Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Largest catalog yet of how human cells read DNA shows how chemical marks alter genetic instructions

Every cell in the body contains essentially the same DNA, yet a brain cell behaves differently from a muscle cell or an immune cell. The difference lies largely in how each cell reads its genetic instructions.

Proteins called transcription factors bind specific DNA sequences and help control when and where genes are active. They direct processes ranging from embryonic development to immune function. When this regulation goes wrong, disease can result. But although the human genome contains around 1,600 transcription factors, the DNA-binding preferences of many have remained unknown.

An international collaboration led by Timothy Hughes at the University of Toronto has now filled many of these gaps in a study published in Nature. The researchers combined five experimental platforms with computational analyses, performing more than 4,800 experiments and identifying DNA-binding motifs for 177 transcription factors that were previously poorly characterized. The work added around 130 distinct motifs to the known vocabulary of human gene regulation.

Unusual superconductivity could emerge in valley-imbalanced rhombohedral graphene

Superconductors are materials in which electrical current flows with a resistance of zero, typically below specific temperatures. In conventional superconductors, this state of matter emerges when two electrons bind together at low temperatures, forming so-called Cooper pairs.

Yet some materials, referred to as unconventional superconductors, exhibit superconductivity under unusual conditions and cannot be explained by conventional theories. Understanding these unusual cases could lead to the development of superconductors that can operate at high enough temperatures to be used in real-world devices with less refrigeration.

Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Stuttgart theoretically demonstrated that an unusual form of graphene, known as valley-imbalanced rhombohedral tetralayer graphene, could host unconventional superconducting states.

A new approach to building noise-resistant quantum sensors

Quantum sensors, devices that collect measurements by exploiting quantum-mechanical phenomena, could potentially detect extremely weak magnetic, gravitational and electromagnetic signals with greater sensitivity than classical sensors. Some quantum sensors leverage entanglement, a phenomenon that prompts distant particles to become so strongly linked that the physical state of one particle dictates the state of the others.

Despite their potential, these sensors are often very sensitive to noise (i.e., external disturbances originating from the surrounding environment). This means that even small environmental disturbances and hardware imperfections can disrupt delicate quantum states and reduce the devices’ sensing precision.

Researchers at the Quantum Science Center of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Southern University of Science and Technology and Shenzhen University recently introduced a new method to develop noise-adaptive sensors that can collect more precise measurements. Their approach, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, relies on a variational quantum circuit, a sequence of quantum operations that can be adjusted to search for a state that performs well on specific measurement tasks.

New photonic crystal method improves single-photon sources for quantum networks

Quantum communication promises many advantages over today’s standard technologies, including absolutely secure transmission of large amounts of data. However, it requires single photons—and generating them is very difficult. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST) have developed a new method that overcomes the problems of previous approaches.

Instead of amplifying the desired frequency, the researchers selectively suppress unwanted frequencies. Until now, so-called resonators have mostly been used to produce single photons—tiny optical structures that influence photon sources, causing them to emit light predominantly at a specific frequency. However, these resonators function only within a narrow frequency range and must be precisely tuned to the respective photon source.

Researchers at TUM and MCQST have developed a new approach that takes the opposite route. Instead of causing emitters to emit more light at a specific frequency, they adapt the emitter’s environment so that less light is emitted at unwanted frequencies.

Scientists ‘see’ nanoscale forces, providing evidence of electric fields at the air‑water interface

Bubbles are round, and we know surface tension does that. But squeeze that gas-liquid boundary into a space only a few tens of nanometers wide—could other forces be at work?

Now, an international team from Kyushu University, Nankai University, Stanford University and the University of Alberta has taken a direct look. Publishing on July 14 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they combined three-dimensional transmission electron microscopy (3D TEM) with force analysis to provide evidence for a powerful electric field at nanoconfined air-water interfaces.

“Water looks simple, but it’s actually incredibly complex,” says Qin-Yi Li, associate professor at Kyushu University’s Faculty of Engineering. “Its structure is especially rich at the water-air interface, and it shifts dramatically with scale.”

Curved surfaces reshape active materials, localizing vibrations near defects

Many materials, both living and engineered, are powered from within. Scientists have thoroughly investigated how such ‘active’ materials operate, but so far, mostly in circumstances where the curvature of the environment does not play a role. In research published in Physical Review Letters this week, a team of physicists proposes a framework to describe how active materials operate in the presence of curvature. The framework explains striking biological observations and may lead to geometry as a design parameter for new materials.

Examples of active materials include tissues made of moving cells and mechanical metamaterials that use embedded motors or actuators. A major difference between such active materials and ordinary materials lies in the way they deform. Push an ordinary material, and it will deform where the force acts. Active materials, on the other hand, can generate further forces that redirect deformations, leading to all kinds of unexpected, but often quite useful, behavior.

A striking example comes from observations in biological experiments, where starfish embryos were found to self-organize into crystal-like structures on a water surface. In this example, an extra factor comes into play: The water surface in the test tubes used in the experiments is not flat but slightly curved—just like the surface of water in an ordinary drinking glass that curves upward where the water touches the glass. One consequence of the curvature is that the starfish embryos don’t fit on the surface in a completely regular pattern: Instead, the pattern has occasional irregularities or defects.

Laser stability method advances precision control of electrons with light

Researchers at the University of Oldenburg’s Institute of Physics are working on techniques for precision control of electric fields of light, which allow the dynamics of individual electrons to be manipulated in experiments. Now a team from the Attosecond Microscopy research group, led by Dr. Jan Vogelsang, has taken a decisive step toward this goal.

In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics B —Lasers and Optics, the researchers present a laser system that generates 200,000 light pulses per second. Six Oldenburg researchers collaborated with members of a research group led by physics Nobel laureate Anne L’Huillier at Lund University in Sweden to perform a detailed characterization of the laser system.

During the experiments, the precise position of the light wave—consisting of infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye—remained extremely stable even over periods of several hours. The stable light fields resulting from a continuous series of identical light pulses make experiments on electron control possible—foundational research that could eventually lead to the development of devices such as ultrafast transistors that operate at the speed of light.

Sound-based traps reveal how fragile biomolecular droplets move, merge and change stiffness

Being able to measure something plays a vital role in our ability to understand many phenomena. But measuring can often affect what we are trying to measure. This is particularly the case when measuring substances that are very small, soft or fragile. In a recent study published in PRX Life, a research team led by the University of Osaka successfully used acoustic tweezers as a contactless method to investigate an important type of fragile material called biopolymer condensates.

Biopolymer condensates are liquid-like droplets composed of proteins and/or nucleic acids and are involved in regulating a variety of physiological functions within cells to keep them healthy. However, problems with these droplet systems can result in a variety of diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases. The mechanical properties of biopolymer droplets, such as fluidity and stiffness, are important for biological activity.

Better knowledge of the mechanical properties of these droplets will help us understand their roles in healthy cells and disease states. However, these droplets are very small and fragile and are difficult to investigate using conventional techniques.

The global race to make a practical quantum computer just took a big leap forward

In the global race to build bigger and better quantum computers, researchers have taken a step forward. A new machine called Helios is radically different from other quantum computers.

Quantum computers harness the power of quantum mechanics, the laws that govern physics at atomic and subatomic scales. Among various designs for such machines, Helios is a trapped-ion quantum computer, which means it uses charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.

It operates using 98 qubits—the units of information that a quantum computer uses to process data. This number of qubits makes it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far. Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025.

/* */