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One system, three solutions: Tackling antibiotic pollution while generating hydrogen peroxide and electricity

What if the dirtiest water in town could help pay for its own cleanup? That is the question that started our project. Sewage is full of hungry bacteria. It also carries leftover medicines, including antibiotics like chloramphenicol, stubborn molecules that conventional treatment can struggle to remove. Most people see a waste problem. We saw a small power plant and a chemical factory hiding in plain sight. Our study is published in the Journal of Power Sources.

The idea behind a microbial fuel cell is simple. Bacteria eat the organic matter in wastewater and shed electrons like exhaust. Give them an electrode to live on, and those electrons travel along a wire to a second electrode and make a current. It is a battery that runs on dinner.

The catch is that the current is small. So we asked a different question: What else could those electrons do when they arrive?

Smartwatches could learn to read your hands

Northwestern University engineers are investigating new ways to tell what the hands are doing—including peering beneath the skin to watch muscles and tendons move. The new methods don’t use high-tech cameras, medical scans or advanced imaging techniques. Instead, they use a common smartwatch.

In one project, engineers designed a new smartwatch system to glean activities from the arm and hands. In another, electrodes built into the back of a watch can track more subtle hand movements and gestures, such as a thumbs-up or clenched fist.

By tracking these movements, researchers could one day help improve the control of bionic prosthetics or monitor patients in specialized care settings, including elder care. Beyond health care, the systems also could make smartwatches easier to use, much like facial recognition has simplified smartphone access, or extend to monitoring everyday activities, such as helping dental hygienists track how many teeth they clean in a week.

Leading AI models are biased against certain accents when scoring interviews, presentations and tests

Artificial intelligence models replicate, and sometimes amplify, all sorts of human biases. In the last few years, University of Washington researchers have found AI has erased female characters from kids’ stories, favored job applicants of certain races and genders and swayed human decisions.

Much bias research has focused on text and visuals. Yet people speak to AI models with increasing regularity, and AI tools are now used to screen job applicants and score oral presentations. Now, a UW-led team of researchers found that state-of-the-art AI models were biased against speakers with certain accents.

The team investigated how state-of-the-art multimodal language models, including two from Google and one from OpenAI, evaluated human speech in job interviews, conference presentations and spoken English proficiency tests. The models scored responses from voices speaking English with five different accents: American, British, Chinese, Indian and Nigerian.

Light-matter hybrids form supersolid quantum state at room temperature

Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology (Poland), IBM Research Zurich and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have observed a new quantum state of matter known as a supersolid in an exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Remarkably, the phenomenon occurs not at temperatures close to absolute zero, but at room temperature. The results have been published in Science Advances.

At first glance, this seems impossible. A crystal is rigid and ordered, while a liquid flows. Yet quantum mechanics allows a state that combines both properties. The story begins with superfluidity—an extraordinary state of matter in which viscosity completely disappears. A superfluid can flow through the narrowest channels without resistance. If you dipped an oar into such a liquid, you would feel almost no drag until a critical velocity was exceeded, at which point quantum vortices would suddenly appear.

As early as the 1960s, physicists predicted that a superfluid could simultaneously develop a periodic crystal-like structure. The resulting phase, called a supersolid, retains the frictionless flow of a superfluid while exhibiting the spatial order of a crystal. For more than half a century, this remained a theoretical prediction. It was not until 2017 that supersolidity was experimentally observed in ultracold atomic Bose-Einstein condensates.

A laser can draw superconductivity at the nanoscale

Researchers from ICMAB-CSIC, the Politecnico di Milano and Université de Liège have adapted a direct laser writing technique that allows them to “draw” superconducting properties in a material. The result is a new way to locally program the behavior of a superconductor, tuning it from a fully superconducting state to an insulating one with extraordinary precision.

High-temperature superconductors (HTSC) are materials that can conduct electricity without resistance at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors. Since they can operate at temperatures achievable using inexpensive liquid nitrogen cooling, they are considered promising candidates for future applications such as quantum technologies, superconducting electronics or next-generation memory devices.

However, patterning HTSC is particularly difficult at very small scales, as their ceramic nature makes them sensitive to conventional micro-and nanofabrication methods. The material’s oxygen level is key to determining its behavior: whether it is superconducting or insulating.

Finding the fingerprints of noisy distributions in random quantum systems

Imagine shuffling a deck of cards where some of the cards are fading just because of the way they interact with the external environment as you shuffle them. Your job is to figure out the interplay between the shuffling, or “imposed randomness,” due to the way you shuffle your cards and how that relates to the fading as cards are exposed to the external environment.

That’s a rough analogy for what Matthew Duschenes and his Ph.D. advisers were doing in a paper that received an Editors’ Suggestion in the journal Physical Review A.

Duschenes is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guelph, and he earned his Ph.D. at Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo with the late Ray Laflamme, a Perimeter founding faculty member and founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, who died in 2025.

The Mystery of Hair Growth Patterns May Finally Have a Simple Explanation

A new study reveals how subtle interactions between cells and chemical signals may shape the intricate patterns of mammalian hair.

The precise arrangement of hair follicles across an animal’s skin may arise from a surprisingly simple process. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have developed a mathematical model showing how cells responding to chemical signals can generate distinct hair patterns in two mammalian species, without requiring a complex system to determine where each follicle forms.

Published in PNAS, the research challenges a long-standing explanation for hair follicle development and suggests that variations in the same underlying cellular process could produce different patterns across species.

A Rare Radioactive Element Reveals a Hidden Secret About the Heaviest Atoms

Using advanced laser spectroscopy on extremely rare radioactive material, researchers have uncovered new insights into the structure of heavy atomic nuclei.

The nucleus of fermium-255 is far from spherical. Scientists have now determined its shape for the first time, finding that it is strongly elongated, much like a rugby ball. The high-precision measurements, published in Physical Review Letters, also correct earlier nuclear data and provide new evidence supporting theoretical models of the heaviest elements.

Fermium-255 contains 100 protons and 155 neutrons. In such heavy nuclei, the electrical repulsion between positively charged protons creates conditions that can lead to spontaneous fission, in which a nucleus splits into smaller fragments. Nuclear shape influences this process, making it a critical factor in predicting whether even heavier, potentially longer-lived elements can exist.

Revolutionary Technology Could Transform How We Extract Lithium

A new breakthrough in lithium separation could help overcome major challenges in extracting this essential battery material.

A new technology developed at The University of Texas at Austin could make lithium extraction faster and more environmentally friendly by separating the valuable element from other dissolved substances with exceptional precision. The approach uses artificial channels so small they operate at the nanoscale, allowing lithium ions to pass through while blocking many competing ions.

Inspired by the molecular gateways found in living cells, the channels demonstrated two to five times greater lithium selectivity than other recently developed lithium transporters. Researchers report that the structures rank among the most selective lithium channels created to date, offering a potential alternative to conventional extraction methods.