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Rare B meson decays tighten search for hidden particles and dark matter links

A University of Melbourne researcher has placed the strongest constraints yet on certain rare decays of subatomic particles, narrowing the window for where new “hidden” particles could be lurking.

In research published in Physical Review Letters, Dr. Daniel Marcantonio analyzed data from the Belle experiment to search for “feebly interacting particles” (FIPs)—a broad class of hypothetical particles that interact extremely rarely with ordinary matter.

FIPs are predicted by many theories that extend our current understanding of particle physics, and some could serve as candidates for dark matter or as messengers between ordinary matter and a hypothetical “dark sector.”

A heat sensor for living cells could offer new views of cell metabolism, rapid antibiotic testing

When living cells grow, divide or respond to drugs, they give off tiny amounts of heat that offer information about what the cells are doing. But because these heat signals are so vanishingly small, they have traditionally been impossible to measure directly. Researchers in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a calorimeter—a device that measures the heat transfer between a living system and its environment—that can detect metabolic heat signals on the order of 100 picowatts, or trillionths of a watt, in living cells.

The device is the most sensitive of any comparable bio-calorimeter to date. The new “pico-calorimeter” can track the metabolism of small populations of bacteria in real time, as well as monitor how bacterial growth changes in response to different antibiotics.

The work is from the lab of Joost Vlassak, the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Materials Engineering, and was carried out by Harvard associate Juanjuan Zheng, a former postdoctoral researcher in Vlassak’s lab. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

High degree of quantum entanglement detected for first time in centimeter-sized crystal of strange metal

Many quantum effects can be observed only when a small number of particles is studied—individual atoms, molecules or photons, for example, carefully shielded from the rest of the world. But what about macroscopic objects, consisting of an unimaginably large number of particles? Can they, too, display effects that provide a direct glimpse into the quantum world?

Experimentalists at TU Wien have now shown that this is possible: A centimeter-sized crystal of a so-called strange metal was investigated, and a high degree of quantum entanglement was detected. This was made possible by a clearly defined method from quantum information theory: the quantum Fisher information.

It establishes a new bridge between solid-state physics and quantum physics: Quantum entanglement can be directly quantified in a macroscopic strange-metal material. The paper is published in the journal Nature Physics.

Nanomedicine discovery uses salt to overcome major obstacle in gene therapy

Researchers at the University of Houston’s College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpectedly simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine—getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.

“We are introducing salt-loaded lipid nanoparticles as a novel and broadly applicable design principle for gene delivery,” said Fanfei Meng, assistant professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty member in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “What makes this exciting is that we can significantly improve delivery efficiency without needing to invent entirely new materials.”

Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, are tiny fat-based delivery vehicles widely used to transport fragile genetic material into cells. They became widely recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic through mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Today, scientists are also using LNPs to develop new treatments for cancer, rare diseases and genetic disorders.

Quantum hyperdimensional computing can work 500 times faster than other methods

Cleveland Clinic researchers are unlocking quantum computing’s full potential through the creation of a new computing paradigm inspired by the human brain. Fabio Cumbo, Ph.D., research associate in the lab of Daniel Blankenberg, Ph.D., associate staff, Computational Life Sciences, is developing the model, called quantum hyperdimensional computing (QHDC).

Cumbo published the first-ever implementation of QHDC in two distinct experiments in npj Unconventional Computing.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a type of computing based in neuroscience. It follows the idea that a concept in the brain is not stored on one single neuron. For example, when you think of a cat, there is no single neuron in your brain solely responsible for knowing what a cat is. That information is spread across thousands or millions of neurons, so if one neuron fails, you still remember what a cat is.

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