Lifeboat Foundation

When robots are made out of modular units, their size, shape, and functionality can be modified to perform any number of tasks. At the microscale, modular robots could enable applications like targeted drug delivery and autonomous micromanufacturing; but building hundreds of identical robots the size of a red blood cell has its challenges.

“At this scale, robots are not big enough to hold a microcontroller to tell them what to do,” explained Taryn Imamura, a Ph.D. Candidate in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“Active colloids (the robots) have what we call embodied intelligence, meaning their behavior, including the speed at which they travel, is determined by their size and shape. At the same time, it becomes more difficult to build microrobots that have the same size and structure as they get smaller.”

Amid the many mysteries of quantum physics, subatomic particles don’t always follow the rules of the physical world. They can exist in two places at once, pass through solid barriers and even communicate across vast distances instantaneously. These behaviors may seem impossible, but in the quantum realm, scientists are exploring an array of properties once thought impossible.

In a new study, physicists at Brown University have now observed a novel class of quantum particles called fractional excitons, which behave in unexpected ways and could significantly expand scientists’ understanding of the quantum realm.

“Our findings point toward an entirely new class of quantum particles that carry no overall charge but follow unique quantum statistics,” said Jia Li, an associate professor of physics at Brown.

A research team led by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has achieved a groundbreaking quantum simulation of the non-Hermitian skin effect in two dimensions using ultracold fermions, marking a significant advance in quantum physics research.

Quantum mechanics, which typically considers a well-isolated system from its environment, describes ubiquitous phenomena ranging from electron behavior in solids to information processing in quantum devices. This description typically requires a real-valued observable—specifically, a Hermitian model (Hamiltonian).

The hermiticity of the model, which guarantees conserved energy with real eigenvalues, breaks down when a quantum system exchanges particles and energy with its environment. Such an open quantum system can be effectively described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, providing crucial insights into quantum information processing, curved space, non-trivial topological phases, and even black holes. Nevertheless, many questions about non-Hermitian quantum dynamics remain unanswered, especially in higher dimensions.

Ferroelectrics are special materials with polarized positive and negative charges—like a magnet has north and south poles—that can be reversed when external electricity is applied. The materials will remain in these reversed states until more power is applied, making them useful for data storage and wireless communication applications.

Now, turning a non-ferroelectric material into one may be possible simply by stacking it with another ferroelectric material, according to a team led by scientists from Penn State who demonstrated the phenomenon, called proximity ferroelectricity.

The discovery offers a new way to make ferroelectric materials without modifying their chemical formulation, which commonly degrades several useful properties. This has implications for next-generation processors, optoelectronics and quantum computing, the scientists said. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

Glass might seem to be an ordinary material we encounter every day, but the physics at play inside are actually quite complex and still not completely understood by scientists. Some panes of glass, such as the stained-glass windows in many medieval buildings, have remained rigid for centuries, as their constituent molecules are perpetually frozen in a state of disorder.

Similarly, supercooled liquids are not quite solid, in the sense that their fundamental particles do not stick to a lattice pattern with long-range order, but they are also not ordinary liquids, because the particles also lack the energy to move freely. More research is required to reveal the physics of these complex systems.

In a study published in Nature Materials, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo have used advanced computer simulations to model the behavior of fundamental particles in a glassy supercooled liquid. Their approach was based on the concept of the Arrhenius activation energy, which is the energy barrier a process must overcome to proceed.

We systematically investigated the detection performance of Al nanostrips for single photons at various wavelengths. The Al films were deposited using magnetron sputtering, and the sophisticated nanostructures and morphology of the deposited films were revealed through high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. The fabricated Al meander nanostrips, with a thickness of 4.2 nm and a width of 178 nm, exhibited a superconducting transition temperature of 2.4 K and a critical current of approximately 5 μA at 0.85 K. While the Al nanostrips demonstrated a saturated internal quantum efficiency for 405-nm photons, the internal detection efficiency exhibited an exponential dependence on bias current without any saturation tendency for 1550-nm photons. This behavior can be attributed to the relatively large diffusion coefficient and coherence length of the Al films.

Simulations deliver hints on how the multiverse produced according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics might be compatible with our stable, classical Universe.

Author: Agnes Chan // Editor: Erin Pallott

I believe most of you have seen that in movies life-threatening events are often depicted in slow motion. Have you ever wondered that it may be true that time is slowed down during certain events? There are several situations in which time was reported to have slowed down or things appeared to happen in slow motion. For example, people often report time slowing down during car crashes or other high-adrenaline situations. These situations are often associated with high levels of fear and danger. If time appeared to be slowing down, it implies that the speed of the internal clock increased during the event. Similar phenomena were reported in military firefights and professional players of high-speed sports reporting their opponents moving in slow motion. It can also be seen in more ordinary events like anxiously waiting for a doctor’s appointment and the passing of time felt slower.

A Mirai botnet variant has been found exploiting a newly disclosed security flaw impacting Four-Faith industrial routers since early November 2024 with the goal of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The botnet maintains approximately 15,000 daily active IP addresses, with the infections primarily scattered across China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the United States.

Exploiting an arsenal of over 20 known security vulnerabilities and weak Telnet credentials for initial access, the malware is known to have been active since February 2024. The botnet has been dubbed “gayfemboy” in reference to the offensive term present in the source code.