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Deep underground, SuperCDMS begins hunting light dark matter with 24 cryogenic crystals

In the hunt for one of nature’s most elusive substances—dark matter, which makes up 85% of all matter in the universe—scientists are going to extremes. Deep underground and chilled to near absolute zero, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) SNOLAB—one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter searches—has begun collecting its first scientific data.

During this early-science phase, the team will fine-tune the system for its full-scale search, set to begin in 2027. Although the experiment isn’t yet operating at full sensitivity, it could still deliver meaningful results.

“The search for dark matter at SuperCDMS SNOLAB is finally underway,” said Tina Cartaro, SuperCDMS operations manager at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

From cartwheels to backflips, motion-imitation framework teaches three robots dynamic movements

Legged robots, robotic systems with legs that typically resemble those of animals or humans, could be advantageous for completing tasks in home environments or populated, dynamic spaces. These robots may look like humans or animals, yet they often cannot reliably replicate complex whole-body movements in a short time.

Training robots on new movements typically entails designing a controller or policy—the software that decides how a robot will move—and adjusting it to produce desired motions. This process can be time-consuming and is not ideal for rapidly teaching robots various agile movements.

Researchers at the Robotics and AI (RAI) Institute and Boston Dynamics recently developed a new framework that can translate recorded or animated movements into robot control strategies. The new framework, introduced in a paper published in Science Robotics, was successfully used to teach two humanoids and one four-legged robot new dynamic movements.

Mirror-image molecules steer electron spins and lift perovskite solar cell efficiency

Some molecules come in two “handed” forms. This property, called chirality, can influence not only how molecules interact with light but also which electron spins they allow to pass. Researchers at the University of Osaka have developed novel chiral hole-transport materials that shed new light on this unusual effect while also improving the interfaces of perovskite solar cells.

The research is published in the journal Small.

Nanoscale transistors achieve lower contact resistance with stepwise evaporation method

Metals, semiconductors and insulators are fundamental components of modern electronics. However, efforts to improve device performance have largely focused on semiconductor quality, while metal crystallinity has received far less attention.

As transistor dimensions continue to shrink, though, structural disorder in metals and at metal-semiconductor interfaces increasingly impedes carrier injection and transport. Metals therefore need a level of structural order comparable to that of single-crystal semiconductors to push device performance toward its physical limits.

To solve this problem, a research team led by Chu Junhao at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed an atomic-scale stepwise evaporation method called Step-Eva that enables the direct in situ growth of single-crystal metal films on semiconductors. This process greatly reduces contact resistance and potentially redefines how transistors are built at the nanoscale.

Tiny Hidden Vibrations Could Make Aircraft More Fuel Efficient

New phononic subsurface designs could help control aircraft turbulence more broadly and predictably without reshaping the vehicle.

At cruising speed, a passenger jet can travel around 640 mph while its wings push through turbulent air along their surfaces. That boundary layer turbulence can increase drag, making flight less efficient and requiring more fuel.

Mahmoud I. Hussein is exploring a different way to control that airflow. Rather than changing the external shape of an aircraft, his research uses engineered microscopic vibrations generated by synthetic materials beneath the surface, with the goal of reducing turbulence and improving fuel efficiency.

Two Opposing Quantum Particles Could Form a Bizarre New Kind of Matter

Researchers predict that strongly interacting bosons and fermions can form stable quantum droplets that may be testable with current experiments.

Two very different kinds of quantum particles may be able to join together in a stable form of matter that physicists once considered unlikely. Researchers at Monash University predict that ultracold bosons and fermions can combine under the right conditions to create self-bound “quantum droplets.”

Bosons and fermions follow fundamentally different quantum rules, yet the new theoretical work indicates that strongly interacting mixtures of the two can remain bound together. The result challenges the long-held expectation that stable droplets would be difficult to form in strongly interacting Bose-Fermi systems.

This New Molecule Could Transform How We Recover Gold From Electronic Waste

A new extraction molecule uses electricity to recover metals while sharply reducing the need for chemical reagents.

Recovering valuable metals from discarded electronics, mining streams, and industrial waste usually depends on large amounts of chemical reagents. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a molecule that could allow electricity to replace much of that chemistry, potentially making metal recovery cleaner, simpler, and more energy efficient.

The findings, led by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, were published in ACS Energy Letters.

Dark Stars May Have Left a Gravitational-Wave Signal We Can Detect Today

A new study suggests that pulsar timing arrays could help reveal how the Universe’s first supermassive black holes formed.

A faint background of extremely low-frequency gravitational waves, detected by monitoring networks of pulsars, may preserve clues from events that began more than 13 billion years ago. Among them could be the processes that produced some of the Universe’s earliest supermassive black holes.

Sohan Ghodla and Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University explored that possibility in a study published as a Letter in Physical Review D. Their goal was to determine whether supermassive black holes that originated in the early Universe could eventually account for a substantial share of the gravitational wave background now detected by Pulsar Timing Arrays, or PTAs.

Next.js Patches Critical AVIF and Windows Flaws Enabling Unauthenticated RCE

Vercel has released security patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities in the Next.js web framework, both of which allow unauthenticated remote code execution, one exploitable via specially crafted AVIF image files and the other through a path traversal flaw affecting servers that use a Windows filesystem.

The Windows path traversal, tracked as CVE-2026–75604 (CVSS score: 9.0), affects Next.js applications that use both the Pages Router and App Router without Cache Components when the server uses a Windows filesystem.

Linux and macOS deployments are not affected.

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