They might just rewrite the story of human migration—as a tale of who failed, not who survived.
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Gravitational-Wave Observations Implicate Failed Supernovae
Stars collapsing directly into black holes might explain the surprising number of merging black holes of about 10 solar masses.
Granular Matter Carries Hidden Memory
A memory phenomenon known as the anomalous Kovacs effect has been experimentally observed in a granular system for the first time.
LHC collaboration presents first result in the hunt for ‘quirks’
An international collaboration of physicists has presented its first results in its search for hypothetical particles that could help to explain the vast disparity between the strength of gravity and the three fundamental forces described by the Standard Model. Following three years of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s FASER experiment, the FASER Collaboration found no evidence for these heavy, slow-moving “quirks.”
All the same, their analysis offers important guidance in the ongoing search for the particles and could inspire similar searches at other large-scale particle colliders.
The collaboration’s analysis has been published in Physical Review Letters.
World’s most sensitive lab-based axion search presents its first results
Physicists at the ALPS II collaboration have reported the first results from the Any-Light-Particle-Search (ALPS) II experiment: the most sensitive instrument of its kind in the search for hypothetical “axions.” Headed by Axel Lindner at the DESY Research Centre in Germany, the collaboration found no evidence for axions in this initial campaign, but its results offer valuable guidance for future runs: tightening the search for one of the most promising candidates for dark matter.
The research has been posted as a preprint on arXiv and will be published in Physical Review Letters.
Earliest known compact quasar pair poses a black hole growth puzzle
The oldest pair of compact quasars ever observed has been found only 900 million years after the Big Bang. Scientists say there is no theoretical explanation for how the pair of actively feeding black holes grew so massive at such an early time in the history of the universe. The pair of quasars has been given the Hawaiian nickname Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua.
An international team of astronomers has discovered J1602+4228AB, nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the most distant, and thus oldest, compact pair of quasars ever found in the universe. Their close separation also makes them the most compact pair of quasars found in the early-universe era known as cosmic dawn. While astronomers theorize that quasar pairs are common, actually finding and characterizing these energetic objects is rare. Even rarer—finding them this early in the history of the universe.
Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua’s surprising nature was revealed through observations with the Gemini North telescope, located on the dormant volcano Maunakea in Hawai’i, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Silvia Onorato, a postdoctoral research associate at NSF NOIRLab, led the study. This research is presented in a paper titled “Nāpōwawā’enakaulua: a close quasar pair at cosmic dawn in the Aether survey” appearing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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.