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Light rewrites magnetic memory in one pulse, opening path to lower-power AI chips

As artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital services continue to expand, the world is facing a growing need for faster and more energy-efficient ways to store and process information. A team led by the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) has developed a new magnetic memory material that can be rewritten using laser light instead of electric current, a step that could help reduce power consumption in data centers and support future high-speed information systems.

The study is published in Applied Physics Letters.

The new material allows magnetic information to be switched by a single ultrashort laser pulse. Because light can reverse magnetic states much faster than electric current, the approach could deliver switching speeds roughly 1,000 times higher than those of conventional electrically driven magnetic memory while also reducing heat generation and energy loss.

This specially-designed jacket pulls drinking water from thin air

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a jacket that harvests drinking water directly from the air. The technology could benefit anyone who spends a lot of time in areas without easy access to drinking water, from hobbyist hikers, campers and runners to agricultural workers, emergency responders and soldiers. The advance in fabric technology comes alongside a new benchmark for atmospheric water harvesting.

“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the new research appearing in Science Advances. “Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.”

The textile incorporated into the jacket collects moisture and funnels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units are placed in a foldable collector piece and heated to produce water.

Cosmic dawn fuel discovery unlocks early galaxy growth secrets

Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy. The team, led from Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Astronomers use “redshift” to describe this distance, which measures how much the universe’s expansion has stretched a galaxy’s light to redder wavelengths. The higher the redshift, the farther back in time we look. REBELS-25 sits at redshift z = 7.3, deep in the Epoch of Reionization, a key era in which the first stars and galaxies transformed the dark, neutral universe into the universe we see around us today.

Galaxies grow by turning gas into stars, and cold molecular gas is the primary fuel. Until now, astronomers suspected early bright, massive galaxies had huge gas supplies, but no one had directly detected them at these distances.

Physicists introduce phase contrast to electron microscopy, delivering sharper images of our body’s tiniest proteins

Nearly 100 years ago, a seemingly simple discovery revolutionized the microscope. The introduction of phase contrast, which garnered a Nobel Prize in 1953, brought into clear view structures inside cells that had previously been too faint or washed out for biologists to study.

UC Berkeley physicists have now adapted the phase-contrast technique to the electron microscope, which has about 10,000 times the magnification of microscopes using optical light. The study is published in the journal Science.

The addition of a so-called laser phase plate has the potential to greatly improve cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique for determining the structure of molecules that itself revolutionized the understanding of proteins and accelerated new drug discovery starting a decade ago.

Organic molecule with ultranarrow emission spectrum could lead to better LEDs

Over the past several decades, light sources have gradually transitioned to light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and inorganic LEDs are now used across a wide range of applications. In parallel, organic LEDs, or OLEDs, have become widely used in display technologies.

OLEDs in particular offer significant advantages in devices such as smartphones, including higher resolution and lower power consumption. All LEDs operate based on spontaneous emission, which is inherently broadband, and OLEDs in particular produce broad emission spectra.

Narrowing this spontaneous emission toward a monochromatic limit would greatly increase its utility, a goal that has long been a central pursuit in photonics. For example, a narrower emission would achieve more highly saturated colors in LED-based displays.

Newly synthesized fullerene material remains metallic even under low temperatures

An international team whose research was coordinated by Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) has reported the survival of metallic behavior in the strongly correlated molecular material ytterbium cesium fulleride (Yb₂CsC₆₀). The electrons in the newly synthesized material remained mobile and continued to conduct electricity even at the lowest temperatures studied, despite strong electron interactions that would normally be expected to drive the material into an insulating state.

The findings were published in Nature Communications.

In materials such as metals, electrons move freely, allowing them to conduct electricity. However, as interactions between electrons become stronger, freedom of motion can be suppressed. Under these conditions, materials undergo a phenomenon known as a Mott metal-insulator transition, where they change from a conducting metal into an insulating state in which electrons become effectively immobile.

Diffusion model links foam physics to voting shifts and market behavior

A drop of dye added to a glass of water undergoes ordinary diffusion. However, when placed on the surface of a foam, the dye spreads differently—diffusion becomes anomalous. An example of this is the pattern on the froth of a cup of cappuccino. Interestingly, recent research suggests that diffusion equations in a heterogeneous environment can also describe social phenomena, such as election results or the behavior of stock market traders. The study is published in the Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science.

The movement of particles in complex media—such as porous materials, gels or foams—bears more resemblance to a random journey through an irregular maze than to a leisurely stroll through a homogeneous space. The presence of local “traps” alongside narrow passages or branches causes the transport of matter or energy to be significantly slowed down or accelerated. Such deviations from classical diffusion are referred to as anomalous diffusion. It is also observed in media with a nonuniform structure.

An international team of physicists from Poland, Croatia, Macedonia and Hungary has undertaken a mathematical description of diffusion in such systems; the Polish side was represented by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.

New cavity control strategy improves performance of blue vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are promising for displays, sensing and optical communication, but improving efficiency remains challenging. Researchers have now shown that “cavity tuning,” which controls resonance wavelength, strongly affects laser performance. By analyzing variations across a VCSEL wafer, the team identified optimal mirror loss conditions and extracted device parameters. Their approach achieved 26.4% wall plug efficiency, offering guidance for next-generation high-efficiency visible-light semiconductor lasers.

Gallium nitride (GaN)-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, or VCSELs, are attracting increasing attention as compact and energy-efficient light sources for future technologies. These semiconductor lasers are considered promising for applications such as next-generation displays, biometric sensing, environmental monitoring and short-range optical communication. However, improving their efficiency has remained a major challenge because laser performance depends strongly on precise optical design and cavity control.

Addressing this challenge, a research team led by Professor Tetsuya Takeuchi, Professor Satoshi Kamiyama and Professor Motoaki Iwaya from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Meijo University, Japan, along with Mr. Naoki Shibahara, first author and graduate student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Meijo University, Japan, investigated how “cavity tuning” influences the lasing characteristics of GaN-based VCSELs. While conventional studies mainly focused on gain tuning, also known as detuning, the researchers demonstrated that resonance wavelength alignment relative to the distributed Bragg reflector center wavelength critically affects laser operation.

New art test could help museums spot fake Van Goghs without touching paintings

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Surface Topography: Metrology and Properties introduces a pioneering, noninvasive technique that can distinguish authentic artworks from forgeries, offering museums, collectors, and auction houses a major advantage in tackling art fraud.

The study, developed at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, introduces a method that analyzes the microscopic “texture” of a painting by converting high-resolution images into 3D-like maps, allowing researchers to measure how rough or detailed the surface is using fractal dimensions. This measurement captures subtle patterns created by an artist’s brushwork—patterns so consistent that they act like a morphological signature unique to that artist.

Using works attributed to Vincent van Gogh, the researchers showed that the method can reliably distinguish between authentic paintings and known forgeries. In tests, the well-documented fake “The Plowmen” was identified as a strong outlier, while the recently authenticated “Sunset at Montmajour” aligned closely with Van Gogh’s known works.

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