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JWST Finds a “Star” 100 Billion Times Brighter Than Any Star Should Be

Something in the young universe is shining like a star that should not be possible.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected a compact red object so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot plausibly explain it. Although the source has a star-like appearance and may be surrounded by gas on the scale of the solar system, it radiates roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically produce.

The leading explanation is far stranger: the glow may come from a rapidly feeding black hole buried inside an enormous, dense envelope of hydrogen.

Scientists Turn an Overlooked Chip Layer Into a Powerful New Light Source

A layer once dismissed as mere support has transformed a tiny photonic chip into a powerful generator of new light frequencies.

A laser usually produces one narrow color of light. A device small enough to sit on a fingertip can turn that single input into hundreds of precisely spaced frequencies, creating a tool for measuring time, identifying chemicals, transmitting data, and studying distant objects in space.

Researchers have now expanded what such photonic chips can do by making two of their materials work together. Instead of treating the outer layer as simple packaging, the team used it to generate additional light frequencies that the chip’s main material could not efficiently produce on its own.

A New Quantum Blueprint Could Make States Easier To Tell Apart

MIT and University of Ferrara researchers created a mathematical blueprint for designing distinguishable non-Gaussian quantum states.

Researchers worldwide are working to develop quantum systems for sensing, communications, computing, and control that could outperform today’s technologies. A major challenge is creating quantum states that are stable, measurable, and easy to distinguish, since these states are the foundation of any practical quantum device.

Quantum states have unique characteristics that make them attractive for advanced information processing. However, achieving both stability and distinguishability remains difficult. Recovering information from a quantum system depends on how well its quantum states can be distinguished, a property tied to orthogonality. Because no two Gaussian states (a widely studied class of quantum states) are orthogonal, some level of error is unavoidable when trying to tell them apart.

New Technique Could Slash AI’s Memory Energy Use by Thousands of Times

The microscopic magnetic flips behind digital memory could soon use thousands of times less energy, offering a new way to shrink AI’s rapidly growing power footprint.

Artificial intelligence is creating and processing data on an enormous scale. Searches, recommendations, generated images, scientific simulations, and large language models all depend on information that must be repeatedly stored, transferred, retrieved, and rewritten. Each operation consumes energy, and those costs multiply across the billions of devices and sprawling data centers that support the digital world.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have now developed a mathematical framework designed to slash the energy required to write information in future magnetic memory. Rather than creating a new memory material, the approach changes how the magnetic state representing a digital bit is flipped.

Scientists Discover a 3.7-Billion-Year-Old Secret of Early Life

Ancient microbes appear to have used molybdenum as far back as 3.7 billion years ago, despite the metal being scarce in Earth’s early oceans.

Scientists funded by NASA have found that organisms living on Earth more than 3 billion years ago were already using molybdenum, even though the metal was extremely rare in the environment at that time. The research, in Nature Communications, is the first study to show that ancient life depended on molybdenum this early in Earth’s history.

Today, molybdenum plays a key role inside cells by helping important biochemical reactions happen faster. It forms part of essential enzymes that drive several major biological processes in living organisms. These reactions matter not only for individual forms of life, but also for planet-scale biogeochemical cycles, including the nitrogen cycle. Without molybdenum, the same reactions could still occur naturally, but far too slowly to support life.

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