High-temperature superconductivity is still not fully understood. Now, an international research team at BESSY II has measured the energy of charge carrier pairs in undoped La₂CuO₄. Their findings revealed that the interaction energies within the potentially superconducting copper oxide layers are significantly lower than those in the insulating lanthanum oxide layers. These results contribute to a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity and could also be relevant for research into other functional materials.

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Around 40 years ago, a new class of materials suddenly became famous: high-temperature superconductors. These materials can conduct electricity completely loss-free, not only at temperatures close to absolute zero (0 Kelvin or minus 273 degrees Celsius), but also at much higher temperatures, albeit still well below room temperature.

A team of European researchers has developed a versatile, open-source luminescence imaging instrument designed to democratize access to advanced fluorescence and electroluminescence techniques across disciplines ranging from plant science to materials research.

The new system, detailed in Optics Express, offers an affordable and customizable alternative to bespoke laboratory setups and was developed with support from the DREAM project.

The device—described as a luminescence macroscope with dynamic illumination—combines flexibility, affordability, and precision in a single platform. Unlike conventional imaging instruments, which are often constrained by fixed optical architectures, the macroscope supports complex, time-resolved illumination and detection protocols.

A team of researchers at the Max Born Institute have managed to fully characterize few-femtosecond-long light pulses tunable in the vacuum ultraviolet. These results unlock the possibility for studying valence electron dynamics of many materials in the VUV.The research is published in the journal Nature Photonics.

A study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London has found that humans have a form of remote touch, or the ability to sense objects without direct contact, a sense that some animals have.

Human touch is typically understood as a proximal sense, limited to what we physically touch. However, recent findings in animal sensory systems have challenged this view. Certain shorebirds, such as sandpipers and plovers, use a form of “remote touch” to detect prey hidden beneath the sand. Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.

The study in IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) investigated whether humans share a similar capability. Participants moved their fingers gently through sand to locate a hidden cube before physically touching it. Remarkably, the results revealed a comparable ability to that seen in shorebirds, despite humans lacking the specialized beak structures that enable this sense in birds.

A new prototype of a knitting machine creates solid, knitted shapes, adding stitches in any direction—forward, backward and diagonal—so users can construct a wide variety of shapes and add stiffness to different parts of the object.

Unlike traditional knitting, which yields a 2D sheet of stitches, this proof-of-concept machine—developed by researchers at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University—functions more like a 3D printer, building up solid shapes with horizontal layers of stitches.

“We establish that not only can it be done, but because of the way we attach the stitch, it will give us access to a lot of flexibility about how we control the material,” said François Guimbretière, professor of information science at Cornell. “The expressiveness is very similar to a 3D printer.”