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A way to greatly enhance the efficiency of a method for correcting errors in quantum computers has been realized by theoretical physicists at RIKEN. This advance could help to develop larger, more reliable quantum computers based on light.

Quantum computers are looming large on the horizon, promising to revolutionize computing within the next decade or so.

“Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems beyond the capabilities of today’s most powerful supercomputers,” notes Franco Nori of the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC).

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New research from a team of cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists finds that chimpanzees drum rhythmically, using regular spacing between drum hits. Their results, published in Current Biology, show that eastern and western chimpanzees—two distinct subspecies—drum with distinguishable rhythms.

The researchers say these findings suggest that the building blocks of human musicality arose in a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

“Based on our previous work, we expected that western chimpanzees would use more hits and drum more quickly than eastern chimpanzees,” says lead author Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna, Austria. “But we didn’t expect to see such clear differences in or to find that their drumming rhythms shared such clear similarities with human .”

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From the powdered wings of a butterfly to the icy spines of a snowflake, symmetry is a common feature in nature. This often even holds true down to the smallest bits of matter, which helps nuclear physicists ensure their measurements of the inhabitants of the subatomic world are accurate. The trick is knowing when something you’re measuring is symmetric and when it is not.

Now, conducting experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have found new and unexpected cases of broken isospin . The discovery upends thoughts on how some particles are produced in experiments and could have implications for future studies of these particles.

The research is published in the journal Physics Letters B.

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During that meeting, three main black hole models were outlined: the standard black hole predicted by classical general relativity, with both a singularity and an event horizon; the regular black hole, which eliminates the singularity but retains the horizon; and the black hole mimicker, which reproduces the external features of a black hole but has neither a singularity nor an event horizon.

The paper also describes how regular black holes and mimickers might form, how they could possibly transform into one another, and, most importantly, what kind of observational tests might one day distinguish them from standard black holes.

While the observations collected so far have been groundbreaking, they don’t tell us everything. Since 2015, we’ve detected gravitational waves from black hole mergers and obtained images of the shadows of two black holes: M87* and Sagittarius A*. But these observations focus only on the outside — they provide no insight into whether a singularity lies at the center.

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Kilili, H., Padilla-Morales, B., Castillo-Morales, A. et al. Sci Rep 15, 15,087 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-98786-3

Download citation.

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The field of nanotechnology is still in its nascent stages, but recent innovations are increasingly making this science fiction world of tiny robots into a reality. New breakthrough research from a team at Caltech has demonstrated the ability of a robot made of a single strand of DNA to explore a molecular surface, pick up targeted molecules, and move them to another designated location.

“Just like electromechanical robots are sent off to faraway places, like Mars, we would like to send molecular robots to minuscule places where humans can’t go, such as the bloodstream,” says Lulu Qian, co-author on the paper. “Our goal was to design and build a molecular robot that could perform a sophisticated nanomechanical task: cargo sorting.”

Previous work by a variety of researchers has successfully demonstrated the creation of such DNA robots, but this is the first time they have been shown to pick up and transport specific molecules.

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