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Electrical imbalances at grain boundaries help explain solid-state battery failure

Next-generation batteries that use new electrolyte materials could achieve far higher energy density than today’s lithium-ion batteries, without many of the safety concerns. But advanced batteries, such as those that use solid or almost-solid electrolytes, have been plagued by the formation of tiny spikes of lithium metal called dendrites that cause the batteries to lose efficiency and fail.

Exactly how those dendrites form is still up for debate. While the interface between the battery’s electrolyte and electrodes has been the focus of most research, another culprit is the boundary where two grains of electrolyte in a solid material meet. Researchers know these boundaries can seed dendrites within electrolytes, although the effects have been difficult to study.

Now researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have uncovered why such boundaries can lead to dendrites: Hidden electrical imbalances across the boundaries affect how the electrolyte conducts electrical charges, which influences how the ions and electrons move through the material during battery operation.

Bioinspired strategy creates complex 3D curved structures via programmed shrinkage

The shape of biological structures, ranging from flower petals to the limbs or organs of animals, is often naturally best suited for performing specific functions. Biological structures also often present curved surfaces with specific functional advantages, such as facilitating the drainage of water, increasing a structure’s strength or aerodynamic efficiency, or supporting heavy loads.

Researchers at Kyoto University recently developed a new method to create three-dimensional (3D) structures with curved surfaces, drawing inspiration from the process through which biological structures grow and acquire specific shapes. Using their proposed fabrication strategy, introduced in a paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they were able to convert flat sheets into curved structures with various complex shapes.

“The starting point for our study was the idea that the 3D forms of living organisms might be explained by spatial patterns of growth-rate differences,” Kentaro Morikawa, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

Quantum computing: Laser-optical system offers full control over 2,000 trapped Rydberg atoms

Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen has developed a highly complex laser-optical system for a quantum computer currently under construction at the 5th Institute of Physics at the University of Stuttgart. This system enables 2,000 Rydberg atoms to be positioned with submicrometer precision in the computer’s highly compact vacuum chamber. To do this, the system projects an array of 2,000 individually controllable laser beams into the chamber. These beams act as optical tweezers and hold the trapped Rydberg atoms precisely at the distance required for them to interact with each other. The computer’s quantum logic processes are based on these interactions.

The task was formidable: to develop a system capable of controlling 2,000 trapped strontium atoms using optical tweezers and positioning them with an accuracy of less than 100 nanometers (nm) within the vacuum chamber of a Rydberg quantum computer. The vacuum chamber is the computer’s processing unit, where two adjacent atoms are brought into a state through laser excitation in which they interact with one another. These interactions can be controlled and measured. Scientists refer to them as two-qubit logic gates; they are the building blocks of quantum logic in a Rydberg quantum computer.

Rydberg atoms are particularly well suited for quantum computing. In their laser-excited state, they are more than one micrometer (µm) in size because, as a result of the excitation, their outermost electron briefly moves to an orbital far from the atomic nucleus, where it nevertheless remains bound. However, due to the weak binding of the outer electron, the atoms are highly sensitive to electric fields, which can also originate from neighboring atoms. Scientists are leveraging this property for the highly precise electromagnetic control of quantum operations.

Detecting neutron sources by borrowing inference tools from cosmology

Neutron sources can be directly identified from measured spectra rather than proxies using inference tools adapted from cosmology, according to a University of Michigan Engineering study published in Physical Review Applied. The method can improve nuclear security by helping intercept materials at ports or borders or guide first responders during emergency response.

Directly detecting and characterizing a neutron source remains a challenge because most nuclear materials emit neutrons with energy patterns, called neutron spectra, that look similar to one another—whether from a benign industrial isotope or fissile material.

“This problem sits at the intersection of fundamental physics, statistics and real-world nuclear security. There is a very practical need to identify unknown neutron-emitting materials, but there is also a deep scientific challenge: How do you extract reliable information from signals that are weak, noisy and highly similar?” said David Breitenmoser, a postdoctoral research fellow of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at U-M and lead author of the study.

Earth’s deepest rocks help define upper limit for viscosity beyond which materials effectively become rigid

Viscosity is one of the most fundamental physical properties used to describe how materials flow. It governs the movement of liquids, molten rocks and even slowly deforming regions deep inside the Earth. While scientists have long studied materials with low or moderate viscosities, a simple but important question has remained largely unexplored: Is there a physically meaningful upper limit to viscosity?

Extremely high-viscosity materials are usually composed of rock-forming minerals, which are rarely discussed within the traditional framework of fluid dynamics, leaving this question largely unanswered.

To address this question, a study by Professor Masaki Yoshida from the Department of Physical Sciences, College of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, investigated whether the Earth’s interior could provide a natural constraint on the highest physically meaningful viscosity over finite timescales.

Controlling magnetic chirality could help memory pack in more data

Magnetic storage devices, like a computer’s hard disk drive, utilize magnets to represent binary data. However, as these devices are downsized, stray magnetic fields generated by individual magnetic components can interact with neighboring elements to cause operational malfunctions, limiting how much data we can densely pack into memory devices.

A joint research team led by Hidetoshi Masuda and Yoshinori Onose from Tohoku University’s Institute for Materials Research—in collaboration with CROSS, J-PARC, Keio University, and Kyoto University—has successfully demonstrated precise, deterministic control over the spiral-handedness (magnetic chirality) in a metallic helimagnet, a material that inherently avoids malfunction-causing crosstalk. Details of their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 16, 2026.

A helimagnet features microscopic atomic magnets arranged in a twisted, spiral pattern. Utilizing its chirality (right-or left-handed mirror images) to represent binary data (“0” and “1”) could enable ultra-high-density storage. While some experiments suggested that this chirality could be controlled by simultaneously applying an electric current and a magnetic field, previous confirmations relied on indirect, macroscopic electrical measurements highly susceptible to experimental artifacts.

NASA’s Hubble Reveals a Star-Spangled Stellar Masterpiece of 500,000 Ancient Stars

More than 500,000 stars glow in shades of red, white, and blue in a spectacular new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Released in celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, the image features Messier 3 (M3), one of the Milky Way’s largest globular clusters. Globular clust

NASA’s Hubble Captures a Stunning Red, White, and Blue Stellar Nursery

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking view of the stellar nursery LH 95, where brilliant blue and white stars sparkle against glowing crimson clouds of gas, creating a scene that resembles fireworks fading into a smoky night sky. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf

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