How does light turn into motion within a metal? A team of researchers from European XFEL, the University of Potsdam and other participating institutions has shown that ultrashort optical laser pulses can trigger extremely rapid lattice vibrations in periodically layered metal structures—not primarily by heating the atomic lattice, but through the pressure exerted by hot electrons. The results are published in Nature Communications.

In the study, platinum and copper layers just a few nanometers (millionths of a millimeter) thick were stacked to form an artificial metal lattice. After being excited by a laser pulse, the artificial crystal lattice began to oscillate at around one terahertz: At a rate of roughly one trillion times per second, the platinum nanolayers expand and squeeze the copper layers. The oscillation, which begins immediately, is too rapid to be explained by conventional lattice heating via heat transfer from the electrons.

“That surprised us,” says Jan-Etienne Pudell of European XFEL. “The oscillation is not caused by the pressure of the heated lattice, but by electron pressure, particularly in the platinum layers.”

F5 fixes CVE-2026–42530 and CVE-2026–42055 in NGINX Open Source, addressing HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 flaws that could allow remote code execution.

New research says time only exists where space is curved enough to support it, implying that our expanding universe is slowly losing its grip on time itself.

A pioneering longitudinal study reveals great ape cognition is highly individualized and structured completely differently than human intelligence.

At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: “contaminated.” The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One argument was that Indigenous cultures had changed through contact, survival and adaptation, and therefore no longer required distinct recognition. I found that deeply troubling.

Survival is not contamination. Indigenous peoples have survived colonization, displacement, assimilation and state violence. They have also adapted, moved, rebuilt and carried knowledge into new circumstances. None of this erases their rights, identities or relationships with ancestral lands.

That experience became one of the reasons I wrote my recent commentary on the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework developed after the 2025 ICOMOS Japan symposium in Gunma Prefecture. The work is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property.

Microsoft is preparing a patch for RoguePlanet, a Defender flaw tracked as CVE-2026–50656 that can enable privilege escalation.

Epic Games has shared its vision for Unreal Engine 6, outlining plans to unify Unreal Engine and UEFN while expanding creator workflows, scalability, and online ecosystems.