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Repurposing the internet’s backbone to advance whale monitoring

Bioacoustics researcher Léa Bouffaut, at the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, has spent the past several years eavesdropping on the conversations of whales. But instead of using underwater microphones like other marine scientists, she listens by tapping into fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor—a powerful tool to aid in marine mammal conservation.

The cables—originally installed for telecommunications or power transmission—also pick up vibrations from sound waves. The technology, known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), works by using special instrumentation, sending laser pulses through fiber-optic cables and measuring tiny changes caused by passing sound waves, including whale sounds. By measuring these disturbances, she can detect sounds along many miles of cable where each vocalizing whale species leaves a unique fingerprint.

Distributed acoustic sensing using fiber-optic cables essentially turns long stretches of seafloor into dense networks of virtual acoustic sensors that are critical for monitoring whales—details needed to safeguard declining whale populations.

Detailed 3D view of babesiosis parasite’s ribosome could guide development of targeted treatments

A new study has revealed a three-dimensional, near-atomic-resolution view of the ribosome from Babesia divergens, one of several Babesia species known to infect humans and cause babesiosis. The structural insights from this close-up view could help researchers identify parasite-specific features that may be exploited for future drug development.

The research also deepens the foundations of knowledge for the entire group of protozoa to which Babesia belongs, known as apicomplexan parasites, that are responsible for diseases including malaria and toxoplasmosis. The study is published in Nature Communications.

Very little is known about the fundamental mechanisms that these complex pathogens rely on to cause infection and survive in a diverse range of host species, said Mélissa Léger-Abraham, assistant professor of microbiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and senior author of the study.

Scientists discover new way to control magnetic waves for future quantum technologies

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Ames National Laboratory have discovered a way to control the handedness of magnons, tiny magnetic waves that can carry information through materials. By changing the material’s magnetic state with an external magnetic field, they were able to switch magnon behavior, a finding with potential applications in quantum information and quantum computing technologies. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

Magnons are excitations—tiny waves of magnetic motion traveling through magnetic materials—that trace paths in a right-handed or left-handed direction, like a spinning top moving clockwise or counterclockwise. Because magnons provide a means to transmit energy and information without moving electrical charge, scientists are exploring them as potential building blocks for future high-efficiency computing applications.

One of the best places to study magnon handedness is in ferrimagnets, a class of materials that naturally host both right-and left-handed magnons. Ferrimagnets contain two different types of magnetic atoms whose magnetic moments point in opposite directions. Because the sizes of their magnetic moments are unequal, they do not entirely cancel each other out. This allows scientists to investigate how the two different types of magnons interact within a given material.

Classical–quantum light interactions could make complex quantum behavior easier to simulate

An international collaboration demonstrates that classical nonlinear dynamics can drive single- and two-photon states to thermalize, opening new avenues for simulating complex quantum many-body systems within accessible optical architectures.

Mathematical method sharpens X-ray images at the nanoscale

In an international collaboration, researchers have developed a method that produces significantly higher-quality three-dimensional X-ray images than previously possible. The technique is used for 3D imaging with so-called X-ray nanotomography. The researchers’ approach draws on expertise in mathematics and computational science.

“Our work shows that the limitation has not only been in the X-ray optics, but also in the mathematics used to reconstruct the image,” says Marcus Carlsson, a mathematics researcher at Lund University and last author of the paper published in Optica.

The new method can distinguish extremely small structures down to 20 nanometers in size. By comparison, a human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick.

Quantum could solve AI energy drain, says tech founder

Quantum computers could curb the vast energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers with their ability to run complex calculations, one of the tech’s pioneers told AFP.

Australian startup Diraq is conducting the first field test worldwide putting a small quantum computer based on a silicon chip in a commercial data center in Sydney.

Gigawatt-scale energy demand from large data centers—warehouse-like buildings full of servers used to train or run AI tools—requires new power plants or increases pressure on electrical grids, sparking community backlash.

Laser-driven magnetic state defies equilibrium rules

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and their collaborators used lasers and neutrons to observe a long-lived quantum state in a magnetic material, opening a new way to study materials systems driven far from their equilibrium. Manipulation of quantum magnets is important for advancing quantum information science and could reduce loss of transported information, improve memory devices and benefit other quantum technologies.

The team studied magnons, quantum quasiparticles whose wavelike excitations are critical to magnetic behavior in materials. Magnons can carry information, and quantum magnets can support long lifetimes and memory for data transfer.

The team’s findings, published in Nature Communications, show how a laser can push a magnetic system out of its normal state, how neutrons can reveal the details of that state and how the new state can persist at low energy instead of transiently fading away.

Microscopy upgrade sharpens images fivefold without sacrificing tissue imaging depth

Researchers at Texas A&M University have cracked a problem that has limited biological imaging for years: seeing fine cellular detail while looking deep inside living tissue. The new microscopy technique resolves structures smaller than 100 nanometers, roughly a thousand times thinner than a human hair, without giving up the ability to image deep into intact samples.

The team, led by Aart Verhoef, Ph.D., assistant professor of biophotonics in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and joint professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, published the findings in the Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Their method, called 2PE-ISM-SOFI, short for two-photon excited image scanning microscopy combined with super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging, layers two established techniques onto a standard two-photon microscope to sharpen its resolution without shrinking its reach.

How the cosmic environment depletes galaxies of their gas

An international team of researchers, led by Jonathan Freundlich (University of Strasbourg, Astronomical Observatory), has revealed how a dense cosmic environment depletes galaxies of their gas. By mapping the molecular gas in a galaxy group located 7 billion light-years away, they found that the galaxies in this group harbor, on average, gas reservoirs reduced by more than half compared to similar isolated galaxies. The results of this study are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The history of the universe is marked by a peak in star formation 10 billion years ago, followed by a drastic drop in the star formation rate. This decrease can be explained by a combination of several factors: the ejection or heating of the gas used to form stars by stellar winds and black holes, a drying up of the fresh gas supply, internal structural transformations or environmental disruptions.

Insofar as the majority of galaxies are located in groups, environmental effects play a major role. These include tidal forces, which deeply deform galaxies and destabilize their gas during close encounters, as well as interaction with the hot gas of the intergalactic medium, which strips gas from galaxies and blocks their external supply. However, measurements of the amount of molecular gas remain particularly rare within galaxy groups despite its role as the essential fuel for star formation.

Webb’s controversial ‘little red dots’ may finally have an explanation

Astronomers may have solved one of the biggest mysteries uncovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using sophisticated simulations to show that enigmatic objects known as “little red dots” (LRDs) are likely the birthplaces of the first supermassive black holes.

The discovery sheds new light on how some of the universe’s largest black holes formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Since JWST began peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before, astronomers have been puzzled by hundreds of compact, bright objects known as little red dots. These mysterious sources appear as tiny red specks in the early universe and are unlike anything predicted by existing theories.