Just as self-driving cars navigate traffic without a human behind the wheel, laboratory instruments are now being developed that can design, carry out and repeat experiments independently, 24 hours a day.
Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and other institutions have now developed an AI system capable of speeding up the operation of optical tweezers, dubbed SmartTrap. The work has been published in Nature Methods.
What if a single sentence could carry two completely different meanings, one when read forward and another when read backward? In a new study, researchers at Arizona State University have discovered a biological version of this idea. Working with the mitochondria of a tiny insect called the citrus mealybug, the team found that the same stretch of DNA can carry two different genes—sets of genetic instructions used by the cell—with one encoded on each strand of the DNA’s ladder-like structure.
The finding expands scientists’ understanding of how DNA can store genetic information and helps solve a mystery that has puzzled researchers for years. The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This kind of paper is what makes running a lab so fun. Born from a spark of individual brilliance—not mine—but accomplished as a collective effort,” says John McCutcheon. “The idea that these two critically important genes could be mirrored on the same piece of DNA has been around a long time, and so it’s a thrill to be part of the team that proved this speculative idea was, in fact, reality.”
Physicists have long been drawn to the nonlinear Hall effect: a subtle variant of the classical Hall effect, in which an electric voltage appears perpendicular to a current flowing through a material. Unlike its classical counterpart, the nonlinear version can arise even without breaking time-reversal symmetry, and its magnitude is tied to deep geometric properties of electron wave functions. So far, however, the behavior of the effect when a magnetic field is applied has remained poorly understood.
Through new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Jinrui Zhong at the Beijing Institute of Technology has shed new light on this question—leading them to discover an entirely new class of quantum oscillation.
Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) usually capture what happens when atomic nuclei smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. But even when the nuclei don’t collide, interesting things can happen. In a new paper just published in Physical Review Letters, members of RHIC’s STAR collaboration describe a new way to use near-miss collisions at RHIC to study what’s going on inside the nucleus. The approach advances the reach of RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, into the next frontier in nuclear physics—a journey into the inner workings of the building blocks of matter.
The technique relies on particles of light, known as photons, that surround the nuclei as they speed around the 2.4-mile (3.9-kilometer) RHIC racetrack. Acting something like the beam of a giant X-ray machine, the photons around one nucleus can interact with particles called gluons inside a nucleus whizzing by in the opposite direction. By tracking the signals produced by those interactions, scientists can map out the distribution of the gluons—the glue-like particles that hold the nucleus together.
“This is an extension of the many ways people have used light to probe hidden structures in our world—from using X-rays to see broken bones and reveal the 3D atomic structures of proteins, to capturing signals from the cosmic microwave background to study the evolution of the universe,” said Ashik Ikbal, a STAR collaborator from Kent State University who carried out this work as a major component of his postdoctoral research. “In this case, we’re using light to map out features at a scale much smaller than atoms to study the gluons that hold quarks together inside the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei.”
An international study of infant remains from 50,000–75,000 years ago has provided new evidence about the developmental trajectory of our evolutionary “cousins,” Neanderthals.
University of Queensland skeletal histologist Dr. Justyna Miszkiewicz led an analysis of ancient baby teeth and bones, revealing the growth of Neanderthals was remarkably similar to that of modern humans. The study is published in Royal Society Open Science.
“The remains were unearthed in Sesselfelsgrotte, Germany, in the 1960s and 1970s and lay in a museum until around 20 years ago, when it was confirmed they were Neanderthal,” Dr. Miszkiewicz said.
A public-private partnership in the Mountain West announced new results today that mark steady progress toward the Department of Energy’s goal of fault-tolerant quantum computing, systems large and reliable enough to solve complex problems.
Sandia National Laboratories, home to the DOE’s longest-running quantum computing program, and tech company Quantinuum published a paper today in Nature reporting the performance of the company’s 98-qubit commercial system, Helios, which debuted last year.
In operations that involved only one or two qubits, or quantum bits, the system demonstrated very high fidelity—99.9975% and 99.921%, respectively. The results establish Helios as the company’s largest and most reliable quantum computer to date.
At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: “contaminated.” The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One argument was that Indigenous cultures had changed through contact, survival and adaptation, and therefore no longer required distinct recognition. I found that deeply troubling.
Survival is not contamination. Indigenous peoples have survived colonization, displacement, assimilation and state violence. They have also adapted, moved, rebuilt and carried knowledge into new circumstances. None of this erases their rights, identities or relationships with ancestral lands.
That experience became one of the reasons I wrote my recent commentary on the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework developed after the 2025 ICOMOS Japan symposium in Gunma Prefecture. The work is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property.
Europe’s first and only TES spectrometer at a synchrotron source is now in operation at BESSY II, developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder, Colorado, U.S.). The photon detection efficiency of the new instrument exceeds that of wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers by a factor of 100 to 1,000. It will be used to investigate the electronic properties of atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted atomic and molecular samples. The team is looking forward to receiving exciting research proposals from the user community.
Synchrotron radiation sources such as BESSY II provide intense, highly brilliant X-ray light that can be used to examine a wide variety of samples. However, X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS), where the photons emitted from the sample are detected, are extremely photon-hungry techniques. Therefore, XES and RIXS have so far been largely limited to high-concentration and bulk samples. The details are presented in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.
Necessary for quantum system development is an environment in which the fragile nature of quantum bits (qubits) is stabilized and the thermal noise (fluctuations in current/voltage) inherent in superconducting electronics is dampened. That environment requires cryogenic temperatures, those ranging from 5 to 10 millikelvins, colder than the extreme temperatures encountered in space. Dilution refrigerators create this needed cryogenic condition.
Dilution refrigerators used for quantum R&D need a wiring system that can operate in cryogenic temperatures, maintain a power-efficient direct current, and support high-speed data transmission. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have prototyped flexible, ribbon-like, low-frequency (LF) cables that not only meet these demands, but also are compatible with commercial circuit-board manufacturing processes. Maybell Quantum, a Colorado-based company supplying hardware for developing quantum systems, licensed the design for these cables and is adapting them for use in their dilution refrigerators.
