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Neutrons reveal how friction stir welding could strengthen steel armor

Using neutrons at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers from The Ohio State University are studying residual stress caused by friction stir welding (FSW) to reveal how to strengthen armor steel welds, like those used in military vehicles. Their findings were published in the Journal of Materials Processing Technology.

“We are trying to develop a new way to join armor steel that produces joints with better ballistic and blast performance,” said Antonio Ramirez, a professor of materials science and engineering at OSU. “In the end, we want to be able to make structures that perform better.”

The team’s results will help fine-tune welding parameters to create a roadmap for engineering better armor systems.

Light’s hidden properties save quantum information from the chaos of bad weather

For years, researchers have tried to harness the “twist” of light to transmit data. This property describes how light spirals as it travels forward, and because it can be molded into a virtually infinite number of different twists, it provides a massive, promising alphabet for high-capacity communication.

This twisted light has proven notoriously fragile in real-world environments such as bad weather, atmospheric turbulence and water. Once it passes through these chaotic media, the twisted pattern becomes completely unrecognizable, a major historical barrier that has stalled the use of this large alphabet for global communications.

By sending quantum information through a storm, researchers at The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have shown that the information in light can be kept completely intact, even though the light itself was completely warped beyond recognition.

Neutron star collisions may forge gold more slowly than expected

Where do gold, platinum and uranium come from? This question has fascinated astrophysicists and nuclear physicists for decades. A research team from Technische Universität Darmstadt has now taken an important step toward understanding the origin of heavy elements. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

Approximately half of all elements heavier than iron are produced through the rapid neutron-capture process, commonly known as the r-process. This process occurs under extreme conditions, such as during the collision of two neutron stars. In these events, atomic nuclei are bombarded with neutrons at an extraordinary rate, enabling the formation of increasingly heavier elements.

A major challenge is that many of the nuclei involved are extremely neutron-rich and cannot be studied experimentally in laboratories. Scientists therefore rely on theoretical models, whose predictions often diverge significantly when applied to regions far from experimentally known nuclei. Some of these exotic nuclei can be produced at research facilities such as GSI/FAIR, but many remain beyond experimental reach.

One LED produces four stable colors at room temperature

Full-color displays normally require separate red, green and blue light emitters. A team from the University of Osaka and Ritsumeikan University has demonstrated another approach: a single light-emitting layer that produces several colors when electrically powered at room temperature. The study was published in Applied Physics Letters.

Micro-LED displays promise high brightness, energy efficiency and resolution. However, conventional green and red nitride LEDs can show changes in color as the current increases. Producing several colors also generally requires multiple light-emitting layers or separately manufactured chips, making it difficult to place many pixels into a very small area.

The team used a manufacturing method already widely employed for nitride LEDs to create aluminum gallium nitride LEDs containing terbium ions.

New twist on the Einstein problem reveals unexpected physics

A shape that captured worldwide attention for solving a decades-old mathematical puzzle has returned to the spotlight. While the shape’s properties allowed it to solve previous puzzles, little is known about its other associated properties, creating opportunities for further discovery. These unexplored properties may also help solve new physics mysteries, such as how to twist light into striking chiral patterns.

In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, and collaborating institutions created optical structures based on the “Smith hat,” an unusual shape that solves the so-called Einstein problem in mathematics. By shining laser light onto these structures, the team discovered diffraction behaviors never before observed in conventional quasicrystals.

The long-standing Einstein problem asks whether a single tile shape, or “monotile,” can be used to cover an entire surface in a nonrepeating pattern. While periodic tilings such as honeycombs or checkerboards repeat regularly, an aperiodic monotile can cover all of space without ever producing a repeating arrangement. In 2023, the first such monotile, the Smith hat, was discovered, sparking widespread interest in the scientific community.

Quantum in the palm of your hand: The evolution of superconducting qubits

Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people’s injuries.

Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons, photons and protons. In contrast to classical physics that we can observe with our senses, particles in the quantum realm have unusual behaviors. Even though quantum particles make common technologies possible, we don’t experience these behaviors in our everyday world.

That’s why a discovery in 1985 was such a big deal. In a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, a team of three scientists showed that a system you could see could demonstrate quantum behavior. Or as they said in one of the journal articles covering the experiments, the system was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on.”

A Simple Twist Could Unlock a New Generation of Electronics

Scientists can now twist large oxide crystals into new materials with potentially powerful electronic properties.

A carefully chosen twist can transform how a material behaves. Researchers have now found a way to apply that principle to large sheets of crystalline oxides, opening a potential route toward electronic materials with structures and properties that can be designed with unusual precision.

The approach gives scientists control over the angle between two stacked oxide layers while creating strong chemical bonds where they meet. Unlike many earlier twistronic materials, the resulting structures can also be produced across areas large enough to be more relevant for practical devices.

Unzipping the Code of Life: Scientists Pinpoint Where DNA First Opens

Researchers mapped where DNA first opens and how a helicase gate may release one strand as genome copying begins.

Before a cell can divide, it must open its tightly wound DNA and begin copying the entire genome. Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) and collaborating institutions have now traced this process to one of its earliest moments, revealing where DNA first separates inside living cells and identifying a molecular gate that helps launch replication.

Published in Nature Communications, the findings provide a closer view of how cells begin duplicating their genetic material. Because copying errors can damage the genome, the start of DNA replication must be controlled with exceptional precision.

Loneliness Is Making People Sick — but Medicine Can’t Fix It Alone

Treating loneliness as a health issue may encourage action while obscuring the broader social conditions behind it.

Loneliness can damage health, but a healthcare system cannot rebuild communities or restore the social connections people have lost. A University of Michigan study warns that defining loneliness mainly as a medical concern may shift responsibility away from the wider social conditions that produce isolation.

Published in Social Problems, the research traces how chronic loneliness and social isolation became widely recognized as public health issues after studies connected them with greater risks of illness, premature death, and increased healthcare spending.

Earth May Be Twice As Vulnerable to Extreme Solar Storms As Scientists Thought

Earth may be far more vulnerable to powerful solar storms than scientists realized, with extreme events potentially hitting modern technology twice as hard as previous models predicted.

Earth’s magnetic shield may not have the safety limit scientists once thought it did. New research suggests that the most powerful solar storms could disturb the planet’s upper atmosphere up to twice as severely as traditional estimates predict.

The finding challenges a decades-old assumption about how Earth responds when it is struck by unusually intense solar wind. Rather than reaching a maximum and leveling off, the planet’s geomagnetic response may continue growing as conditions become more extreme.

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