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Breaking connections helps ideas spread farther, says physics-based study

Sticking with the same people might feel safe and comfortable. But a new Northwestern University study suggests it can actually trap new ideas and behaviors inside tight echo chambers. By contrast, the research, published in Communications Physics, shows that when interactions shift away from familiar contacts—and toward new ones—activity can spread more widely.

To explore how activities spread across networks, physicists developed a new theoretical framework that includes simple “learning” rules. While traditional network models assume relationships do not change, the new model shows what happens when connections change with experience. As interactions strengthen or weaken relationships, they gradually reshape the entire network.

The findings apply not only to ideas moving through social networks but to a wide range of systems where activity spreads, including infections passing among people, signals traveling through the brain and behaviors proliferating through groups of animals. Ultimately, the study suggests that whether something spreads or stalls may hinge on a simple choice: revisit the same connections or explore new ones.

An interplanetary shortcut can speed up trips to Mars

Whether it’s robotic rovers heading to Mars or, one day, a crew of astronauts, a round-trip journey is an incredibly long one. But there may be a way to find a shortcut. A new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica suggests that hundreds of days could be shaved off a return trip to the Red Planet by using the early orbital data of asteroids. This could bring the total mission time down to as low as 153 days.

To identify optimal routes and calculate fuel needs, planners of interplanetary missions use precise planetary data. Sending missions to other worlds rarely involves early orbital data from asteroids.

When it comes to Mars missions, a key planning consideration is a phenomenon known as Mars opposition. This occurs roughly every 26 months when Earth passes directly between the sun and Mars. During this alignment, the two planets are on the same side of the sun, bringing Mars to its closest point to Earth.

At just four nanometers thick, this metal starts behaving in a way physicists did not expect

Researchers in the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have discovered a powerful new way to control the electronic behavior of a metal—by manipulating the atomic properties of materials where they meet. The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that interfacial polarization can tune the surface work function of metallic ruthenium dioxide (RuO2) by more than 1 electron volt (eV)—a tiny amount of energy—simply by adjusting film thickness at the nanometer scale.

“We often think of polarization as something that belongs to insulators or ferroelectrics—not metals,” said Bharat Jalan, professor and Shell Chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. “Our work shows that, through careful interface design, you can stabilize polarization in a metallic system and use it as a knob to tune electronic properties. This opens an entirely new way of thinking about controlling metals.”

This specific change is most powerful when the metal layer is about 4 nanometers thick—roughly the width of a single strand of DNA. At this precise size, the metal shifts from being “stretched” by the material underneath it to a more “relaxed” state. This transition proves that the physical way atoms are packed together has a direct, measurable impact on how the metal handles electricity.

Bananas, cups and peelers: Robots learn how to handle curved objects like fruits and tools

It does not take much to confuse some robots. A machine might be great at handling a simple object like a box, yet when it tries to work with a more irregular shape like a banana, it often fails.

But help is at hand. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) and Idiap Research Institute have developed a new approach that lets robots more reliably manipulate a variety of different shapes by teaching them to follow the unique geometry of any object they encounter.

Their work is detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

Specially designed material combines light and electricity to remove PFAS from water without harmful byproducts

Researchers at Clarkson University have reported a breakthrough in tackling per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of widely used “forever chemicals” that are difficult to remove from water and have raised growing environmental and public health concerns. The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by Associate Professor Yang Yang and his team in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. It presents a new method for breaking down PFAS that could improve the treatment of contaminated water in real-world conditions.

Why stars spin down, or up, before they die

From birth to death, stars generally slow by 100 to 1,000 times their initial rotation rates; in other words, they “spin down.” The sun’s total angular momentum has declined as material is gradually blown off at the surface as solar wind. By observing this, astronomers have theorized the interaction between magnetic fields and plasma flow to be the most efficient way to spin down stars.

Why and how this happens has long interested astronomers, and recently an observational technique called asteroseismology, which measures a star’s natural oscillation frequencies, has made it possible to measure the internal rotation rates and magnetic fields of other stars in our galaxy.

From this huge population, a picture of how stellar rotation decreases with stellar age has emerged, one that suggests that current theory is insufficient to explain the dramatic decrease in rotation.

Machine learning offers faster, more reliable analysis of Fermi surfaces in search of spintronic materials

The search for next-generation electronic materials often starts with studying the Fermi surface, which serves as a map of a material’s electronic structure. Its shape varies with crystal structure, composition, and electronic band arrangement, directly impacting properties such as carrier density, magnetic behavior, and spin polarization. This makes it a crucial tool for understanding and engineering new materials.

The Fermi surface of a material is determined experimentally using techniques such as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). However, interpreting ARPES data requires specialized expertise, and the measurements themselves are often susceptible to noise. As experiments produce larger amounts of data, carefully reviewing every image by hand becomes time-consuming and inefficient.

Single X-ray photons reveal hidden light-matter interactions in 50-nanometer double slits

A rainbow reveals with colors what otherwise remains hidden: light is “refracted” by transparent matter, in this case water droplets. This same physical effect underlies many everyday technologies, like LCD screens and broadband connections based on fiber-optic cables. Light refraction is caused by an interaction between light and the atoms of matter. This brings the light waves slightly out of sync, so to speak. “X-ray light” is “refracted,” too. But the effect is difficult to measure here.

A miniature device now offers a novel approach: Researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Hamburg, together with partners, have built the world’s smallest X-ray interferometer, to their knowledge. It has enabled them to precisely measure, for the first time, the refraction of X-rays confined to a few nanometers, and to deduce how they interact with atomic nuclei. The study was published in the journal Nature Photonics.

The new X-ray interferometer is based on the famous double-slit experiment, which Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.”

A faster, greener method to recycle lithium-ion batteries can also ease supply chain issues

As global demand for lithium-ion batteries continues to surge, a team of Rice University researchers has developed a faster, more energy-efficient way to recover critical minerals from spent batteries, potentially easing supply chain pressures and reducing environmental harm.

In a new study published in Small, researchers from Rice’s Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering introduce a class of water-based solutions that can extract valuable metals from battery waste in minutes rather than hours. The work centers on aqueous solutions of amino chlorides, which mimic the performance of commonly studied green solvents like deep eutectics, while avoiding their key limitations.

“Traditional recycling methods often rely on harsh acids or slow, energy-intensive processes,” said the study’s first author, Simon M. King, a sophomore studying chemical and biomolecular engineering who completed this work as a summer research fellow at the Rice Advanced Materials Institute. “What we’ve shown is that you can achieve rapid, high-efficiency metal recovery using a much simpler, water-based system.”

Children may be born with two complex cognitive functions already established, research reveals

A new study is the first to show that two of our most sophisticated cognitive functions, using and understanding language and being able to sense how other people feel, have distinct origins in the brain in young children—matching what we know about the adult brain.

The findings suggest that these separate but related ways of processing complex concepts, both uniquely human skills, do not originate from overlapping brain areas and grow more distinct as the mind matures, which challenges prior theories. Instead, our brains appear to have evolved with discrete architecture and wiring enabling these different kinds of thinking.

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