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Enhancing the cell’s natural recycling center improves Alzheimer’s features in animal models

A defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease is the abnormal, sustained accumulation of protein aggregates such as tau inside brain cells, which disrupts the cells’ normal functions. As time passes, brain cells stop working and die, leading to a gradual decline in memory and thinking skills and other symptoms of this condition.

One goal of researchers is to find ways to reduce or stop the accumulation of tau and other related proteins to slow down or prevent disease progression.

At Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital, a team of researchers has just taken a step in that direction. They have discovered that reducing the levels of a protein called Slingshot-1 has the unanticipated effect of improving Alzheimer’s features in animal models and human cells in the lab.

GhostAction Attackers Target Nearly 23,000 GitHub Repos with Credential-Stealing Malware

Despite these changes, the IP address (“193.32.204[.]199”) is one indicator of compromise that has been constant, allowing organizations and developers to check if their repositories have been impacted by GhostAction.

“Between October 19 — 21, the attackers also went back to CI with a different goal,” Gile told The Hacker News. “The new workflows are tailored to each repo and list its real secret names, and some request a GitHub OIDC token and try to use it to assume AWS roles. The code looks inert as written, because it depends on a role ARN the files never define, so I can’t say whether it has worked anywhere.”

In a follow-up update shared on October 27, 2026, GitGuardian said the GhostAction operator pushed over 72,000 commits to 22,964 public repositories between October 13 and 21, 2026, out of which 7,989 are new victims.

Using Pulsars to Probe Early Growth of Black Holes

Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation.

In our lifetimes, an amazing thing has happened: Black holes have advanced from “remarkable inventions of the human mind” [1] to empirical objects studied with telescopes and gravitational-wave detectors. A major puzzle in black hole astronomy is understanding the assembly of “supermassive” black holes—those having masses over a million times that of the Sun. The debate hangs on decades of impressive work but can be summed up simply: Did black holes start massive, grow massive, or build up through mergers? Yiqin Chen from Beijing Normal University and her colleagues have opened up a new way to tackle the problem [2]. They use a long-running experiment called the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, located in Australia, to probe a possible signal of early-Universe black hole binaries in low-frequency gravitational waves.

Four superconducting cables link two large quantum processors into one

As quantum computers grow more ambitious, many researchers believe the best way forward is to build them in multiple interconnected parts. In these modular designs, separate quantum processors are linked so they can work together as one larger machine. For this to happen, however, connections must carry fragile quantum information without destroying it.

For superconducting processors, this means building reliable links around a meter (3.3 feet) long inside equipment chilled to just above absolute zero. A team at IBM Research has now achieved this for the first time: joining two large superconducting processors using four separate high-quality quantum links, all installed after both chips were already in place.

Their work is detailed in a new paper published on the arXiv preprint server.

Experiment supports theoretical foundation for potentially more error-resistant quantum computing

One approach to making information storage in quantum computing less prone to errors is known as topological quantum computing. It relies on special quantum states that are expected to be more resistant to local disturbances.

Physicists at the University of Cologne have now observed quantum states that behave as predicted in a material system considered promising for this approach.

Their findings, published under the title “Tunneling spectroscopy of topological insulator Josephson junctions” in Science Advances, support a theoretical description of how superconductivity interacts with the surface of a topological insulator.

Breaking the ice: Scientists use attracting particles to form an anti-spin ice

In a recent Nature Communications study, researchers have reported the realization of an anti-spin ice, a system that does the opposite of conventional spin ices by breaking the ice rule that governs them.

Spin ices are magnetic systems that mimic a rule found in water ice. In water ice, each oxygen atom keeps two hydrogen atoms close and two farther away. This is known as the ice rule. Because many arrangements satisfy this rule equally well, the hydrogen atoms in ice end up being disordered, meaning that there’s no repeating pattern.

This is a sign of geometric frustration, which occurs when competing interactions in a system can’t all be satisfied at once, leaving many equally good compromises.

Ultrathin kagome material opens a route to study unusual quantum states

How atoms are arranged inside materials can influence the behavior of electrons and the resulting electronic states. Kagome lattices, repeating arrangements of atoms forming triangles that share corners (with hexagonal spaces between them), have been linked with the emergence of unusual electronic states.

Researchers at Seoul National University, the Center for Complex Phase of Materials and other institutions recently realized a two-dimensional (2D) kagome material that could be used to investigate quantum physics phenomena. This material, presented in a paper published in Nature Physics, was found to retain a set of tunable electron states with nearly identical energies (i.e., a flat electronic band) in a single layer.

“A central theme in condensed matter physics is the emergence of new electronic behavior from the underlying lattice geometry and symmetry,” Mingu Kang, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “A well-known example is graphene, where the symmetry of its hexagonal lattice gives rise to massless Dirac electrons (m = 0). Another extensively studied example in theoretical physics is the kagome lattice, composed of corner-sharing triangles.”

Magnetic nanocomposites could help shrink the components that power computer chips

When you think about making computer chips better, you probably think about transistors. My colleagues and I focused on a less visible part of the problem: the components that deliver power to those transistors. A chip needs more than electricity. It needs electricity supplied at the right voltage, with fluctuations kept under control. Making the hardware that does this smaller is an important challenge—and one that led my colleagues and me to build tiny magnetic devices called stripline microinductors.

In our study, we fabricated these devices using a composite of nickel and iron oxide nanoparticles. Our measurements showed more than twice the inductance of comparable devices without a magnetic core. The broader question behind this work is how to bring useful magnetic materials into the small structures used in semiconductor manufacturing.

The research was conducted at the University of Florida with my coauthors Brenden M. Mears, Noah Morgan, Jennifer S. Andrew and David P. Arnold. Our study, now published in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, brought together expertise in materials synthesis, microfabrication and electrical characterization.

Exactly solvable model reveals how trapped light can create magnetic order in one-dimensional spin chains

A research team wanted to better understand how the forces between particles inside a material change. They discovered that by confining one-dimensional classical spin chains inside a mirror box cavity with light, they could force these magnetic particles to organize and undergo a phase transition. Their work provides the simplest exactly solvable examples showing that light can create new phase transitions with materials.

In 1925, Ernst Ising showed that a single one-dimensional chain of small magnetic particles with nearest-neighbor interactions does not exhibit a magnetic phase transition at finite temperatures. This is called the Ising chain.

However, scientists today know that magnetic phase transitions can occur in two or more dimensions, positioning the Ising model as a simple, crucial math tool for studying how large groups of interacting particles behave. In addition, scientists are using cavity systems where matter and light are trapped and strongly interact with each other, leading to the possible discovery of new phenomena in physics.