A new study finds that older adults with gum disease are more likely to show signs of white matter damage in the brain — a change tied to memory decline, balance issues, and higher stroke risk.
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Gene variant that protects against norovirus spread with arrival of agriculture, prehistoric DNA reveals
The arrival of agriculture coincided with a sharp rise in a gene variant that protected against the virus that causes winter vomiting, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Linköping University report after analyzing DNA from over 4,300 prehistoric individuals and cultivating “mini guts.”
Winter vomiting disease is caused by the norovirus, which is most virulent during the colder half of the year. The infection clears up after a couple of days, but the protection it provides is short-lived, meaning that the same person can repeatedly fall sick in a short space of time. But some people cannot succumb to the virus, thanks to a particular gene variant.
“We wanted to trace the historical spread of the gene variant,” says Hugo Zeberg, senior lecturer in genetics at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
A low-cost catalytic cycle could advance the separation, storage and transportation of hydrogen
Hydrogen (H2) is an Earth-abundant molecule that is widely used in industrial settings and could soon contribute to the clean generation and storage of electricity. Most notably, it can be used to generate electricity in fuel cells, which could in turn power heavy-duty vehicles or serve as back-up energy systems.
Despite its potential for various real-world applications, hydrogen is often expensive to produce, store and safely transport to desired locations. Moreover, before it can be used, it typically needs to be purified, as hydrogen produced industrially is typically mixed with other gases, such as carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂) and light hydrocarbons.
Researchers at Fudan University and other institutes in China recently devised a new strategy to separate hydrogen from impurities at low temperatures, while also enabling its safe storage and transportation. Their proposed method, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, relies on a reversible chemical reaction between two organic compounds that act as hydrogen carriers, enabling the reversible absorption and release of hydrogen.
Supersolid spins into synchrony, unlocking quantum insights
A supersolid is a paradoxical state of matter—it is rigid like a crystal but flows without friction like a superfluid. This exotic form of quantum matter has only recently been realized in dipolar quantum gases.
Researchers led by Francesca Ferlaino set out to explore how the solid and superfluid properties of a supersolid interact, particularly under rotation. The study is published in Nature Physics.
In their experiments, they rotated a supersolid quantum gas using a carefully controlled magnetic field and observed a striking phenomenon.
Newly discovered ‘super-Earth’ offers prime target in search for alien life
The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as Earth, and likely to be a rocky planet.
“We look for these types of planets because they are our best chance at finding life elsewhere,” said Suvrath Mahadevan, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy at Penn State and co-author of a paper about the discovery published in The Astronomical Journal.
“The exoplanet is in the habitable or the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the right distance from its star that liquid water could exist on its surface, if it has the right atmosphere.”
Scientists capture real-time melting of 2D skyrmion lattices using magnetic fields
What occurs during the melting process in two-dimensional systems at the microscopic level? Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have explored this phenomenon in thin magnetic layers.
“By utilizing skyrmions, i.e., miniature magnetic vortices, we were able to directly observe, for the first time, the transition of a two-dimensional ordered lattice structure into a disordered state at the microscopic level in real time,” explained Raphael Gruber, who conducted the research within the working group of Professor Mathias Kläui at the JGU Institute of Physics.
The findings, published in Nature Nanotechnology, are fundamental to a deeper understanding of melting processes in two dimensions and the behavior of skyrmions, which may revolutionize future data storage technologies.
Common crystal proves ideal for low-temperature light technology
Superconductivity and quantum computing are two fields that have seeped from theoretical circles into popular consciousness. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for work in superconducting quantum circuits that could drive ultra-powerful computers. But what may be less well known is that these promising technologies are often possible only at cryogenic temperatures—near absolute zero. Unfortunately, few materials can handle such extremes. Their cherished physical properties disappear when the chill is on.
In a new paper published in Science, however, a team of engineers at Stanford University spotlights a promising material—strontium titanate, or STO for short—where the optical and mechanical characteristics do not decline at extreme low temperatures, but actually get significantly better, outperforming existing materials by a wide margin.
They believe these findings suggest that STO could become the building block for new light-based and mechanical cryogenic devices that push quantum computing, space exploration, and other fields to the next level.
Simulations hint at new strongly correlated states of matter in ultracold polar molecules
Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are fascinating states of matter that emerge when atoms or molecules are cooled to extremely low temperatures just slightly above absolute zero (0 K). In 2023, physicists at Columbia University realized BECs comprised of ultracold molecules for the very first time.
Building on their work, another research group at TU Wien and the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology recently set out to investigate the behavior of these ultracold dipolar molecules, while also exploring the possibility that they could spontaneously organize themselves into new forms of matter. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, suggest that new correlated states could emerge in ultracold polar molecules, showing that these states could be probed in future experiments.
“BECs of ultracold polar molecules were a decade-long goal, but have only been realized experimentally very recently,” Matteo Ciardi, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org.
Microscopic ‘ocean’ on a chip reveals new nonlinear wave behavior
University of Queensland researchers have created a microscopic “ocean” on a silicon chip to miniaturize the study of wave dynamics. The device, made at UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, uses a layer of superfluid helium only a few millionths of a millimeter thick on a chip smaller than a grain of rice.
The work is published in the journal Science.
Dr. Christopher Baker said it was the world’s smallest wave tank, with the quantum properties of superfluid helium allowing it to flow without resistance, unlike classical fluids such as water, which become immobilized by viscosity at such small scales.
The search for neutrinoless double beta decay gets some noise cancelling headphones
Deep under a mountain in Italy, researchers continue to push the boundaries of science with an experiment that could rewrite the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
Their experiment, known as the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), which includes researchers from Yale, has now collected two ton-years of data (the equivalent of collecting data for two years if the cube-shaped crystals in the CUORE detector weighed one ton) in a years-long effort to document a theory of rare nuclear particle decay called neutrinoless double beta decay.
Standard double beta decay is already a proven particle process. When it occurs, two neutrons, which are uncharged particles in the nucleus of an atom, transform into two protons and emit two electrons and two antineutrinos. Antineutrinos are the antimatter counterpart to neutrinos.