It’s a typical workday and you sign onto your computer. Unbeknownst to you, a high-frequency sensing system embedded in your work device is now tracking your heart rate, allowing your employer to monitor your breaks, engagement, and stress levels and infer alertness. It sounds like a dystopian scenario, but some believe it’s not so far from current reality.
As quantum computers continue to advance, many of today’s encryption systems face the risk of becoming obsolete. A powerful alternative—quantum cryptography—offers security based on the laws of physics instead of computational difficulty. But to turn quantum communication into a practical technology, researchers need compact and reliable devices that can decode fragile quantum states carried by light.
A new study from teams at the University of Padua, Politecnico di Milano, and the CNR Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies shows how this goal can be approached using a simple material: borosilicate glass. As reported in Advanced Photonics, their work demonstrates a high-performance quantum coherent receiver fabricated directly inside glass using femtosecond laser writing. The approach provides low optical loss, stable operation, and broad compatibility with existing fiber-optic infrastructure—key factors for scaling quantum technologies beyond the laboratory.
A novel type of three-dimensional (3D) polar topological structure, termed the “polar chiral bobber,” has been discovered in ferroelectric oxide thin films, demonstrating promising potential for high-density multistate non-volatile memory and logic devices. The result was achieved by a collaborative research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, and other institutions. The findings were published in Advanced Materials on January 30.
Topological polar textures in ferroelectrics, such as flux-closures, vortices, skyrmions, merons, Bloch points, and high-order radial vortices discovered in recent years, have attracted wide interest for future electronic applications. However, most known polar states possess limited configurational degrees of freedom, constraining their potential for multilevel data storage.
In this study, the researchers used phase-field simulations and aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy to predict and experimentally confirm the existence of polar chiral bobbers in (111)-oriented ultrathin PbTiO₃ ferroelectric films. This 3D topological structure is characterized by a nanoscale domain with out-of-plane polarization opposite to its surroundings, which starts from the film surface and terminates at a Bloch point inside the film.
Modern technologies increasingly rely on light sources that can be reconfigured on demand. Think of microlasers that can quickly switch between different operating states—much like a car shifting gears—so that an optical chip can route signals, perform computations, or adapt to changing conditions in real time. The microlaser switching is not a smooth, leisurely process, but can be sudden and fast. Generally, nearly identical “candidate” lasing states compete with each other in a microcavity, and the laser may abruptly jump from one state to another when external conditions are tuned.
This raises a practical question: How fast can such a switch be, in principle? For physicists, it raises a deeper one: Does the switching follow a universal rule, like other phase transitions in nature?
A team at Peking University has now provided a clear picture of an ultrahigh-quality microcavity laser—the time the laser needs to complete a state switch follows a remarkably simple power-law rule. When the control knob is swept faster, the switch becomes faster—but not arbitrarily so. Instead, the switching time decreases with the square root of the sweep speed, corresponding to a robust exponent close to half. This result effectively sets a speed limit for how quickly such microlasers can “change gears.” The findings are published in Physical Review Letters.
Sodium-ion batteries (NIBs) are gaining traction as a next-generation technology to complement the widely used lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). NIBs offer clear advantages versus LIBs in terms of sustainability and cost, as they rely on sodium—an element that, unlike lithium, is abundant almost everywhere on Earth. However, for NIBs to achieve widespread adoption, they must reach energy densities comparable to LIBs.
State-of-the-art NIB designs use hard carbon (HC), a porous and amorphous type of carbon, as an anode material. Scientists believe that sodium ions aggregate into tiny quasi-metallic clusters within HC nano-pores, and this “pore filling” process remains as the main mechanism contributing to the extended reversible capacity of the HC anode.
Despite some computational studies on this topic, the fundamental processes governing sodium storage and transport in HC remain unclear. Specifically, researchers have struggled to explain how sodium ions can gather to form clusters inside HC pores at operational temperatures, and why the overall movement of sodium ions through the material is sluggish.
This course covers elementary discrete mathematics for computer science and engineering. It emphasizes mathematical definitions and proofs as well as applicable methods. Topics include formal logic notation, proof methods; induction, well-ordering; sets, relations; elementary graph theory; integer congruences; asymptotic notation and growth of functions; permutations and combinations, counting principles; discrete probability. Further selected topics may also be covered, such as recursive definition and structural induction; state machines and invariants; recurrences; generating functions.
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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about a strange electrostatic world of tiny organisms.
Links:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2503555122
https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0960-9822%2823%2900674-7
http://cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00772-8
Other videos:
#biology #science #electrostatics.
0:00 Static phenomena and electrostatic ecology.
1:50 Pollen and bees.
3:00 Flying spiders and ballooning.
4:10 Ticks.
4:40 Electrosensation.
5:40 Worms and jumping.
7:50 Worm parasites.
9:50 Practical applications and aeroplankton.
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Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions—oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons—circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light inside the collider’s two house-sized particle detectors, STAR and sPHENIX. RHIC, a nuclear physics research facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has been smashing atoms since the summer of 2000. The final collisions cap a quarter century of remarkable experiments using 10 different atomic species colliding over a wide range of energies in different configurations.
The RHIC program has produced groundbreaking discoveries about the building blocks of matter and the nature of proton spin and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing that have far surpassed scientists’ expectations when this discovery machine first turned on.
“RHIC has been one of the most successful user facilities operated by the DOE Office of Science, serving thousands of scientists from across the nation and around the globe,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “Supporting these one-of-a-kind research facilities pushes the limits of technology and expands our understanding of our world through transformational science—central pillars of DOE’s mission to ensure America’s security and prosperity.”
A team of researchers at Queen’s University has developed a powerful new kind of computing machine that uses light to take on complex problems such as protein folding (for drug discovery) and number partitioning (for cryptography). Built from off-the-shelf components, it also operates at room temperature and remains remarkably stable while performing billions of operations per second. The research was published in Nature.
The breakthrough shows that it is possible to build a practical and scalable machine that can tackle extremely difficult problems.
The project, led by Bhavin Shastri, Canada Research Chair in Neuromorphic Photonic Computing and professor in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy, with a team of his graduate students including Nayem Al Kayed and Hugh Morison, uses commercially available lasers, fiber optics, and modulators—the same technology that powers today’s internet infrastructure. The team partnered with McGill University researcher David Plant and his graduate student Charles St-Arnault.
