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Asteroids venturing near white dwarfs don’t break directly into dust, study reveals

When asteroids travel too close to white dwarfs, the dense remnants of stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel, powerful gravitational forces can tear them apart. However, new research from Planetary Science Institute (PSI) suggests that these asteroids don’t immediately break into dust. Instead, most of the mass initially remains in larger fragments, revealing a previously overlooked step in how debris forms around dying stars.

The study, led by PSI senior scientist Jordan Steckloff, identifies a “kilometer-size barrier” that limits just how much asteroids can break apart when subjected to the powerful gravitational forces of white dwarfs.

White dwarfs are often surrounded by disks of planetary debris, including dust from asteroids and other objects pulled apart by the star’s gravity. Previous models have generally assumed that these objects behave like loosely bound piles of rubble with no internal strength. This allows them to break into increasingly smaller pieces and eventually turn into dust.

A hidden brain rhythm challenges ideas about where consciousness comes from

How our brains give rise to consciousness is one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience. But new research by Janis Hesse at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, may help fill in some of the details. The insights are coming from studies on macaque monkeys.

For years, neuroscientists have been divided over whether the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness lie primarily in the front or the back of the brain. Some researchers champion frontal regions through frameworks like global neuronal workspace and higher-order models. Others support posterior zones through models like integrated information theory and recurrent processing.

This new study suggests both camps might be arguing about the wrong thing.

New catalyst builds proton highways to tackle a long-standing hurdle in green ammonia synthesis

Over a century ago, the Haber-Bosch process, a two-step reaction for the synthesis of ammonia (NH₃), an irreplaceable chemical for the fertilizer industry, prevented the world from going into a serious food crisis. Today, however, the same method consumes about 1% of global energy and contributes more than 1% of annual anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

In a recent study, researchers designed a new covalent organic framework that provided a promising solution to a long-standing problem in green ammonia synthesis.

The team designed hydroxyl-functionalized copper phthalocyanine-based covalent organic frameworks as electrocatalysts for electrocatalytic nitrate reduction (NO₃RR). This process emerged as a viable, greener alternative to the industrial Haber-Bosch process, which is known to rely heavily on harsh high-temperature and high-pressure conditions.

How the quantum vacuum perturbs atoms, could shrink black holes and may have helped form galaxies

The word “vacuum” may conjure the image of empty space. Maybe you think of a region far outside the solar system without planets, debris, gas clouds or light. According to quantum theory, however, a vacuum is never truly empty. Quantum mechanics extends the Heisenberg uncertainty principle —which states that we cannot measure the position and the velocity of an object exactly at the same time—to a vacuum. The result is that a vacuum can never be still.

Instead of an empty space, we can imagine the vacuum as a dynamic object, with regular fluctuations in energy.

Physicists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom recently presented preliminary research showing direct imaging of these fluctuations in a lab-made quantum vacuum. Physicists have “seen” the quantum vacuum many times before, however. And we can all see the effects of the quantum vacuum on atoms in the atmosphere—through the gorgeous light displays of the aurora borealis.

New X-ray method isolates faint signals from water at material surfaces

A research team from Toyohashi University of Technology, the Institute for Molecular Science and the Institute of Science Tokyo, led by Yu Kinjo and professor Ryugo Tero of Toyohashi University of Technology, has developed a new method to investigate the state of water near material surfaces using X-rays. By combining X-ray absorption spectroscopy with data analysis, the researchers separated the weak signals of interfacial water from those of the much larger amount of surrounding water.

They also revealed differences in the state of interfacial water between inorganic material surfaces and lipid bilayers that mimic biological membranes. This method is expected to contribute to understanding various phenomena occurring at interfaces between materials and water.

The study was published online in Applied Physics Express on Oct. 1, 2026.

A blue laser for underwater communication and sensing

Researchers at EPFL have developed a chip-scale blue laser that combines stable light emission with rapid frequency control, opening possibilities for underwater communication, environmental sensing and quantum technologies.

Blue light has some useful properties: it travels through water more easily than infrared light, which is widely used in today’s optical communication systems. It also scatters strongly when it encounters tiny particles in the air. These properties make blue lasers attractive for underwater communication, pollution monitoring and scientific instruments.

But these applications demand precise control over the laser’s light. For example, the frequency must remain stable enough to distinguish a useful signal from background noise, while also changing rapidly when needed to transmit information or make measurements.

Theoretical method uses light to locate anyons, potential quantum computing building blocks

Theoretical physicists at Emory University have discovered a way to use light to detect the “spectral fingerprints” of anyons—exotic quasiparticles that emerge from the collective behavior of many electrons. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters. The work offers a new tool for the study of anyons, which hold potential as fundamental building blocks for quantum computing.

“Using a particular frequency of light, we’ve developed a sensor that can pinpoint the location of an anyon in a material,” says Luiz Santos, professor of physics at Emory University and senior author of the study.

“The dream goal is the ability to manipulate anyons to achieve topological quantum computation,” says Tianhong Lu, first author of the paper and an Emory Ph.D. candidate in physics. “Our theoretical work takes another step in that direction.”

Measuring multiple reactions on a single electrode with extraordinary sensitivity

A reaction on a single electrode can tell scientists a remarkable amount about the chemical nature and number of analytes involved. The challenge comes when they want to distinguish many reactions on the same electrode. After more than a decade of trying to overcome that limitation, Ravi Saraf and his Nebraska Engineering graduate students have demonstrated a way to quantify many reactions on the same electrode without sacrificing extraordinary sensitivity.

The advancement, Saraf said, could lead to better early diagnoses of diseases such as cancer and improved assessment of injury from exposure to high-energy radiation.

“It is certainly one of the more exciting things I’ve done,” said Saraf, Lowell E. and Betty Anderson Distinguished Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

The ‘shape’ of gene expression: Identifying genes that may share roles across species

Much of what we know about biology comes from animal models, particularly mice. Applying these insights to humans, however, is not always straightforward. For example, some of the genes important for the formation of germ cells, which eventually give rise to eggs or sperm, differ between mice and humans.

To identify gene correspondences across species, researchers often compare DNA sequences. This helps establish evolutionary relationships between genes, but it does not always answer a more functional question: Which genes play similar regulatory roles within specific cell types or cell fate specification processes across species?

To explore this question, a team of researchers at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi) looked at how genes are expressed in relation to one another. They reasoned that the overall organization of regulatory networks might remain similar across species, even when the genes involved differ.

Detailed images reveal ribosome assembly inside human cells for the first time

For decades, ribosomes have been under the lens of many scientists. Ribosomes are highly sophisticated and complex molecular machines that allow cells to synthesize proteins. However, putting ribosomes together requires intricate assembly processes. While many underlying mechanisms for building ribosomes have been discovered ex situ (outside their native cellular context), our understanding of how ribosomes are assembled in situ has so far remained limited.

Through a collaboration between the research groups of Christoph Müller, Sara Cuylen-Häring and Julia Mahamid at EMBL Heidelberg, researchers have now pushed these limits. By combining cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) with correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), they were able to image the nucleolus—the site of ribosome assembly inside cells—at sufficiently high resolution to visualize the ribosome assembly pathway inside intact human cells for the first time.

The results—a collection of molecular snapshots—yielded subnanometer-resolution in-cell structures of tens of intermediates along the ribosome assembly pathways, complementing and expanding previous insights into ribosome assembly obtained from ex situ structures. The new results have now been published in the journal Science.