An adapted optical technique reveals the temporal structure of ultrafast x-ray pulses by eliminating background light.

A new method for creating twisted structures in liquid crystals could be helpful in controlling them for possible memory-storage applications.

Exim BDAT flaw affects 4.97–4.99.2 GnuTLS builds, causing heap corruption and possible code execution.

RubyGems halted new registrations after a major attack involving hundreds of malicious packages, increasing supply chain risks.

Despite challenges, TSMC is optimistic about Fab 21.

Circularly polarized light has properties that make it useful in a growing range of technologies, from next-generation 3D displays to bioimaging tools that can detect signals deep within living tissues. One way to produce this kind of light is with the help of chiral molecules—compounds that have a mirror-image form to which they cannot be perfectly superimposed. Among these, small organic molecules (SOMs) offer tunable emission wavelengths.

Luminescent radicals represent a promising type of SOM for red and near-infrared circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) emission. One particular family of radicals, tris(2,4,6‑trichlorophenyl)methyl (TTM)‑based radicals, is inherently chiral and a natural candidate for CPL.

In practice, however, these molecules fall short on multiple fronts, with tradeoffs between stable chirality, high emission efficiency, and durability under operating conditions.

New research into how humans perceive color differences is helping resolve questions tied to a theory first proposed nearly 100 years ago by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. A team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Roxana Bujack used geometry to mathematically describe how people experience hue, saturation and lightness. Their findings, presented at a visualization science conference, strengthen and formalize Schrödinger’s model by showing these color qualities are fundamental properties of the color system itself.

“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack said. “This metric geometrically encodes the perceived color distance — that is, how different two colors appear to an observer.”

By formally defining these perceptual characteristics, the researchers believe they have supplied a crucial missing piece in Schrödinger’s long-standing vision of a complete model capable of defining hue, saturation, and lightness entirely through geometric relationships between colors.

That creepy feeling in old buildings might come from a sound you can’t hear.

The new mode is reportedly snappier.

Li et al. report that Arabidopsis BSK1 negatively regulates ABA signaling. The stability of BSK1 is dynamically controlled by PUB25 and PUB26, a process likely regulated by BAK1 phosphorylation, whereas UBP24 stabilizes BSK1 by removing ubiquitin chains. ABA shifts this balance toward degradation by inducing the accumulation of PUB25/26.