Researchers have used laser cooling and trapping to isolate calcium monohydride, a key step toward producing ultracold atomic hydrogen.
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Cosmic acceleration holds up as new analysis rebuts slowdown claim
Our universe’s expansion is still accelerating despite recent claims suggesting otherwise, an international team of astrophysicists says.
They refuted a study published last year claiming the growth of the universe is slowing and insist there is no flaw in the widely accepted theory that a mysterious force known as dark energy is driving the expanding cosmos.
The researchers, who include two Nobel laureates and represent institutions worldwide, say the debate that followed last November’s revelations was the result of a scientific misunderstanding rather than a cosmic grenade threatening to blow apart everything we know about the universe.
Silver nanoparticles pave the way for precise DNA cutting and joining
DNA is composed of long chains that act as the blueprint for living organisms. In genetic engineering, scientists cut DNA at specific sites and join the resulting fragments to other DNA sequences, enabling applications such as advanced crop breeding, treatment of genetic diseases, and the generation of animal models for drug discovery.
Assembling short DNA fragments requires overhanging sequences, known as sticky ends, to facilitate efficient binding. However, generating sticky ends requires precise cutting at targeted sites, which remains challenging with current technologies.
A Japanese research group has developed a silver nanoparticle-based technology to precisely cut and join DNA at targeted sites, achieving two to five times higher DNA assembly efficiency than conventional restriction enzyme methods. These findings were published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
Annual global migration has nearly tripled since 2000, reshaping where and how people move
Global migration has risen sharply from approximately 13 million people per year in 2000 to around 35 million people per year in 2023. This is according to a new dataset on human migration published in Nature by researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), IIASA and the University of Hong Kong.
This rise in migration outpaces global population growth, showing a true per capita increase in human mobility. The trend is contrary to previous research efforts to quantify global migration flows.
Using deep learning, the researchers built the first dataset of migration flows between all countries for the period 1990–2023, offering a far more detailed picture of global movement than traditional data, which is highly fragmented.
Russian satellites linked to mysterious GPS disruptions across several countries
Since 2019, GPS signals across Europe, Greenland and Canada have experienced a huge spike in sudden, widespread signal blackouts. These have resulted in disruptions and degraded performance in navigation systems that airplanes and ships rely on to travel safely.
Some causes are known, such as military jamming on the ground, but others have been a total mystery. A new paper published on the arXiv preprint server points an accusatory finger at Russia, claiming that a constellation of Russian satellites is likely responsible for many of these interference events, which have been blasting out waves of radio static from space.
The study focuses on how these events affected the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) that GPS relies on. The researchers studied 75 separate days on which at least one major interference event occurred.
AI helps reveal large-scale quantum effects hidden in stacked atomic sheets
Quantum materials are a class of exotic materials with special properties that are governed by quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Those properties—like superconductivity, entanglement and unusual forms of magnetism—often originate in the tiny repeating patterns of atoms inside crystals, but through clever engineering, they can be observed and controlled at a more human scale. Quantum materials are helping to power the quickly growing field of quantum computing and could find their way into future generations of energy-efficient electronics.
Designing new materials from the atomic scale up, however, requires intense modeling and simulation. Some materials may appear ordinary when viewed as small clusters of atoms, yet reveal new and useful properties when their atomic building blocks repeat and interact over larger distances. Researchers must be able to accurately predict behaviors at large scales in order to find materials with practical applications—otherwise, designing new materials is a slow and costly trial-and-error process.
In the past 50 years, supercomputers have helped materials scientists solve some of those thorny prediction problems, but two recent studies from the University of Washington demonstrate how newer computing techniques can help researchers sniff out promising quantum materials to pursue.
Cells have a secret power line: How the nucleus gets its own private energy supply from mitochondria
For decades, biologists assumed a cell’s energy simply diffused to wherever it was needed. It turns out the most important destination of all has a private delivery line.
An international team of scientists led by Dr. Ivan Menendez-Montes, assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Hesham A. Sadek, director of the Sarver Heart Center at the University of Arizona and group leader at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC), has uncovered a previously unknown mechanism through which mitochondria directly supply energy to the cell nucleus.
Published in Nature, their study demonstrates that mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, physically dock at the control center of the cell—the nucleus—through its main gate—the nuclear pore complexes. This creates a highly efficient system for delivering energy and metabolites directly into the nucleus.
An underground detector in China unveils its first major findings about mysterious ghost particles
A massive underground detector aimed at understanding the mysterious ghost particles in our universe released its first major results on Wednesday.
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory in China started collecting data in August with the goal of understanding neutrinos: tiny cosmic particles that date back to the Big Bang and whiz harmlessly through our bodies by the trillions every second. Yet they weigh almost nothing, making them difficult to sniff out.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, the JUNO team unveiled its initial findings from two months of data collection—including some of the most precise measurements to date of how neutrinos switch between three varieties, or flavors, as they zip through space.