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Higher-dimensional black holes hide an exact symmetry in their ringing, and string-inspired gravity breaks it

Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational waves in a brief, dying chord, and since 2015, gravitational-wave detectors have been listening. The notes of that chord, which physicists call quasinormal modes, depend only on the black hole’s mass and spin and on the law of gravity itself. Change the law, and the chord changes.

My colleague Davide Batić and I, both mathematicians at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, wanted to know how the chord changes when space has more dimensions than the three we see, and when Einstein’s equations receive a correction suggested by string theory. We report the answer in a paper published in Physical Review D. Along the way, we met something we had not been looking for: two quite different kinds of waves that ring at exactly the same notes.

Several attempts to unite gravity with quantum physics, string theory first among them, need extra dimensions of space. At low energies, some string theories add a term to Einstein’s equations built from the curvature of spacetime, called the Gauss–Bonnet term. In our four-dimensional spacetime, this term leaves the gravity equations unchanged; it only comes alive when there are more dimensions.

AI-guided mutations help viruses infect bacteria up to 1 million times more effectively

Biochemists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are using AI to tackle one of modern medicine’s most pressing challenges: the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Using data collected in their lab, biochemistry professor Vatsan Raman and his team built an AI model to identify new possibilities for fighting bacteria with one of their natural enemies. Their findings, published in the journal Cell Systems, could help accelerate the development of alternatives to traditional antibiotic drugs.

For decades, antibiotics have been the frontline defense against bacterial illnesses such as strep throat and urinary tract infections. But bacteria evolve quickly, developing resistance to drugs faster than we can develop new treatments. The result is a slew of highly infectious diseases for which we have fewer effective treatments.

One-atom-high rails steer superconducting vortices, with temperature and magnetic field tuning their guidance

Researchers at the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), a center within Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), discovered that atomic-scale steps can guide superconducting vortices in an ultrathin superconductor.

Vortices moved more than 1,000 times as easily along the steps as across them, and this guiding effect could be tuned by temperature and magnetic field.

Superconducting vortices are tiny quantum objects whose movement can strongly influence how superconductors behave. Controlling their direction of motion could therefore be important for developing ultralow-power superconducting technologies.

3D-printed scaffolds help turn waste methane into useful chemical using less power than liquid reactors

When landfills and wastewater treatment plants create methane as a byproduct, much of it is simply burned and its value is lost. But the gas is an energy-rich resource that could be recycled as a fuel, chemical feedstock or bioproduct. Capturing and converting waste methane offers an opportunity to recover energy and create useful products from an otherwise wasted gas stream.

To harness that resource, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a solid-state bioreactor that can convert methane into succinate, a valuable chemical used to make polymers, stabilize drugs, enhance food flavor and more. The small, efficient bioreactor performs more than 10 times better than conventional liquid-state systems—and it consumes less power.

“Bioproduction using poorly soluble gases has long been limited by slow mass transfer and low efficiency because conventional liquid-phase bioreactors are not well suited for gas fermentation,” said LLNL scientist and corresponding author Fang Qian. “With growing interest in recovering energy and valuable products from waste gas streams, new bioreactor technologies designed specifically for gas fermentation are greatly needed.”

New catalogs map the quantum possibilities of atomically thin materials

Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients. Twisted graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides have already yielded superconductivity and fractional Chern insulators, states with fractionally charged excitations. One of physics’ most active frontiers now has a moonshot ambition: to design entirely new forms of quantum matter.

New families of twisted materials have repeatedly brought new rules for how electrons move and interact—a different Hamiltonian—and new kinds of quantum simulators. The team’s recent Nature study of M-point twisting illustrates how changing the starting electronic structure opens different physics. Exploring other atomic architectures could therefore uncover quantum states and models that today’s familiar platforms cannot reach.

Now, in two back-to–back papers to be published Sept. 24 in Science, an international collaboration provides both the building blocks and a guide to that vast search. The first maps the electronic structures and topology of nearly 9,000 two-dimensional entries, whether topological or not. The second identifies more than 1,600 candidates for twisting, with different electronic starting points that could enable entirely new kinds of quantum simulators.

Stanford Researchers Discover That the Human Brain May Be Two Separate Organs Fused Together

A split in early brain development helped researchers grow human hindbrain neurons that could shed light on SMA and ALS.

The human hindbrain, the region at the back of the brain that helps control breathing and swallowing, has been difficult to study in the laboratory. For decades, scientists have struggled to grow its neurons, leaving them without an important tool for investigating diseases that gradually take away those abilities.

Researchers led by Stanford Medicine have now grown functional human hindbrain motor neurons, the nerve cells that control muscles, by identifying a developmental split that begins as an embryo takes shape. Their work suggests that making these cells requires a different starting point from the one that produces the brain’s other major regions.

Jupiter Handles the Solar Wind in a Way Scientists Didn’t Expect

New observations from NASA’s Juno mission are revealing that Jupiter’s bow shock behaves in more complex ways than its counterpart at Earth.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has captured the most detailed measurements yet of Jupiter’s bow shock, the vast boundary where the solar wind crashes into the planet’s magnetic environment. The observations show that Jupiter manages this high-energy interaction very differently from Earth, using a more complex mix of plasma waves and smaller shock structures to slow incoming particles.

The results, reported by a University of Iowa-led team, also give researchers a nearby example of shock physics that could help them study far more energetic environments, including the remnants of exploded stars.

Scientists May Have Uncovered the Mystery Behind Webb’s Strange Little Red Dots

New simulations suggest Webb’s Little Red Dots capture a rapid growth phase that could explain the early appearance of supermassive black holes.

Little Red Dots, the small, extremely red objects spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe, may reveal how black holes grew so big, so quickly.

Astronomers have found supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the Sun less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. Explaining how they gained so much mass in that time has been difficult, and new simulations suggest the dots could represent the rapid growth needed to get them there.

Once-in-a-Century Impact: NASA Just Found a Massive New Crater on the Moon

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter helped uncover a 728-foot-wide crater that formed on the Moon in 2024 after a rare, powerful impact.

What began as a routine check of lunar mapping data quickly turned into an unexpected discovery. Robert Wagner, a scientist working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was examining a large map of the Moon when one feature immediately stood out: an unusually bright patch surrounded by a dark halo.

The pattern suggested that material on the lunar surface had recently been disturbed.

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