viewing angles.

Another is creating chiral responses, which allow devices to distinguish between left-and right-handed circularly polarized light. Until now, however, achieving both flatband and chiral behavior with high efficiency on a single platform has remained a major challenge.

Quantum uncertainty captured in real time using femtosecond light pulses

Researchers from the University of Arizona, working with an international team, have captured and controlled quantum uncertainty in real time using ultrafast pulses of light. Their discovery, published in the journal Light: Science & Applications, could lead to more secure communication and the development of ultrafast quantum optics.

At the heart of the breakthrough is “squeezed light,” said Mohammed Hassan, the paper’s corresponding author and associate professor of physics and optical sciences.

In , light is identified by two linked properties that roughly correspond to a particle’s position and intensity—but can never be known with perfect precision, a concept known as uncertainty. The product of these two measurements cannot fall below a certain threshold, much like the fixed amount of air in a balloon, with each measurement representing one side of the balloon.

Researchers develop the first miniaturized ultraviolet spectrometer chip

Recently, the iGaN Laboratory led by Professor Haiding Sun at the School of Microelectronics, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), together with the team of academician Sheng Liu from Wuhan University, has successfully developed the world’s first miniaturized ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer chip and realized on-chip spectral imaging.

Based on a novel gallium nitride (GaN) cascaded photodiode architecture and integrated with (DNN) algorithms, the device achieves high-precision spectral detection and high-resolution multispectral imaging.

With a response speed on the nanosecond scale, it sets a new world record for the fastest reported miniaturized spectrometer. The work, titled “A miniaturized cascaded-diode-array spectral imager,” was published online in Nature Photonics on September 26, 2025.

Stretchable waveguides maintain stable transmission even when bent or twisted

Researchers have designed and demonstrated stretchable waveguides that maintain efficient, stable signal transmission of surface plasmon polaritons even when bent, twisted or stretched. These plasmonic waveguides could make it possible to seamlessly embed advanced sensing, communication and health monitoring functions into everyday wearable materials.

Plasmonic waveguides are tiny structures that guide light by coupling it with electrons on a . The new flexible waveguides transmit what are known as spoof surface plasmon polaritons, which are formed with — in this case—rather than the conventional infrared or .

“Although our work is still at the research stage, it highlights the exciting possibility of merging advanced electromagnetic technologies with soft, stretchable materials,” said research team leader Zuojia Wang from Zhejiang University. “This brings us closer to a future where advanced health care and connectivity are integrated into what we wear.”

Cryo-imaging gives deeper view of thick biological materials

Electron microscopy is an exceptional tool for peering deep into the structure of isolated molecules. But when it comes to imaging thicker biological samples to understand how those molecules function in their cellular environments, the technology gets a little murky.

Cornell researchers devised a new method, called tilt-corrected bright-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (tcBF-STEM), to image thick samples with higher contrast and a fivefold increase in efficiency.

The Sept. 23 publication of the findings, in Nature Methods, arrives two years after the death of co-author Lena Kourkoutis, M.S. ‘06, Ph.D. ‘09, associate professor in applied and in Cornell Engineering, whose work in cryo-electron microscopy drove much of the nearly 10-year effort.

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