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Nobel physics winner’s pride at pioneering AI role

Francis Halzen, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, spoke with pride on Wednesday about his early promotion of artificial intelligence in his research on neutrinos.

Halzen, 82, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was visiting the city of Turin in northern Italy and spoke to reporters there a day after the Nobel announcement.

The U.S.–Belgian physicist is the mind behind the IceCube neutrino observatory, made up of 5,484 optical modules used as sensors deep in the Antarctic ice.

One quantum material, two superconducting states: Stretching helps explain conflicting experiments

Unconventional superconductors can host unusual electronic states, but understanding what drives their superconductivity becomes difficult when different forms of order coexist. The kagome metal CsV3Sb5 has become a particularly debated example.

It develops charge density wave order at about 94 K before becoming superconducting at about 2.5 K, yet experiments have offered conflicting views of whether its superconducting gap is conventional or contains nodes.

Resolving this question is important because knowing how superconductivity forms can guide the search for better superconducting materials.

Uranium compound known since the 1960s reveals hidden spiral structure with unusual magnetic properties

A University of Texas at Dallas scientist and her colleagues have discovered an unusual atomic pattern in a uranium-based material that gives it a rare combination of magnetic properties, a finding that could open new pathways for designing advanced electronic and computer memory devices.

Dr. Mengke Liu, an assistant professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and her collaborators found a previously unrecognized chiral superlattice in a crystal of uranium oxytelluride (UOTe).

Liu is a corresponding author of a study detailing the research that was published online Oct. 7 in the journal Nature.

Researchers Reverse Autism-Related Behaviors in Mice by Targeting Brain Blood Vessels

A study in mice suggests that cells lining the brain’s blood vessels may play an important role in autism-related symptoms.

Researchers have reversed several autism related behavioral symptoms in adult mice by correcting a problem in the blood vessels that supply the brain. The findings point to an unexpected treatment target: endothelial cells, which line blood vessels and help control how quickly blood reaches active regions of the brain.

The study, published in Neuron, focused on mice carrying a 16p11.2 deletion, a genetic change associated with autism in humans. Activating a receptor called P2Y2 restored blood vessel function, increased blood flow in the brain, and reversed hyperactivity, repetitive movements, and impaired motor learning in the animals.

Rare Mutation May Shield the Brain From Alzheimer’s Damage

A rare mutation may keep a major Alzheimer’s risk gene from damaging the brain’s protective barrier.

About one in five people carries at least one copy of APOE ε4, the strongest common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Yet some carriers remain mentally sharp into their 80s. Columbia researchers previously identified a rare variant in the fibronectin gene (FN1) that may help explain their resilience.

Fibronectin helps support the structure of tissues, but too much of it can collect around the brain’s blood vessels in people with APOE ε4. The protective variant appears to limit that buildup. A new study in Nature Aging investigates why that matters and whether the process could offer a target for treatment.

A Strange New Material Breaks the Usual Rules of Heat and Stiffness

A new material barely lets heat through yet is up to 10,000 times stiffer than the silicone used in oven mitts.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have engineered a thin film that combines exceptional stiffness with extreme thermal insulation. Its thermal conductivity ranks among the lowest reported for a dense, nonporous material, approaching the theoretical limit for how effectively such a material can block heat. The film can also be printed at large scales and applied as a coating.

“Stiff materials that are good thermal insulators would have substantial utility in a variety of applications, from cookware to electronic devices to space travel,” says Dali Sun, a physics professor at NC State and co-corresponding author of a journal article describing the work.

James Webb Telescope Detects the Fingerprints of Catastrophic Planetary Collisions

Dust around distant stars may reveal whether colliding worlds grazed one another or hit hard enough to vaporize rock.

Vaporizing vast amounts of solid rock, a Mars-sized world called Theia may have slammed into the infant Earth, blasting debris into space that eventually gathered into the Moon. Astronomers searching for similar collisions around distant stars cannot observe the developing planets directly because they appear too small at such great distances. They look for clues in the dust those impacts may leave behind, though these unusually dusty environments appear around only about 1% of young stars.

Kate Su of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and her colleagues used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine these environments, known as extreme debris disks. Using observations from Webb and NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the team identified minerals through distinctive features in the dust’s mid-infrared light. Their findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that those minerals could distinguish impacts powerful enough to vaporize rock from less energetic encounters.

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