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Category: computing

Why Earth-like worlds might be rare

Dr. Craig Walton: “This makes searching for life on other planets a lot more specific. We should look for solar systems with stars that resemble our own Sun.”

How common are Earth-like worlds beyond our solar system? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists unveiled new evidence that Earth-like worlds might be rarer than previously thought. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Earth-like worlds and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate the formation of the interiors of potential Earth-like worlds, specifically focusing on planetary interior formation. This is because the researchers note how nitrogen and phosphorus are essential for the formation of habitable worlds, and the planetary mantle, the layer just beneath the planetary crust, is where they are formed and exist.

In the end, the researchers found that the right amount of oxygen needs to be present within the mantle for nitrogen and phosphorus to form. They note while Earth has these conditions, worlds with less oxygen in their mantle could limit the ability of nitrogen and phosphorus to form, resulting in non-habitable worlds.

The Computer That Consumes Stars

And a black hole would be a type of computer if we could use it.

What is the ultimate limit of a civilization? It isn’t conquering a galaxy. It is processing power.

A “Matrioshka Brain” is a megastructure so massive it encases an entire star. It is a Dyson Sphere upgraded to God-Mode. Instead of just harvesting energy, it uses the star to fuel a computer powerful enough to simulate trillions of universes.

If a civilization builds one of these, they don’t need to explore space. They can upload their minds to a digital heaven and live forever. This might be the terrifying reason why the universe is so silent.

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Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing

Quantum computers are often described as a glimpse of a faster, more powerful future. The catch is that today’s devices are fragile in a way ordinary computers are not. Their biggest headache is decoherence, the gradual loss of the delicate quantum behavior that makes them useful in the first place. When decoherence sets in, it can trigger two common kinds of mistakes: bit flips and phase flips.

A bit flip is the more intuitive problem. A qubit that should represent ‘0’ can unexpectedly behave like ‘1’. A phase flip is stranger but just as damaging. Even if a qubit stays in a superposition, the relationship between its components can suddenly switch, turning a positive phase into a negative one and scrambling the computation.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 26H1 for select and upcoming CPUs

Microsoft has announced Windows 11 26H1, but it’s not for existing PCs. Instead, it will ship on devices with Snapdragon X2 processors and possibly other rumored ARM chips.

Microsoft insists Windows 11 is still following an annual update cadence, which means Windows 11 26H2 is likely on track.

According to Microsoft, Windows 11 26H1 is based on a new platform release to support the upcoming ARM chips.

Scientists camouflage heart rate from invasive radar-based surveillance

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.

Laser‑written glass chip pushes quantum communication toward practical deployment

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.

3D ‘polar chiral bobbers’ identified in ferroelectric thin films

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.

How fast can a microlaser switch ‘modes?’ A simple rule reveals a power-law time scaling

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.

Understanding the physics at the anode of sodium-ion batteries

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.

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