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Microscopes can now watch materials go quantum with liquid helium

A new specimen holder gives scientists more control over ultra-cold temperatures, enabling the study of how materials acquire properties useful in quantum computers.

Scientists can now reliably chill specimens near absolute zero for over 10 hours while taking images resolved to the level of individual atoms with an . The new capability comes from a liquid-helium-cooled sample holder designed by a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Michigan and Harvard University.

Conventional instruments can usually maintain such an extreme temperature, about-423 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees above absolute zero, for a few minutes, capping out at a few hours. But longer periods of time are needed to take atomic-resolution images of candidate materials for advanced technologies.

Laser reveals sound from supersonic molecules in near-space cold conditions

What happens when you hurl molecules faster than sound through a vacuum chamber nearly as cold as space itself? At the University of Missouri, researchers are finding out—and discovering new ways to detect molecules under extreme conditions.

The discovery could one day help chemists unravel the mysteries of astrochemistry, offering new clues about what the universe is made of, how stars and planets form and even where life originated.

In a recent study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Mizzou faculty member Arthur Suits and doctoral student Yanan Liu fired a laser at methane gas molecules moving faster than the in a at roughly −430°F, close to the temperature in parts of outer space.

Atom-thin crystals provide new way to power the future of computer memory

Picture the smartphone in your pocket, the data centers powering artificial intelligence, or the wearable health monitors that track your heartbeat. All of them rely on energy-hungry memory chips to store and process information. As demand for computing resources continues to soar, so does the need for memory devices that are smaller, faster, and far more efficient.

A new study by Auburn physicists has taken an important step toward meeting this challenge.

The study, “Electrode-Assisted Switching in Memristors Based on Single-Crystal Transition Metal Dichalcogenides,” published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, shows how memristors—ultra-thin that “remember” past —switch their state with the help of electrodes and subtle atomic changes inside the material.

Atomic-level engineering enables new alloys that won’t break in extreme cold

Navigating the extreme cold of deep space or handling super-chilled liquid fuels here on Earth requires materials that won’t break. Most metals become brittle and fracture at such low temperatures. However, new research is pioneering an approach to build metal structures atom by atom to create tough and durable alloys that can withstand such harsh environments.

Traditional strengthening approaches are often not good enough for these applications. For example, a common heat treatment technique called precipitation hardening strengthens metals by creating tiny hard particles within their structure. But in , the materials can lose their ductility (the ability to bend, stretch or be pulled into a new shape without breaking) and fracture suddenly.

A study published in the journal Nature describes a new way to design so they stay strong and tough even at super low temperatures. The big idea is to create an alloy with two different types of perfectly arranged atomic structures inside it. These structures are called subnanoscale short-range ordering (SRO), which are tiny islands of organized atoms and nanoscale long-range ordering (NLRO), which are slightly larger.

Development and performance of the thin-foil proton recoil spectrometer for ITER plasma diagnostics

High Resolution Neutron Spectrometer (HRNS) is one of the essential plasma diagnostics of ITER, whose operational role is the neutronic measurement of the n t/nd ratio in a plasma core. Coexisting with the other ITER diagnostics makes it a powerful tool for efficient and precise plasma diagnostics. The main goal of this work is to present the operating principles and key challenges associated with the High Resolution Neutron Spectrometer in ITER, with a particular focus on the Thin-Foil Proton Recoil (TPR) Spectrometer. The complexity of ITER tokamak brings with it many variables that had not been considered of primary importance until now, such as the magnetic field or high temperature in the detector region.

Astrophysicists Zero In on Source of Strange Gamma-Ray Signals

Millisecond pulsar binaries may produce the excess 511 keV photons seen in the galaxy. These systems could expose hidden pulsars and even exoplanets. Many astrophysicists devote their work to tracing the origins of photons, since certain types are closely linked to specific cosmic processes. Iden

Samsung patches actively exploited zero-day reported by WhatsApp

Samsung has patched a remote code execution vulnerability that was exploited in zero-day attacks targeting its Android devices.

Tracked as CVE-2025–21043, this critical security flaw affects Samsung devices running Android 13 or later and was reported by the security teams of Meta and WhatsApp on August 13.

As Samsung explains in a recently updated advisory, this vulnerability was discovered in libimagecodec.quram.so (a closed-source image parsing library developed by Quramsoft that implements support for various image formats) and is caused by an out-of-bounds write weakness that allows attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable devices remotely.

New HybridPetya ransomware can bypass UEFI Secure Boot

A recently discovered ransomware strain called HybridPetya can bypass the UEFI Secure Boot feature to install a malicious application on the EFI System Partition.

HybridPetya appears inspired by the destructive Petya/NotPetya malware that encrypted computers and prevented Windows from booting in attacks in 2016 and 2017 but did not provide a recovery option.

Researchers at cybersecurity company ESET found a sample of HybridPetya on VirusTotal. They note that this may be a research project, a proof-of-concept, or an early version of a cybercrime tool still under limited testing.

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