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Sound waves do double duty, carrying and protecting quantum information

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated a promising new way to protect fragile quantum information using nothing but mechanical vibrations—essentially extremely small sound waves. The breakthrough, which comes from the lab of Marko Lončar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, paves a path toward compact, sound-based quantum networks on chips, as well as hybrid quantum systems that combine many different types of quantum bits, or qubits.

The research is published in Nature Physics. Experiments were led by Eliza Cornell, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Lončar lab and current postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, and Zhujing Xu, a former postdoctoral scholar in Lončar’s group.

Erasable semiconductor is programmed with light

Researchers at Princeton Engineering have created a semiconductor with unique properties: It is just a few molecules thick and can repeatedly change its properties in response to light. This is a step toward building more energy-efficient sensors, optoelectronic devices and computing technologies.

Advances in semiconductors over the past 50 years have allowed engineers to create increasingly smaller semiconductor devices and more efficient computers. But this approach is reaching its physical limits—the semiconductor devices are so tiny that it is challenging to add more devices. Researchers are now creating new materials rather than shrinking existing ones.

“One of the future goals for advancing electronics is not just making materials smaller, but making them adaptable and smarter,” said Jaehoon Ji, a postdoctoral researcher and first author on the July 1 paper describing the research in Science Advances.

Scientists resurrect ancient proteins, offering new antibiotic leads

University of Oregon biologists have resurrected prehistoric proteins up to 160 million years old that carry natural antimicrobial properties. The revived molecules could inspire the design of new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, a pressing global health issue.

Described in a paper published in PLOS Biology on Aug. 25, the scientists worked their way up the tree of life, reconstructing peptides—short protein fragments—dating back to the earliest placental mammals, the diverse lineage that includes humans and nearly all mammals alive today. In laboratory tests, the researchers found that some of the extinct peptides were more potent against drug-resistant bacteria than some of their present-day counterparts.

Evolution’s ancient remedies could offer new starting points for scientists designing treatments that supplement or replace antibiotics that no longer work, said Matt Barber, senior author of the paper and evolutionary biologist at the UO College of Arts and Sciences.

Exact calculations sharpen view of atomic nuclei

Every high-energy nuclear collision leaves behind a trail of clues about the structure of atomic nuclei. Deciphering those clues, however, depends on the accuracy of the underlying theory. Physicists at Osaka Metropolitan University have now performed a full calculation within Glauber theory, a cornerstone framework for describing high-energy nuclear collisions.

By overcoming a computational challenge that has long forced researchers to rely on approximations to reduce computational demands, the team has shown that its full calculation can accurately reproduce experimental data and provide a reliable framework for predicting the outcomes of future experiments involving ordinary and exotic nuclei.

The study was published in Physical Review Letters on May 18 and Physical Review C on June 1. Physical Review Letters provides a brief overview of the main findings, while Physical Review C contains the complete paper with additional details, results and analysis.

Chemical physicists quantitatively model electron interactions in real quantum materials

A team of scientists from Caltech and Yale University has shown for the first time how to accurately quantify an important quantum phenomenon in metals, called the Kondo effect, for specific real materials. Unlike previous approaches, which for decades have relied on simplified models to qualitatively describe the effect, the new work uses the actual atomic and electronic structures of materials to solve the problem directly.

The work represents a step toward simulations of important quantum materials such as high-temperature superconductors, in which the motions of individual electrons depend so sensitively on what other electrons are doing at any moment that they cannot be averaged together.

The team describes the new technique and results in a paper published in Science. The lead authors are Linqing Peng (Ph. D.) and Tianyu Zhu of Yale University. Both Peng and Zhu started working on the project in the lab of Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry and director of the Rudolph A. Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry at Caltech.

Bright ideas accelerate the hunt for quantum emitters

The search for materials that can power future quantum technologies is accelerating, but identifying the most promising candidates remains painfully slow. Evaluating whether a material can efficiently emit quantum light requires computationally intensive simulations, making it difficult to screen the vast number of available materials.

Now, researchers from the University of Osaka have overcome this bottleneck with a prediction method that rapidly evaluates promising quantum materials without sacrificing accuracy. They established a high-speed first-principles framework for evaluating atomic-scale color centers that emit single photons and store quantum information.

The findings are published in the journal npj Computational Materials.

AI Decodes a Hidden DNA Signal Linked to Disease-Causing Mutations

Machine learning identifies the likely “initiator” and enables new predictions about DNA mutations that can cause disease.

Every human cell depends on tens of thousands of genes being switched on at the right time and in the right amount. Specialized stretches of DNA coordinate this activity, ultimately directing the production of enzymes, hormones, proteins, and other components essential to cell structure and function. When that regulation goes wrong, cells can malfunction and contribute to disorders including cancer.

To better understand the DNA sequences that control this process, researchers in the University of California San Diego Professor James T. Kadonaga’s laboratory focused on a crucial region known as the “initiator.” This DNA segment marks the point where information encoded in a gene first begins to be converted, or expressed, into functional products.

A Malicious Webpage Could Poison Your Local AI Model Behind NVIDIA NemoClaw

Oasis Security has disclosed a weakness in NVIDIA NemoClaw that could let an attacker-controlled webpage take unauthenticated control of the local Ollama instance serving an AI agent and plant hidden instructions inside the model itself.

The findings were shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, and the report says Oasis Security reported them to NVIDIA’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) beforehand. The research carries no CVE identifier. No exploitation has been reported as of August 25, 2026.

Oasis Security’s head of research, Elad Luz, told The Hacker News that NemoClaw v0.0.35 fixed the issue on macOS and Linux. There is no fix on the Windows and WSL path, according to Luz, where v0.0.34 added a Windows installation that carries a warning instead.

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