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Living in an unequal society impacts the structure of children’s brains, study finds

The distribution of wealth between different people living in specific geographical regions has changed substantially over the past decades, with some segments of the population benefiting most from economic growth than others. In some parts of the United States, the United Kingdom and various European countries, the distribution of wealth has become increasingly uneven.

An uneven wealth distribution essentially means that there is significant disparity in the income and resources of the general population, with some people earning good salaries and others living in the same place struggling to meet their basic needs. This is typically measured with a value ranging from 0 to 1, known as the Gini coefficient, where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 extreme inequality.

Researchers at King’s College London, Harvard University and the University of York recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the possible impact of living in a society where wealth is unevenly distributed on the brain’s development in late childhood and pre-adolescence. Their findings, published in Nature Mental Health, suggest that living in places with a high income inequality is associated with differences in the structure of some brain regions, which could in turn predict the emergence of mental health disorders.

Super-thin semiconductor overcomes trade-off between speed and thermal stability

A team led by academician Huang Ru and Professor Wu Yanqing from the School of Integrated Circuits at Peking University has developed a super-thin, high-performance semiconductor with enhanced heat conductivity, enabled by a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate. The research, published in Nature Electronics under the title “Amorphous indium tin oxide transistors for power amplification above 10 GHz,” marks a significant step forward in next-generation radio-frequency (RF) electronics.

Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOS) enable low-temperature, large-area, and chip-compatible processing with . However, their inherently low thermal conductivity leads to self-heating effects, which limit top-gate scaling and high-frequency operation in applications such as 5G communications and the Internet of Things. Overcoming this trade-off between speed and thermal stability remains a central challenge.

This breakthrough using a SiC substrate overcomes the trade-off between speed and in AOS, paving the way for low-cost, flexible, and chip-compatible RF electronics. It demonstrates how combining high-frequency design with effective thermal management can deliver both performance and reliability in high-speed devices.

Artificial muscle can switch from soft to rigid to support 4,000 times its own weight

A research team affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a new type of artificial muscle that can seamlessly transition from soft and flexible to rigid and strong—much like rubber transforming into steel. When contracting, this innovative muscle can lift many times its own weight, delivering energy output far surpassing that of human muscles.

Led by Professor Hoon Eui Jeong in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST, the research team has successfully created a soft artificial muscle capable of dynamically adjusting its stiffness.

The study is published online in Advanced Functional Materials.

Nanomaterial-based wireless sensor can monitor pressure injuries and hygiene risks in real time

A research team has co-developed a nanomaterial-based ‘wireless multi-sensing platform’ for the early detection of pressure injuries, which have a high prevalence among individuals with limited mobility, including the elderly and people with disabilities. The team’s findings are published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Pressure injuries are among the most painful conditions affecting elderly and disabled individuals in long-term care and rehabilitation facilities. They result from sustained pressure that damages , making regular repositioning and meticulous hygiene care essential.

For patients with , in particular, contact with bio-contaminants such as urine and feces can further irritate the damaged skin and worsen the injuries. However, in hospital settings, a shortage of caregivers or staff makes real-time monitoring of patients’ conditions extremely challenging.

Rewriting the rules of genetics: Study reveals gene boundaries are dynamic, not fixed

Molecular biologists have long believed that the beginning of a gene launched the process of transcription—the process by which a segment of DNA is copied into RNA and then RNA helps make the proteins that cells need to function.

But a new study published in Science by researchers at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts T.H. Chan School of Medicine challenges that understanding, revealing that the beginning and end of genes are not fixed points, but move together—reshaping how cells build proteins and adapt through evolution.

“This work rewrites a textbook idea: the beginning of a gene doesn’t just launch transcription—it helps decide where it stops and what protein you ultimately make,” says Ana Fiszbein, assistant professor of biology and faculty fellow of computing & data sciences, and one of the lead authors of the study.

Physics-informed AI excels at large-scale discovery of new materials

One of the key steps in developing new materials is property identification, which has long relied on massive amounts of experimental data and expensive equipment, limiting research efficiency. A KAIST research team has introduced a new technique that combines physical laws, which govern deformation and interaction of materials and energy, with artificial intelligence. This approach allows for rapid exploration of new materials even under data-scarce conditions and provides a foundation for accelerating design and verification across multiple engineering fields, including materials, mechanics, energy, and electronics.

Professor Seunghwa Ryu’s research group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Jae Hyuk Lim’s group at Kyung Hee University and Dr. Byungki Ryu at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute, proposed a new method that can accurately determine material properties with only limited data. The method uses physics-informed machine learning (PIML), which directly incorporates physical laws into the AI learning process.

In the first study, the researchers focused on hyperelastic materials, such as rubber. They presented a physics-informed neural network (PINN) method that can identify both the deformation behavior and the properties of materials using only a small amount of data obtained from a single experiment. Whereas previous approaches required large, complex datasets, this research demonstrated that material characteristics can be reliably reproduced even when data is scarce, limited, or noisy.

The playbook for perfect polaritons: Rules for creating quasiparticles that can power optical computers, quantum devices

Light is fast, but travels in long wavelengths and interacts weakly with itself. The particles that make up matter are tiny and interact strongly with each other, but move slowly. Together, the two can combine into a hybrid quasiparticle called a polariton that is part light, part matter.

In a new paper published today in Chem, a team of Columbia chemists has identified how to combine matter and light to get the best of both worlds: polaritons with and fast, wavelike flow. These distinctive behaviors can be used to power and other light-based quantum devices.

“We’ve written a playbook for the ‘perfect’ that will guide our research, and we hope, that of the entire field working on strong light-matter interactions,” said Milan Delor, associate professor of chemistry at Columbia.

Stable ferroaxial states offer a new type of light-controlled non-volatile memory

Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and ferroelectrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: They switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control.

Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford now show that bi-stable ferroaxial states can be switched with single flashes of polarized terahertz light. This enables ultrafast, light-controlled and stable switching, a platform for next-generation non-volatile data storage. The work is published in the journal Science.

Modern society relies on , where all information is fundamentally encoded in a of 0s and 1s. Consequently, any physical system capable of reliably switching between two stable states can, in principle, serve as a medium for digital data storage.

Freely levitating rotor spins out ultraprecise sensors for classical and quantum physics

With a clever design, researchers have solved eddy-current damping in macroscopic levitating systems, paving the way for a wide range of sensing technologies.

Levitation has long been pursued by stage magicians and physicists alike. For audiences, the sight of objects floating midair is wondrous. For scientists, it’s a powerful way of isolating objects from external disturbances.

This is particularly useful in the case of rotors, as their torque and , used to measure gravity, gas pressure, momentum, among other phenomena in both classical and , can be strongly influenced by friction. Freely suspending the rotor could drastically reduce these disturbances, and now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed, created, and analyzed such a macroscopic device, bringing the magic of near-frictionless levitation down to Earth through precision engineering.

Controlling atomic interactions in ultracold gas ‘at the push of a button’

Changing interactions between the smallest particles at the touch of a button: Quantum researchers at RPTU have developed a new tool that makes this possible. The new approach—a temporally oscillating magnetic field—has the potential to significantly expand fundamental knowledge in the field of quantum physics. It also opens completely new perspectives on the development of new materials.

Computer chips, imaging techniques such as imaging, , transistors, and : many milestones in our modern everyday world would not have been possible without the discoveries of quantum physics. What is remarkable is that it was only about a hundred years ago that physicists discovered that the world at the smallest scales cannot be explained by the laws of classical physics.

Atoms and their components, protons, neutrons, and electrons—but also light particles—sometimes exhibit physical behaviors that are unknown in the macroscopic world. To this day, the quantum world therefore holds unclear and surprising phenomena that—once understood and controllable—could revolutionize future technologies.

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