Scientists at Caltech have figured out how to precisely engineer tiny three-dimensional (3D) metallic pieces with nanoscale dimensions. The process can work with any metal or metal alloy and yields components of surprising strength despite having a porous and defect-ridden microstructure, making it potentially useful in a wide range of applications, including medical devices, computer chips, and equipment needed for space missions.
The scientists describe their method in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The work was completed in the lab of Julia R. Greer, the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering at Caltech, and Huajian Gao of Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The researchers use a technique called two-photon lithography that allows them to sequentially build an object of a desired size and shape by carefully controlling the geometry at the level of individual voxels, the smallest distinguishable volumes, or features, in a 3D image. Beginning with a light-sensitive liquid, the scientists use a tightly focused femtosecond laser beam—a femtosecond is 1 quadrillionth of a second—to build a desired shape out of a gel-like material called hydrogel. After infusing the miniature hydrogel sculpture with metallic salts, such as copper nitrate or nickel nitrate, they heat the structure twice in a specialized furnace to produce a shrunken metallic replica of the original shape.
Apple has released its first Background Security Improvements update to fix a WebKit flaw tracked as CVE-2026–20643 on iPhones, iPads, and Macs without requiring a full operating system upgrade.
The CVE-2026–20643 flaw allows malicious web content to bypass the browser’s Same Origin Policy.
Apple says the flaw is a cross-origin issue in the Navigation API that was addressed with improved input validation.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers.
According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact so strongly that the qubit would collapse before the calculation could be completed. However, the experiments conducted by the Linköping team show that it works.
“Our findings open up an entirely new research field,” says Yuttapoom Puttisong, associate professor at Linköping University.
When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study.
This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while they are undergoing anesthesia.
“What’s exciting about that is the possibility of a universal anesthesia-delivery system that can measure this one signal and tell how unconscious you are, regardless of which drugs they’re using in the operating room,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
Miller, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience Emery Brown, and their colleagues are now working on an automated control system for delivery of anesthesia drugs, which would measure the brain’s stability using EEG and then automatically adjust the drug dose. This could help doctors ensure that patients stay unconscious throughout surgery without becoming too deeply unconscious, which can have negative side effects following the procedure.
Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Cell Reports. MIT graduate student Adam Eisen is the paper’s lead author.
Materials from a new class of magnets could host permanent dissipationless spin currents when they enter a superconducting state.
Superconductors are famous for transporting electric charge with zero resistance. This ability underpins technologies such as MRI scanners, quantum computers, and sensitive magnetometers known as superconducting quantum interference devices. However, in the field of spintronics—which seeks to process information using electron spin rather than charge—achieving a similar long-range dissipationless transport has remained elusive. In ordinary metals, electron spins are highly susceptible to scattering and spin-orbit coupling, both of which cause spin currents to decay over short distances. Although research in superconducting spintronics based on ferromagnets has made progress [1, 2], ferromagnets produce stray magnetic fields that interfere with external circuit elements, and their internal magnetic fields tend to destroy superconductivity.
Optical frequency combs—laser sources that emit evenly spaced colors of light—are foundational, ubiquitous tools for precision measurement, found in optical clocks, gas-sensing spectrometers, and instruments that detect the light signatures of exoplanets. Traditionally, frequency combs are produced by large, fiber-laser systems ranging from the size of a shoebox to a refrigerator.
Engineers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are at the forefront of shrinking these powerful laser sources onto photonic chips to make “microcombs” at millimeter to micron scales, useful not only for their smaller size, but in next-generation telecommunications applications, such as generating multiple data carriers over a single optical fiber.
New research led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, describes a new, generalized model for how to design so-called resonant electro-optic microcombs on thin-film lithium niobate, a material featuring a strong electro-optic effect, or the ability to efficiently mix electronic signals with optical ones.
Research is actively underway to develop a “dream memory” that can reduce heat generation in smartphones and laptops while delivering faster performance and lower power consumption. Korean researchers propose a new possibility for controlling magnetism using the exchange interaction of electron orbitals—the motion of electrons orbiting around an atomic nucleus—rather than relying on the conventional exchange interaction of electron spin, the rotational property of electrons inside semiconductors.
A joint research team led by Professor Kyung-Jin Lee of the Department of Physics at KAIST and Professor Kyoung-Whan Kim of the Department of Physics at Yonsei University has established, for the first time in the world, a new theoretical framework enabling magnetism to be freely controlled through orbital exchange interaction, surpassing the limitations of conventional technologies that control magnetism using electric currents. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Until now, next-generation memory research has mainly focused on the spin of electrons. Spin refers to the property of electrons that rotate on their own axis like tiny spinning tops, and information can be stored by using the direction of this rotation. However, electrons simultaneously move around the atomic nucleus along paths known as orbitals.
A research team led by Professor Jae Eun Jang and Dr. Goeun Pyo from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST has developed “dual-modulated vertically stacked transistors” that operate stably without current leakage even in two-dimensional nanoscale channel structures. A study on this work is published in the journal Advanced Science.
In recent years, the semiconductor industry has faced physical limitations as the demand to integrate more devices within limited space continues to grow. To overcome these constraints, “vertically stacked transistors,” in which current-carrying channels are vertically layered, have emerged as a promising alternative for next-generation 3D semiconductors. However, conventional vertically stacked transistors suffer from a critical drawback in which gate electric signals are not delivered uniformly into the channel interior due to their electrode structure, consequently leading to current leakage or unstable device operation as the channel length becomes shorter.
To address this issue, the research team proposed a “dual-modulation structure” in which two gates—positioned above and below—control the channel through different mechanisms. This represents an innovative approach in which current flows in a sandwich-like configuration, with the upper and lower electrodes facing each other across the channel.
Does the universe need observers to exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore questions about entropy, spontaneous symmetry breaking, spectroscopy and more with astrophysicist Charles Liu.
Does the universe require observers for information to exist? From Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation to modern neuroscience and philosophy, the crew explores whether measurement creates reality or reveals it. How does the double-slit experiment fit into this? Are wave and particle behaviors determined by how we measure them?
The conversation turns to information itself. What do physicists mean by “information”? How is entropy connected to hidden information in a system? We discuss entropy through everyday examples like coin flips, burning wood, and boiling water. How does this relate to quantum computing? We explore how astronomers separate cosmic redshift from stellar motion using spectroscopy, how interstellar dust and extinction curves complicate observations, and why mapping that dust is both a challenge and a source of discovery.
We discuss why the Big Bang didn’t form a black hole, how spontaneous symmetry breaking may have split the fundamental forces, and whether science can meaningfully investigate the universe’s earliest moments. Wrapping up, the team looks ahead to multi-messenger astronomy, next-generation telescope technology, exotic ideas about the speed of light, and how information continues to reshape what we know about the cosmos.
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“When engineering a computer, you need to know the circuitry of the central processing unit. If you don’t know how everything is wired together, you can’t understand its function, optimize it or fix it when something breaks. We are approaching the brain the same way,” said study leader Boxuan Zhao, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“Our technology enables simultaneous mapping of thousands of neural connections with single-synapse resolution —a capability that doesn’t exist in any current technology. It is directly applicable to understanding circuit dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and could provide a platform for developing circuit-guided therapeutic interventions,” he said.
