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Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere may owe its existence to cold subduction

Earth was mostly devoid of oxygen for much of its 4.5 billion year lifetime. That is, until certain processes started to allow for the eventual buildup of oxygen up to the levels we have now (around 21% of the atmosphere). While scientists have found evidence of the approximate timescales of rises in oxygen over time and are aware of some of the mechanisms behind it, the main driver behind Earth’s long-term oxygenation is still unclear.

A new study explores whether changes in subduction style—how tectonic plates sink—influenced oxygen levels over time. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points to a process called cold subduction as the main driving factor behind Earth’s rise in oxygen levels, which ultimately led to a more habitable Earth.

DNA ‘nicks’ make for safer, more precise genetic analysis

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a safer and more precise way to study how genes function in living tissues by refining a recently developed CRISPR-based genetic technique in fruit flies, enabling researchers to better study how genes contribute to development and disease.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the work highlights a new method that replaces the harsh DNA cuts used in traditional CRISPR analysis with gentler cuts known as “nicks.”

According to Chun Han, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, the approach still allows scientists to study how genes function in living tissues, but with far less unintended cellular damage and greater control over the experiment.

Quantum teleportation carries microwave states at temperatures up to 4 K, beating classical limit

A growing number of quantum engineers worldwide have been trying to realize large-scale quantum networks, which consist of several connected quantum computers or devices that share information with each other. The successful realization of these networks could potentially pave the way for the realization of new high-speed and secure communication systems, or even of a quantum version of the internet.

A key challenge when trying to realize large-scale quantum networks is ensuring that the quantum properties of microwave signals can be reliably transferred from one location to another. These signals are highly sensitive to random energy fluctuations associated with heat. Thus, systems introduced so far typically operate inside cooling machines known as dilution refrigerators.

Researchers at Walther-Meißner-Institute (WMI) and Technical University of Munich have introduced a new approach to successfully transfer quantum microwave states between two separate dilution refrigerators connected by a warmer superconducting cable, with temperatures of up to 4K.

Researchers push back fundamental limit on energy transfer between particles without ‘spilling’ radiation

Researchers at TU/e have demonstrated that energy transfer without loss via light or heat can occur over much greater distances than previously thought possible thanks to vibrations in microscopic gold rods. They succeeded in making energy jump from one particle to another over a distance of several millimeters without “spilling” energy along the way.

In the microscopic world in which this research takes place, that is a giant leap, with promising applications in quantum communication, solar energy, and ultrasensitive medical sensors. The researchers have published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

Normally, a molecule that absorbs energy loses it again as heat through vibrations passed on to the surrounding environment or as a particle of light (known as a photon). In Förster resonance energy transfer (or FRET for short, which is named after the German physicist Theodor Förster), something different happens: the energy jumps directly, without radiation, from one molecule to a specific neighboring molecule through an invisible interaction between their electric fields.

Metamaterials enable control of heat transfer at nanoscale, potentially transforming energy and electronics

Heat behaves in predictable ways: a hot cup of coffee cools, a laptop warms your hands, the sun heats Earth. But at scales thousands of times smaller than a human hair, those rules begin to break down, and scientists are learning how to take advantage of that.

A new study, published in Nature from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Stanford University and Purdue University, shows that heat can be manipulated far more powerfully than previously demonstrated using carefully engineered metamaterials. The work offers one of the clearest experimental confirmations yet that heat transfer can be actively designed and enhanced.

At the core of the discovery is a phenomenon called near-field radiative heat transfer. When two objects are brought extremely close together—just a few hundred nanometers apart—heat doesn’t simply radiate away in the usual sense. Instead, it can tunnel across the gap through electromagnetic waves, dramatically increasing how much energy flows between them.

Perfect randomness realized for the first time

Creating perfect randomness is surprisingly difficult. Even modern random number generators never generate completely ideal random numbers: small systematic errors can result in some numbers appearing slightly more frequently than others. For many applications, this does not matter. In cryptography, however, even the tiniest deviations can be problematic.

Now, researchers at ETH Zurich led by Renato Renner and Andreas Wallraff in the Department of Physics have demonstrated how perfect randomness can actually be created using quantum physics. Their results, which have just been published in Nature, represent a milestone in this area of research.

Memory-preserving transistors could bypass the Boltzmann limit

Researchers have created a new theoretical framework that shows how memory-preserving “memtransistors” could overcome the intrinsic limits in efficiency faced by conventional semiconductor transistors, imposed by the laws of thermodynamics.

Led by Victor Lopez-Richard at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, in collaboration with the University of Wurzburg, in Germany, and the University of Richmond, U.S., the researchers showed that further improvements to transistor switching efficiency could be reached simply by harnessing memory effects that are already present in many nanoscale devices. The research has been published in Physical Review Applied.

Analysis of more than 10,000 cities reveals hidden details governments can use to better support their people

The world’s urban population increased by 785 million people between 2000 and 2020, but that tells only part of the story. Now, a research team including an expert from the University of Michigan has dug into the demographics of more than 10,000 individual cities to obtain insights that can be lost in the aggregate. The findings are published in the journal Nature Cities.

Optical device uses humidity to unlock hidden information and offers new option for data storage

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an optical device that reveals hidden images and changes colors in response to different levels of humidity. The technology, published in Light: Science & Applications, could lead to the development of new anti-counterfeiting labels, secure data storage, interactive displays, and environmental sensors.

The device works by displaying different images depending on moisture levels in the air. Under normal conditions or low humidity levels, one image (UC San Diego Triton logo) is visible. When humidity increases, a second image (UC San Diego library logo) emerges and conceals the first. This transition can be triggered even when a person breathes on the device. It happens in a fraction of a second and can be repeated many times.

“You can imagine using this as a built-in security feature with the environment acting like a key that unlocks different pieces of information,” said study first author Asad Nauman, an electrical and computer engineering postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego. “One example would be something like a credit card security tag, where you can blow on it and reveal a hidden code. Another application would be an environmental sensor that changes color as the humidity changes.”

Q&A: How researchers are building next-gen quantum computers

Quantum computers have the potential to transform science, accelerating breakthroughs in drug development, cosmology, materials science, nuclear physics, and more.

To make this future a reality, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are partnering with industry, academia, and the national labs to drive advances across the quantum computing “stack”—the hardware, software, and controls designed to ensure error-corrected quantum calculations.

“Making a functional quantum computer requires much more than qubits alone. It takes an entire technology stack that can harness quantum science for real-world applications,” said Chris Spitzer, operations lead at the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT).

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