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Asteroid breakup may explain inner solar system bombardment 800 million years ago

A Southwest Research Institute-led study has proposed a connection between a specific collision in the main asteroid belt and an inner-solar-system-wide bombardment episode that may have had measurable biological and geological consequences on Earth. The research suggests that the catastrophic breakup of the Eulalia parent body could be linked to an impact shower that struck the terrestrial planets about 800 million years ago. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

“The role impacts have played in shaping the origin and evolution of life in our solar system is poorly understood,” said Dr. William Bottke, an executive director in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. He also directs the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE), SwRI’s team in NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, and is lead author of a paper describing this research. “The heavily cratered surface of the moon serves as a reminder of the large impacts in Earth’s past, but so far, only the Chicxulub impact event 66 million years ago has been strongly linked to a specific effect on life, namely the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.”

Finding geological evidence of impacts older than 650 million years ago on Earth is challenging because of the constant renewal of our home planet’s surface. Earth’s landscape constantly changes as constructive forces such as volcanoes and plate tectonics build it up, while destructive forces such as weathering wear it down. One way researchers have searched for clues about Earth’s past is to study asteroid shower events.

New method scales up twist-engineered oxide materials for future electronics

Researchers have shown it is possible to expand the field of twistronics—literally. They have demonstrated a technique that allows them to fabricate oxide twistronic materials at much larger scales while also controlling the twist angles between materials that dictate their structural and electronic properties.

The field of twistronics examines how the angle between layers of two-dimensional (2D) materials affects their electronic properties. The paper, “Deterministic Fabrication of Large-Area, High-Crystallinity Oxide Moiré Superlattices,” is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Sensitive measurements uncover dual superconducting states in atom-thin NbSe₂ and TaS₂

A new study reveals that two widely studied ultrathin superconducting materials are more sophisticated than they appear. Although they seem to behave like simple superconductors with a single energy gap, they actually contain two strongly interacting superconducting states that work together and disguise themselves as one. This finding resolves a long-standing mystery about how these materials behave, providing new insight into superconductivity that could help scientists design better superconducting materials for future technologies such as quantum computers, ultra-efficient electronics and advanced sensors.

Sometimes, the biggest scientific discoveries come from looking more closely at something we thought we already understood. For decades, physicists have studied a remarkable class of materials called superconductors—materials that can carry electricity with zero energy loss. These materials could one day help power ultra-efficient electronics, quantum computers and advanced medical technologies.

One of the most widely studied superconductors, niobium diselenide (NbSe₂), seemed straightforward when peeled down to just a few atomic layers. Experiments suggested it behaved like a superconductor with a single energy gap—a fundamental fingerprint that describes how electrons order in pairs to flow without resistance.

What does it mean to be ‘quantum?’ A physicist explains the basics behind Einstein’s spooky actions at a distance

Imagine shining a flashlight across a dark room. You can predict exactly what the light will do: travel in a straight line from one point to another. That seems obvious because, in the world we see around us, light appears to follow a single, clear path.

Quantum mechanics paints a far stranger picture.

If you zoom in to the atomic scale, light does not behave as though it follows only one straight route. Instead, a particle of light explores every path available to it at once. One path may indeed be the straight line across the room. But others could involve the light bouncing off walls, curving through space or tracing wildly improbable detours before reaching its destination.

TuxBot v3 Evolution Shows Signs of LLMAssisted IoT Botnet Development

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unreported Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet framework dubbed TuxBot v3 Evolution that shows signs of being developed with assistance from a large language model (LLM), albeit with not so successful results.

“While the AI complied with their request to generate botnet code, it included a safety disclaimer that the developer failed to remove before shipping,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. “Although the LLM clearly aided in constructing the botnet, several functions in the analyzed samples failed to work correctly.”

The cybersecurity company said a manual code review would have resolved these errors and that it’s possible more polished iterations of the malware exist out there in the wild.

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