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NASA’s AWE instrument completes mission to study Earth’s effect on space weather

On May 21, ground controllers powered down NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) instrument, bringing the data collection phase of the mission to a successful and scheduled end, surpassing its planned two-year mission.

Installed on the exterior of the International Space Station since November 2023, AWE studied atmospheric gravity waves, which are giant ripples in the atmosphere caused by strong winds flowing over tall mountains or by violent weather events, such as tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes.

The AWE instrument looked for these waves in colorful bands of light in Earth’s atmosphere, called airglow. AWE investigated how atmospheric gravity waves propagate upward to space and contribute to space weather—conditions in space that can disrupt satellites, as well as navigation and communications signals.

Crystals of space and time: A structural phenomenon that may collapse into tiny black holes

A team from Vienna and Frankfurt has found a formula describing a strange phenomenon: Space and time can form a kind of “crystal” that may turn into a black hole. The results are described in Physical Review Letters.

Alongside the famous gigantic black holes, physics also allows for microscopic versions. They emerge from so-called critical states, when spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. A team from Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Wien has now succeeded, for the first time, in describing this phenomenon with an exact mathematical formula using an unusual mathematical trick.

Black holes usually form in spectacular events, such as the death of a massive star. But in theory, arbitrarily small black holes are also possible: tiny microscopic objects that can emerge from special critical states after the slightest addition of energy. Such states may have existed shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe was still a chaotic mixture of particles, potentially giving rise to so-called primordial black holes.

Piezoelectric effect in diamond membranes challenges century-old scientific dogma

A research team in China has reported a significant piezoelectric effect in ultrathin and ultra-flexible polycrystalline diamond membranes. This pioneering discovery challenges a century-long scientific dogma that diamonds are strictly non-piezoelectric.

The team was led by Professor Zhiqin Chu, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor Yuan Lin, Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Their study is published in Science Advances.

Since the 1900s, diamonds have been classified globally as non-piezoelectric material. Consequently, despite being a strong, hard and inert material with exceptionally high acoustic velocity, thermal conductivity, dielectric breakdown strength and ultrawide bandgap, diamond has only been used as a mechanical substrate supporting other piezoelectric material layers in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Indeed, the very idea of “generating electricity from diamonds” was initially deemed impractical by many.

A new light-based sensor could help make ultrasensitive disease testing more portable

When we think about highly sensitive medical testing, we often imagine a hospital laboratory filled with large instruments, trained technicians, and carefully controlled conditions. This is especially true for optical biosensing, where scientists try to detect extremely small changes caused by biomolecules binding to a sensor surface.

These tiny changes can carry important information about disease, treatment response, or biological function. But detecting them often requires precise spectrometers, stable light sources, and carefully aligned instruments. This makes many advanced biosensing technologies powerful in the laboratory, but difficult to use in smaller clinics, remote regions, or point-of-care settings.

In our recent study, now published in Nature Photonics, we asked a simple question: Can we make high-performance label-free biosensing smaller, more robust, and easier to scale, without sacrificing sensitivity?

Molecule-in-a-crystal system could boost quantum computing via chemically engineered qubits

Within a crystal’s atomic structure, tiny atomic-scale flaws will naturally occur where electrons can become trapped. These defects have emerged as one of the leading platforms for quantum information processing. Through a new study, posted to the preprint server arXiv, Ilai Schwartz and colleagues at NVision Imaging Technologies in Germany have shown that a specialized molecule embedded inside a crystal could take this approach a step further, offering a more controllable and versatile route to building quantum systems.

Unlike the classical computers we use every day, quantum computers encode information in the quantum states of qubits, which can exist in combinations of 0 and 1 simultaneously. This quantum information can’t simply be copied or transmitted in the same way as classical bits: when a qubit is measured, its quantum state is disturbed, making it impossible to transmit its information directly.

To tackle this problem, qubits must be connected to photons, which can transmit their quantum information between distant parts of a network. This connection relies on what physicists call a “spin-photon interface”: a structure in which the quantum state of an electron or nucleus can be reliably written, read, and communicated via light.

AI-powered stretchable computing patch can run algorithms directly on the body

A new skin-like computing patch developed at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) can analyze health data using artificial intelligence in an unprecedented way. Unlike today’s wearable devices, it carries out its AI computations directly on the body, in mere milliseconds, without relying on a wireless connection.

While your current smartwatch may be able to track your heart rate or movements, it doesn’t analyze what it finds. The analysis happens elsewhere, after it shuttles data to an external server. In some situations—detecting ventricular fibrillation in the heart, for instance—that few-seconds lag to communicate with the server is too long.

The new device, designed and tested in collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, was made possible by the development of manufacturing processes that allow organic electrochemical transistors to be printed onto flexible surfaces.

Novel origami pattern turns flat sheets into load-bearing 3D technology

McGill University researchers have discovered a new way to fold flat sheets into smooth, curved shells that can switch from floppy and flexible to stiff and load-bearing on demand. By designing a special origami pattern and threading cable-like elements through it, they can control the material’s final three-dimensional shape and how rigid it becomes.

The result, a “doubly curved lens box,” could advance the technology of such objects as temporary emergency tents, morphing robots and smart fabrics, the researchers said. “Smooth doubly curved origami shells with reprogrammable rigidity,” by Morad Mirzajanzadeh and Damiano Pasini, was published in Nature Communications.

“Existing foldable structures face a trade-off: if they are smooth and nicely curved, they tend to be soft and floppy; if they are strong and stiff, they usually look faceted, jagged or uncomfortable, and their shape is hard to tune once built,” said Damiano Pasini, study co-author and professor of mechanical engineering.

Perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells reach 32.89% certified efficiency with peak-selective passivation strategy

A team of Chinese scientists has developed a new passivation strategy that significantly improves both the efficiency and operational stability of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells. The study has been published in the journal Matter on May 21.

Perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells combine a top perovskite layer, which efficiently converts sunlight into electricity, with a silicon bottom substrate. These solar cells hold great potential for lightweight, high-efficiency applications in the photovoltaic field, with the current world efficiency record reaching 35.0%.

However, the pyramid-textured surface of industrial silicon substrates makes it difficult to deposit a uniform perovskite top layer, which often leads to localized electrical leakage and thus limits the commercial prospects of these tandem cells.

Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies Could Unlock Secrets of the Early Universe

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are among the smallest known galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Astronomers have long viewed them as ancient remnants from the early cosmos. Now, researchers at the Oskar Klein Centre and the LYRA collaboration have used a powerful new set of simulations to show that these dim galaxies may reveal how conditions in the young Universe shaped which galaxies were able to grow and which never formed stars at all.

The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), was led by Azadeh Fattahi, Associate Professor at the Oskar Klein Centre (OKC), along with collaborators from Durham University and the University of Hawaii.

She explains the scale of the project: “In this work we presented a brand-new suite of cosmological simulations focused on the faintest galaxies in the Universe, with an unprecedented resolution. These are by far the largest sample of such galaxies ever simulated at these resolutions.”

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