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The dying sun could tear the solar system apart sooner than thought

The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.

The rock we live on will probably be long gone by then, but Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune might not make it either.

Traditional models assumed that the outer solar system would survive for billions of years before a passing star might disturb it. However, recent modeling by theoretical astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Jim Fuller at the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan shows that the dying sun could trigger a relatively rapid and chaotic upheaval.

Same duty cycle, very different outcomes: What tough materials taught us about histotripsy

One of the questions that stayed with me throughout my Ph.D. was surprisingly simple: Why are some tissues so much harder to break down with histotripsy than others? Histotripsy is a focused ultrasound technique that uses cavitation bubbles to mechanically break down tissue. Unlike thermal ablation, the goal is not to heat the tissue. Instead, the rapid activity of these bubbles creates mechanical stresses that progressively disrupt tissue structure.

This process can be very effective in many soft tissues. Fibrous tissues, however, can behave quite differently. This was especially interesting to me because my doctoral research was motivated in part by benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH tissue can contain substantial amounts of smooth muscle and collagen, and these fibromuscular components can make the tissue mechanically tough and more resistant to histotripsy.

To study that problem in a controlled way, we developed fibrous tissue-mimicking materials that reproduced important mechanical characteristics of prostate tissue and were intentionally difficult to break down. Once we had a material that resisted treatment, another question became increasingly important to me: If we deliver the same overall amount of ultrasound exposure, does it matter how that exposure is distributed in time?

Vapor-clearing channels could keep powerful chips cool with less risk of short circuits

Integrated circuits are electronic chips containing the interconnected components that process information or control electrical signals inside many electronic devices. These chips are known to generate heat as they operate, which can affect the safety and performance of electronics.

Just add water: New binder simplifies battery manufacturing and recycling without sacrificing performance

A new battery binder—the glue that holds together a battery’s internal parts—could make lithium-ion batteries more environmentally friendly and easier to recycle without sacrificing performance.

By creating a binder that is fluorine-free and dissolves in water, engineers at the University of California San Diego showed that they can simplify both battery manufacturing and recycling by cutting down on toxic ingredients, energy use and waste. Batteries made with the new binder performed just as well as conventional lithium-ion batteries.

The advance, published Oct. 9 in Nature Communications, was a collaboration between the lab of Zheng Chen, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and John Muldoon at Toyota Research Institute of North America.

New spinning method builds electronic circuits directly inside soft, washable fibers

Electronic devices are no longer limited to conventional systems with a screen, keyboard and processing components. Over the past decades, some electronics engineers have been developing thin electronic fibers that could be used to create wearable devices or flexible sensors for robots.

Despite their potential, electronic fibers can be difficult to assemble reliably into components or devices for specific applications. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at Donghua University in China introduced a new manufacturing method to build customizable circuits directly inside electronic fibers.

“This work grew out of a simple question: Can a soft fiber be more than a carrier for electronics and instead become the circuit itself?” Hengda Sun, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “For embodied intelligence, electronic systems need to conform to complex, moving robot bodies while combining sensing, information processing and interaction.”

Hybrid quantum computers could finally get to grips with light and matter

Many of nature’s most important processes depend on how particles of matter interact with light and other force-carrying particles. So far, however, it has proven difficult for conventional computers to determine how individual particles behave in these interactions.

Now, a team led by Eleanor Crane at MIT has developed a digital toolkit for simulating these interactions using quantum computing hardware, which could allow such machines to outperform their classical counterparts without the need for extensive error correction.

Their research has been published in Physical Review X.

Anesthesia produces shared neural activity patterns across six species

Anesthetics, drugs that reduce sensation or, in the case of general anesthetics, awareness, help doctors minimize the pain and discomfort experienced by patients during surgeries or other procedures. Many anesthetics produce similar behavioral changes in different species, suggesting that they affect their brains similarly.

Researchers at the University of Oxford, McGill University, the NeuroSpin Center and other institutions worldwide recently tried to further explore this possibility by examining the signals produced by nerve cells (i.e., neural activity) across six different species under anesthesia.

Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that anesthesia produces a shared pattern of neural activity, with shorter-lasting local fluctuations and reduced coordination between different regions of the nervous system across all six species.

Squid Skin May Work Like an Ear, Surprising New Research Suggests

Squid have hundreds more sensory cells than scientists realized, with hair bundles that may help explain how human hearing works and breaks down.

Water flowing over a squid’s head and arms brushes tiny past bundles of hair-like projections that help the animal sense movement around it. Scientists have known about these sensory structures for years, but they had only a partial picture of how widely this equipment was spread across the squid’s body.

Brian McDermott and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University have now found hundreds more of the cells carrying these bundles, extending across the animal’s entire surface. Their research, published in Current Biology, includes the first complete map of squid lateral lines, arrays of sensory cells known as hair cells. The newly revealed network could give researchers another way to investigate the delicate structures that make human hearing possible.

Scientists Discover a Strange New Quantum State Where Two Materials Meet

Researchers have directly observed an unusual quantum state emerging at the boundary between an atomically thin material and a metal.

Scientists have directly observed an unusual quantum state forming where a material just one atom thick meets a metal. The discovery, made by a research team led by the University of Osaka, demonstrates how interactions between electrons in different materials can produce a state known as a heavy fermion, potentially offering new ways to engineer quantum materials.

Heavy-fermion states occur when strong interactions cause electrons to behave as if they have unusually large effective masses. These states are closely associated with exotic quantum phenomena, including unconventional superconductivity, in which electrical current can flow without resistance through mechanisms that differ from those in conventional superconductors.

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