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Droplet impacts reveal surprising physics in shear-thickening fluids

From ketchup to quicksand, non-Newtonian fluids have long fascinated and puzzled scientists. Unlike ordinary fluids, their flow properties change depending on how much force is applied, but the precise mechanics governing this behavior remain poorly understood—particularly under rapid deformation. Now, a team led by Xiang Cheng at the University of Minnesota has used droplet impacts to probe these dynamics in new detail, uncovering behaviors which have eluded physicists so far. Their findings appear in Physical Review Letters.

While ordinary Newtonian fluids maintain a constant viscosity regardless of the forces acting on them, non-Newtonian fluids behave very differently: with viscosities that can increase or decrease in response to stress. One classic example is a “shear-thickening” fluid, which can be made simply by mixing cornstarch into water. At high enough concentrations, these suspensions can jam almost completely solid under sudden impacts, even allowing a person to run across them without sinking.

In their study, Cheng’s team prepared cornstarch-water suspensions ranging from 30% to 43% cornstarch by volume, spanning regimes from mild to dramatic shear thickening. They then dropped millimeter-scale droplets of the fluids onto a metal plate at high speeds, producing particularly extreme shear thickening.

A silicon-compatible path toward scalable quantum systems

Beginning in the 1950s, silicon transformed the electronics industry by enabling smaller and faster devices that could be reliably manufactured at scale. More than six decades later, silicon-based semiconductors remain at the heart of many modern technologies, including so-called “classical” computers.

In pursuit of new quantum technologies, scientists and engineers have turned to specialized materials for building qubits—the fundamental components of quantum systems. For example, many qubits are made from superconducting materials deposited on sapphire substrates. But transitioning from laboratory demonstrations to scalable systems will require scientific and manufacturing infrastructure capable of supporting robust and reliable qubit fabrication.

Marking a milestone toward bridging that gap, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have built superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) using a silicon-compatible class of materials called transition metal silicides. The research was conducted as part of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), a recently renewed National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Brookhaven Lab.

Mirror-positioning method could make quantum gravity tests possible

In quantum physics, objects can exist in multiple states at the same time—a phenomenon known as quantum superposition, where a particle does not have a single definite value of position or momentum until it is measured. A major open question is whether gravity, one of the fundamental forces, also follows the quantum rule. One way to examine this is through gravity-induced entanglement, in which two objects that interact only via gravity become quantum mechanically linked.

Now, researchers led by Professor Kazuhiro Yamamoto at the Faculty of Science and Quantum and Spacetime Research Institute, Kyushu University, have proposed a way to enhance the quantum superposition of a mirror’s position in systems in which two mirrors interact via gravity, thereby making the resulting entanglement signal easier to detect. Their findings, published in the journal Physical Review Research on April 13, 2026, represent a crucial step toward experimentally testing whether gravity is fundamentally quantum.

Gravity-induced entanglement suggests that if gravity follows quantum mechanics, then two objects interacting only through gravity should become entangled. This is a natural prediction of the quantum nature of gravity. Detecting this effect, however, is challenging as gravity is weak at small scales.

Fluorescent technique reveals hidden scale of microfiber pollution from our clothes

Pollution released from our textiles is smaller and more irregular in shape than previously thought, according to new research led by The University of Manchester. In a study published in Scientific Reports, Manchester researchers—in collaboration with researchers from the University of East Anglia and Manchester Metropolitan University—have developed a new fluorescence-based method that dramatically improves the detection of microfibers released from textiles during washing and wear.

The findings suggest that conventional testing methods may have been missing a large proportion of the smallest fiber fragments, the particles most likely to persist in the environment and enter living organisms.

Every time clothes are worn or washed, microscopic fibers shed from fabrics and enter water, air and soil. Until now, accurately measuring the smallest of these fibers has been extremely difficult, limiting our understanding of their true environmental impact.

Graphene as a charge mirror: Why water droplets ‘see’ graphene—but don’t show it

Research on graphene has made great strides in recent years. However, to fully harness its potential in applications such as desalination membranes, sensors, and energy storage and conversion, a deeper understanding of the interaction between graphene and water is required.

Until now, it was widely thought that graphene, when supported on a substrate, largely inherits the wetting properties of the underlying material, a phenomenon known as “wetting transparency.” An international research team led by Yongkang Wang and Yair Litman has now shown that, while graphene appears transparent on large scales, it exerts a subtle but significant influence on nearby water molecules at the nanoscale. The study is published in the journal Chem.

Graphene, a carbon layer just one atom thick, is considered a wonder material: extremely stable, highly conductive, and optically transparent. For a long time, it appeared just as transparent to water: measurements of the water contact angle—a measure of wettability—showed that graphene on a substrate lets through the substrates wettability virtually unchanged. This phenomenon of wetting transparency, observed for years, seemed to contradict the fact that graphene is highly polarizable and therefore reacts sensitively to charges in the substrate.

Catching distant gamma-ray explosions with precisely aligned X-ray optics

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) rank among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing immense energy in intense flashes of gamma rays. The most distant GRBs originate from the era when the first stars and galaxies formed. Detecting them allows astronomers to probe the early universe and understand how the first heavy elements formed and how the earliest stellar populations lived and died. Missions like HiZ-GUNDAM, a satellite planned for launch in the 2030s by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), aim to detect these distant explosions in real time.

However, detecting GRBs presents a major challenge. These explosions appear unpredictably across the sky, and their afterglows fade rapidly. Astronomers must therefore detect each burst quickly and determine its position immediately so that other telescopes can observe it. Wide-field X-ray monitors provide one solution, as they can observe large regions of the sky and determine the direction of incoming signals.

Some designs use lobster-eye X-ray optics, inspired by the way lobsters’ compound eyes collect light from many directions simultaneously. Yet building a single optical system from multiple lobster-eye segments and aligning them precisely remains a difficult technical task.

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