As quantum computers get bigger, researchers scramble to chill hardware without rare helium-3.
Tight supplies of precious isotope are driving new approaches to ultracold tech.
Category: computing
New sensor sniffs out pneumonia on a patient’s breath
Diagnosing some diseases could be as easy as breathing into a tube. MIT engineers have developed a test to detect disease-related compounds in a patient’s breath. The new test could provide a faster way to diagnose pneumonia and other lung conditions. Rather than sit for a chest X-ray or wait hours for a lab result, a patient may one day take a breath test and get a diagnosis within minutes.
The new breath test is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects synthetic compounds, or “biomarkers,” of disease, which are initially attached to inhalable nanoparticles. The biomarkers serve as tiny tags that can only be unlocked and detached from the nanoparticle by a very particular key, such as a disease-related enzyme.
The idea is that a person would first breathe in the nanoparticles, similar to inhaling asthma medicine. If the person is healthy, the nanoparticles would eventually circulate out of the body intact. If a disease such as pneumonia is present, however, enzymes produced as a result of the infection would snip off the nanoparticles’ biomarkers. These untethered biomarkers would be exhaled and measured, confirming the presence of the disease.
We Were WRONG About the Quantum Eraser! ft. @LookingGlassUniverse
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Does quantum mechanics allow the future to retroactively influence the past, as in the infamous delayed choice quantum eraser experiment? How about we get an actual quantum physicist–who many of you already know–to show us how to do this experiment at home, and hopefully set this matter to rest.
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Physicists achieve first-ever ‘quadsqueezing’ quantum interaction
Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated a new type of quantum interaction using a single trapped ion. By creating and controlling increasingly complex forms of “squeezing” – including a fourth-order effect known as quadsqueezing – the team has, for the first time, made previously unreachable quantum effects experimentally accessible.
The approach also provides a new way to engineer these interactions, with potential applications in quantum simulation, sensing, and computing. Their results have been published in Nature Physics.
Many systems in physics behave like tiny objects that vibrate or swing back and forth, like a spring or a pendulum. In quantum physics, these are known as quantum harmonic oscillators. Light waves, vibrations in molecules, and even the motion of a single trapped atom can all be described in this way. Controlling these systems is important for quantum technologies, from ultra-precise sensors to new kinds of quantum computers.
Computer vision helps observers understand how iconic artworks were created
Paintings are often made up of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, each going in a certain direction, that are not easily observed by the viewer. A cross-disciplinary research team from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and Loughborough University in England has developed an image analysis method that helps to make the underlying brushstroke structure of paintings visible, giving new insight into how artists physically created their works.
This approach offers both experts and non-experts a fresh way to observe and interpret the making of artworks. The research was recently published in the journal Patterns.
The researchers bridged art and data science to show that painting style can be quantified and visualized as flow, turning elusive qualities like “gesture” into measurable, analyzable data. They used a computational technique to examine very small patches of Impressionist paintings, determining the direction of the brushstroke in each tiny spot and connect these different directions, as if drawing lines that follow the flow.
Groundbreaking Study on Chimp Warfare Shows Us the Nature of War
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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about war and what it means in the animal kingdom
Links:
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1… #science #chimps.
0:00 War never changes — but what is war?
2:28 Gombe Chimp War in the 1970s
4:30 New study — largest war ever
5:20 Ngogo chimp project
5:55 Something happened in 2014 resulting in violence
7:20 Why did the violence start?
8:40 Implications for humans
9:45 Ant warfare
11:40 What does this tell us about our nature?
12:55 Conclusions.
Enjoy and please subscribe.
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How do you study something you can never step outside of?
Studying the thing you can never step outside of and look back at is the fundamental problem facing every cosmologist who has ever looked up at the night sky. The Universe is not a laboratory you can peer into from above, it’s the thing you are already inside. The only way to truly test your ideas about how it works is to build a copy of it, run the clock forward from the Big Bang, and see if what emerges matches what your telescopes are actually telling you.
That is exactly what the FLAMINGO project has been doing. And this week, its creators made the results available to the entire world.
An international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, has released one of the largest cosmological simulation datasets ever produced. The archive contains more than 2.5 petabytes of data (roughly equivalent to half a million high definition films) and is free to access for researchers anywhere on the planet.
NO-independent inflammatory response by iNOS
The finding challenges a longstanding assumption in immunology: that iNOS controls immune cell behaviour primarily through nitric oxide production. The study shows that the physical shape of iNOS – stabilised by its cofactor, tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) – is what drives the interaction with IRG1, independently of whether iNOS is producing nitric oxide at all.
The researchers used co-immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry to confirm that iNOS is a direct binding partner of IRG1 in living cells, with computational modelling and molecular dynamics simulations used to predict and validate the structure of the interaction. Surface plasmon resonance confirmed that the binding is stable and high-affinity in both mouse and human models, and that it does not occur with the related protein eNOS – pointing to a specific, evolutionarily conserved function.
In cells lacking iNOS, IRG1 produced more than 15 times more itaconate compared with normal cells following immune stimulation. Critically, iNOS mutants unable to produce nitric oxide still suppressed IRG1 – what mattered was whether iNOS could adopt the correct shape, determined by BH4 binding. Disrupting that binding abolished the effect entirely.
The work also showed that in the absence of iNOS, IRG1 associated with a different set of partner proteins involved in glycolysis and cell metabolism – suggesting iNOS effectively sequesters IRG1 away from those roles, with wider consequences for how immune cells manage energy during inflammation.
A protein long understood to drive inflammation by producing nitric oxide has a second, previously unknown role – it physically binds to another key protein inside cells to directly modulate the immune response. The discovery, published in Nature Metabolism, could open new routes to treating conditions such as cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Crohn’s and other inflammatory diseases.
When the immune system detects infection or injury, it triggers inflammation to fight back. That response is essential, but it must be carefully controlled. If it runs too hard for too long, it causes the tissue damage that underlies many chronic diseases. Understanding the molecular switches that regulate inflammation – and finding new ways to target them – is one of the biggest challenges in modern medicine.
Light unlocks full polarization control at ultrafast speeds, reshaping photonics
Scientists at Heriot‑Watt University have demonstrated in a world-first, that light can be used to control every aspect of how electromagnetic waves oscillate, opening new technological frontiers. Researchers working in photonics, the science of light, have discovered a new way to control “polarization,” a key property of light that plays a crucial role in the performance of technologies such as drug development and quantum computers.
The breakthrough resolves a long-standing challenge in photonics: achieving control of light that is both fast and strong enough to be useful in real systems. The research, titled All-optical polarization control in time-varying low index films via plasma symmetry breaking, has been published in the journal Nature Photonics.
Dr. Marcello Ferrera, Professor at Heriot-Watt University’s School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, said, How light oscillates has a huge impact on how it interacts with the physical world around us. For the first time, we now have full control over this property of light, for any polarization state, and at ultra‑fast speeds.