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Imagine being tasked with baking a soufflé, except the only instruction provided is an ingredient list without any measurements or temperatures.

It would likely take an enormous amount of time, effort and ingredients to bake the perfect soufflé. It would require trial and error—tweaking ingredient measurements, altering the temperature and baking duration—but what if you had a model that could predict the final product before anything ever went into the mixing bowl? It would not only save weeks’ worth of time and resources but could also provide useful details like why and how the soufflé rose and collapsed when it did or why the texture didn’t turn out how you expected.

Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology aren’t quite baking soufflés. Instead, they developed a that digs into the chemical “recipe” of polymer manufacturing to provide predictive control over how materials self-organize to give rise to new textures and properties.

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New data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an “atom smasher” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, reveals how the primordial soup generated in the most energetic particle collisions “splashes” sideways when it is hit by a jet of energetic particles.

The evidence comes from the first measurement at RHIC of reconstructed produced in collisions back-to-back with photons, particles of light. Scientists have long anticipated using measurements of photon-correlated jets to study the matter generated in these collisions. The findings, described in two papers just published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review C, offer fresh insight into this primordial soup, which is known as a (QGP)—and raise new questions about its extraordinary properties.

“Measuring reconstructed jets gives us unique views of how the strongly interacting plasma responds as the jets move through it,” said Peter Jacobs, a physicist at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and member of RHIC’s STAR Collaboration, which published these results. “Instead of focusing on what happens to the jet, we want to turn it around and see what the jet can tell us about the QGP.”

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Use of common psychiatric medications (anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, and antidepressants) is linked to a higher risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and poorer outcomes after diagnosis with shorter survival and faster functional decline, according to a nationwide Swedish study led by Karolinska Institutet

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Imagine you’re walking to work when the unspeakable occurs: Your favorite coffee shop—where you stop every day—is closed. You groggily navigate to a newly opened coffee shop a couple blocks away, which, you’re pleased to discover, actually makes quite a good morning brew. Soon, you find yourself looking forward to stopping at the new location instead of the old one.

That switch probably alters more than just your morning routine. Each time you visit that new coffee shop, the experience likely strengthens a neural map marking the positions of rewarding experiences—a map that can guide you back to those experiences even from miles away.

While the existence of a reward map is familiar from previous work, Wu Tsai Neuro researchers working with were surprised to find that the map persists even when mice move many meters away from a treat, and that it updates almost immediately when the of the treat changes.

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In a new study, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used a cloud of atoms chilled down to incredibly cold temperatures to simultaneously measure acceleration in three dimensions—a feat that many scientists didn’t think was possible.

The device, a new type of atom “interferometer,” could one day help people navigate submarines, spacecraft, cars and other vehicles more precisely.

“Traditional atom interferometers can only measure acceleration in a single dimension, but we live within a three-dimensional world,” said Kendall Mehling, a co-author of the new study and a graduate student in the Department of Physics at CU Boulder. “To know where I’m going, and to know where I’ve been, I need to track my acceleration in all three dimensions.”

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Perovskite has broad application prospects in solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and detectors due to its high luminescent efficiency and low cost. However, electrons and holes in traditional perovskite materials often struggle to effectively recombine and emit light. As a result, the strongly space-confined method is commonly employed to improve luminescence efficiency. Furthermore, how to enhance the brightness of LEDs and extend their lifespan has become a top research priority in this field.

In a study published in Nature, Prof. Xiao Zhengguo’s team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a novel strategy based on weakly space-confined, large-grain crystals of all-inorganic perovskite to prepare with larger crystalline grains and higher temperature resistance. Researchers increased the brightness of perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) to over 1.16 million nits and extended their lifespan to more than 180,000 hours.

Researchers developed the strategy based on the weakly space-confined technique. They first added specific compounds—hypophosphorous acid and ammonium chloride—to the perovskite material. Then, they prepared a new type of perovskite thin film with larger crystalline grains and fewer defects using a high-temperature annealing process.

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Mercury levels in the world’s rivers have more than doubled since the pre-industrial era, according to new research from Tulane University that establishes the first known global baseline for riverine mercury pollution.

The study, published in Science Advances, developed a process-based model to simulate mercury transport in rivers and found that global rivers carried approximately 390 metric tons of mercury to the oceans annually before 1850. Today, that figure has jumped to about 1,000 metric tons per year.

Primary drivers of the increase are wastewater discharge, soil erosion and mercury releases from industrial activities and mining, said lead author Yanxu Zhang, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Tulane School of Science and Engineering.

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Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also key in security; if a password or code is an unguessable string of numbers, it’s harder to crack. Many of our cryptographic systems today use random number generators to produce secure keys.

But how do you know that a random number is truly random?

Classical computer algorithms can only create pseudorandom numbers, and someone with enough knowledge of the algorithm or the system could manipulate it or predict the next number. An expert in sleight of hand could rig a coin flip to guarantee a heads or tails result. Even the most careful coin flips can have bias; with enough study, their outcomes could be predicted.

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A research team has observed multibody interaction-induced EPs and hysteresis trajectories in cold Rydberg atomic gases. They revealed the phenomenon of charge-conjugation parity (CP) symmetry breaking in non-Hermitian multibody physics.

The team was led by Prof. Guo Guangcan, Prof. Shi Baosen and Prof. Ding Dongsheng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and their study was published in Nature Communications.

CP-symmetry is an important discrete symmetry in . When certain physical processes exhibit asymmetry under CP transformation, it is referred to as the breaking of CP-symmetry, such as in the decay of neutral K mesons (K⁰) and B meson decay.

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Once only a part of science fiction, lasers are now everyday objects used in research, health care and even just for fun. Previously available only in low-energy light, lasers are now available in wavelengths from microwaves through X-rays, opening a range of different downstream applications.

In a study published in Nature, an led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has generated the shortest hard X-ray pulses to date through the first demonstration of strong lasing phenomena.

The resulting pulses can lead to several potential applications, from quantum X-ray optics to visualizing inside molecules.

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