Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A device made of multilayer graphene exhibits topologically protected edge currents whose direction can be switched using an electric field.

Topological phases of matter have captivated physicists for several decades, promising exotic phenomena and new paradigms for electronic devices [1]. So-called Chern insulators—systems exhibiting quantized Hall conductance without an external magnetic field—are particularly enticing. These materials support dissipationless, one-way electron transport along their edges, which could enable robust low-power electronics or even form the backbone of future topological quantum-computing architectures [2]. Yet, the defining feature of a Chern insulator—its chirality, which determines the direction of the edge-state current—is set by material symmetry and is therefore notoriously rigid and difficult to manipulate dynamically [3–5].

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A brief episode of anxiety may have a bigger influence on a person’s ability to learn what is safe and what is not. Research recently published in npj Science of Learning has used a virtual reality game that involved picking flowers with bees in some of the blossoms that would sting the participant—simulated by a mild electrical stimulation on the hand.

Researchers worked with 70 neurotypical participants between the ages of 20 and 30. Claire Marino, a research assistant in the ZVR Lab, and Pavel Rjabtsenkov, a Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, were co-first authors of the study.

Their team found that the people who learned to distinguish between the safe and dangerous areas—where the bees were and were not—showed better spatial memory and had lower , while participants who did not learn the different areas had higher anxiety and heightened fear even in safe areas.

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When a planet’s orbit brings it between Earth and a distant star, it’s more than just a cosmic game of hide and seek. It’s an opportunity for NASA to improve its understanding of that planet’s atmosphere and rings. Planetary scientists call it a stellar occultation and that’s exactly what happened with Uranus on April 7.

Observing the alignment allows NASA scientists to measure the temperatures and composition of Uranus’s stratosphere—the middle layer of a planet’s atmosphere—and determine how it has changed over the last 30 years since Uranus’s last significant occultation.

“Uranus passed in front of a star that is about 400 light years from Earth,” said William Saunders, planetary scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and science principal investigator and analysis lead, for what NASA’s team calls the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025.

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For biologists, seeing is believing. But sometimes biologists have a hard time seeing. One particularly vexing challenge is seeing all the molecules in an intact tissue sample, down to the level of single cells, simultaneously. Detecting the location of hundreds or thousands of biomolecules—from lipids to metabolites to proteins—in their native environment allows researchers to better understand their functions and interactions. Unfortunately, scientists don’t have great tools to accomplish this task.

Now a multi-institutional research team has developed a tissue expansion method that enables scientists to use imaging to simultaneously detect hundreds of molecules at the single cell level in their native locations. Their paper is published in the journal Nature Methods.

Imaging methods, including most types of microscopy, provide a view of molecules inside cells. But they can track only a select handful of molecules at one time, and they can’t detect all types of biomolecules, including some lipids. Other methods, like regular mass spectrometry, can detect hundreds of molecules but don’t work on intact samples, so researchers can’t see how the biomolecules are oriented.

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A new comparison and analysis of the genomes of species in the genus Malus, which includes the domesticated apple and its wild relatives, revealed the evolutionary relationships among the species and how their genomes have evolved over the past nearly 60 million years.

The research team identified structural variations among the genomes and developed methods for identifying genes associated with desirable traits, like tastiness and resistance to disease and cold, that could help guide future breeding programs.

A paper describing the research, conducted by an international team that includes Penn State biologists, was published in the journal Nature Genetics.

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Researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have proposed a key indicator that may reveal the emergence of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by analyzing particle “fingerprints” generated in heavy-ion collisions.

Published in Physics Letters B, the study provides a new perspective for exploring the evolution of matter in the .

About 13.8 billion years ago, within a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe existed in an ultra-hot and dense state. Instead of protons and neutrons, the fundamental building blocks of matter were free quarks and gluons—a unique state known as QGP. As the universe expanded and cooled, the QGP gradually condensed into the we recognize today.

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A team of infectious disease specialists and environmental engineers at Université Claude Bernard Lyon’s, École Centrale de Lyon, in France, and the University of Rome La Sapienza, in Italy, has found via experiments that the physical characteristics of exhaled droplets play a role in the transmission of infectious diseases.

In their study published in the journal Physical Review Fluids, the group asked volunteers to breathe normally while silent, to speak normally, and to cough, while their exhausted droplet characteristics were measured.

Prior research has shown that many are spread via tiny expelled through the nose and mouth of infected people as they breathe. These droplets are small enough to hang in the air long enough for others to inhale them, leading to infection. Prior research has also shown that some people can be characterized as superspreaders—for some reason, they infect more people than do others. Some suspect that this might be due to the size of droplets expelled by superspreaders or the distance the droplets travel once expelled.

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A recent study found that the Hubbard model failed to accurately predict the behavior of a simplified one-dimensional cuprate system. According to scientists at SLAC, this suggests the model is unlikely to fully account for high-temperature superconductivity in two-dimensional cuprates.

Superconductivity, the phenomenon where certain materials can conduct electricity without any energy loss, holds great potential for revolutionary technologies, from ultra-efficient power grids to cutting-edge quantum devices.

A recent study published in Physical Review Letters.

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A mysterious menagerie of quantum states — once purely theoretical — has been brought to life by researchers at Columbia using twisted molybdenum ditelluride.

These newly observed states, some never seen before, hint at the possibility of topological quantum computers that don’t require magnetic fields, overcoming a major obstacle in the field. By employing a highly sensitive optical technique, scientists have not only identified a range of exotic quantum states but also demonstrated a new experimental approach that may transform the way we study quantum matter.

Quantum States: A Growing “Zoo”

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Working with the Quantum Statistical Physics (PQS) group, Dengis developed a protocol for rapidly generating NOON states. “These states, which look like miniature versions of Schrödinger’s famous cat, are quantum superpositions,” he explains. “They are of major interest for technologies such as ultra-precise quantum sensors or quantum computers.”

The obstacle of time

The main challenge? Manufacturing these states normally takes far too long. We’re talking tens of minutes or more, which often exceeds the lifetime of the experiment. The cause? An energy bottleneck, a “sharp bend” in the system’s evolution that forces it to slow down.

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