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The insect-inspired bionic eye that sees, smells and guides robots

The compound eyes of the humble fruit fly are a marvel of nature. They are wide-angle and can process visual information several times faster than the human eye. Inspired by this biological masterpiece, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an insect-scale compound eye that can both see and smell, potentially improving how drones and robots navigate complex environments and avoid obstacles.

Traditional cameras on robots and drones may excel at capturing high-definition photos, but struggle with a narrow field of view and limited peripheral vision. They also tend to be bulky and power-hungry.

A microfluidic chip monitors gases using integrated, motionless pumps

A new microscale gas chromatography system integrates all fluidic components into a single chip for the first time. The design leverages three Knudsen pumps that move gas molecules using heat differentials to eliminate the need for valves, according to a new University of Michigan Engineering study published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering. The monolithic gas sampling and analysis system, or monoGSA system for short, could offer reliable, low-cost monitoring for industrial chemical or pharmaceutical synthesis, natural gas pipelines, or even at-home air quality.

Gas chromatography has long been considered the gold standard for measuring and quantifying volatile organic compounds—gases emitted from industrial processes, fuels, household products and more. Recently, micro gas chromatography miniaturized the technology to briefcase-size or smaller, bringing gas analysis from the laboratory to the source.

Most micro gas chromatography systems use pumps and valves to move gas molecules from an input port to a preconcentrator, which extracts and concentrates samples, then from the preconcentrator to a column for chemical separation, and then to the detector and finally to an exhaust port. Up to this point, pumps and valves have been fabricated and assembled separately, which increases device size, assembly cost and risk of failure at connection points.

Silicon metasurfaces boost optical image processing with passive intensity-based filtering

Of the many feats achieved by artificial intelligence (AI), the ability to process images quickly and accurately has had an especially impressive impact on science and technology. Now, researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have found a way to improve the efficiency and capability of machine vision and AI diagnostics using optical systems instead of traditional digital algorithms.

Mark Lawrence, an assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering, and doctoral student Bo Zhao developed this approach to achieve efficient processing performance without high energy consumption. Typically, all-optical image processing is highly constrained by the lack of nonlinearity, which usually requires high light intensities or external power, but the new method uses nanostructured films called metasurfaces to enhance optical nonlinearity passively, making it practical for everyday use.

Their work shows the ability to filter images based on light intensity, potentially making all-optical neural networks more powerful without using additional energy. Results of the research were published online in Nano Letters on Jan. 21, 2026.

Nanolaser on a chip could cut computer energy use in half

Researchers at DTU have developed a nanolaser that could be the key to much faster and much more energy-efficient computers, phones, and data centers. The technology offers the prospect of thousands of the new lasers being placed on a single microchip, thus opening a digital future where data is no longer transmitted using electrical signals, but using light particles, photons. The invention has been published in the journal Science Advances.

“The nanolaser opens up the possibility of creating a new generation of components that combine high performance with minimal size. This could be in information technology, for example, where ultra-small and energy-efficient lasers can reduce energy consumption in computers, or in the development of sensors for the health care sector, where the nanolaser’s extreme light concentration can deliver high-resolution images and ultrasensitive biosensors,” says DTU professor Jesper Mørk, who co-authored the paper together with, among others, Drs. Meng Xiong and Yi Yu from DTU Electro.

New perspectives on how physical instabilities drive embryonic development

Multicellularity is one of the most profound phenomena in biology, and relies on the ability of a single cell to reorganize itself into a complex organism. It underpins the diversity in the animal kingdom, from insects to frogs, to humans. But how do cells establish and maintain their individuality with such precision? A team led by Jan Brugués at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at TUD Dresden University of Technology has uncovered fundamental mechanisms that shed light on this question.

The findings, published in Nature, reveal how cells establish physical boundaries through an inherently unstable process, and how different species have evolved distinct strategies to circumvent this process.

During early development, embryos divide rapidly and with remarkable precision, while reorganizing into many individual units. This requires the cell material (known as cytoplasm) to be partitioned into compartments in a highly orchestrated manner.

A new microscope for the quantum age: Single nanoscale scan measures four key material properties

Physicists in Leiden have built a microscope that can measure no fewer than four key properties of a material in a single scan, all with nanoscale precision. The instrument can even examine complete quantum chips, accelerating research and innovation in the field of quantum materials. The study is published in the journal Nano Letters.

Temperature, magnetism, structure, and electrical properties. These are the material characteristics that this new microscope reveals. “It almost feels like having a superpower,” says Matthijs Rog, a Ph.D. student in Kaveh Lahabi’s research group. “You look at a sample and see not only its shape but also the electrical currents, heat, and magnetism within it.”

Kaveh Lahabi, who leads the group, says, “This microscope removes the experimental bottlenecks that have long limited the study of quantum materials. This is not an idealized technique—it works on the systems we actually want to understand. Furthermore, the sensitivity of our measurements tends to impress a lot of my physicist colleagues.”

Driven electrolytes are agile and active at the nanoscale

Technologies for energy storage as well as biological systems such as the network of neurons in the brain depend on driven electrolytes that are traveling in an electric field due to their electrical charges. This concept has also recently been used to engineer synthetic motors and molecular sensors on the nanoscale or to explain biological processes in nanopores. In this context, the role of the background medium, which is the solvent, and the resulting hydrodynamic fluctuations play an important role. Particles in such a system are influenced by these stochastic fluctuations, which effectively control their movements.

“When we imagine the environment inside a driven electrolyte at the nanoscale, we might think of a calm viscous medium in which ions move due to the electric field and slowly diffuse around. This new study reveals that this picture is wrong: the environment resembles a turbulent sea, which is highly nontrivial given the small scale,” explains Ramin Golestanian, who is director of the Department of Living Matter Physics at MPI-DS, and author of the study published in Physical Review Letters.

The research uncovers how the movement of the ions creates large-scale fluctuating fluid currents that stir up the environment and lead to fast motion of all the particles that are immersed in the environment, even if they are not charged.

Physicists develop new protocol for building photonic graph states

Physicists have long recognized the value of photonic graph states in quantum information processing. However, the difficulty of making these graph states has left this value largely untapped. In a step forward for the field, researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have proposed a new scheme they term “emit-then-add” for producing highly entangled states of many photons that can work with current hardware. Published in npj Quantum Information, their strategy lays the groundwork for a wide range of quantum enhanced operations including measurement-based quantum computing.

Entanglement is a key driver in delivering faster and more secure computational and information systems. But creating large, entangled states of more than two photons is challenging because the losses inherent in optical systems mean most photon sources have a low probability of successfully producing a photon that survives to the point of detection. Therefore, any attempt to build a large entangled state is full of missing photons, breaking the state apart. And identifying the missing spots would mean attempting detection of the photons, which is a destructive process itself, and precludes going back to fill those spots.

To circumvent this challenge, a team led by Associate Professor of Physics Elizabeth Goldschmidt and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Eric Chitambar began with a different mindset.

Cutting down on quantum-dot crosstalk: Precise measurements expose a new challenge

Devices that can confine individual electrons are potential building blocks for quantum information systems. But the electrons must be protected from external disturbances. RIKEN researchers have now shown how quantum information encoded into a so-called quantum dot can be negatively affected by nearby quantum dots. This has implications for developing quantum information devices based on quantum dots.

Quantum computers process information using so-called qubits: physical systems whose behavior is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. An electron, if it can be isolated and controlled, is one example of a qubit platform with great potential.

One way of controlling an electron is to use a quantum dot. These tiny structures trap charged particles using electric fields at the tips of metal electrodes separated by just a few tens of nanometers.

Rolling out the carpet for spin qubits with new chip architecture

Researchers at QuTech in Delft, The Netherlands, have developed a new chip architecture that could make it easier to test and scale up quantum processors based on semiconductor spin qubits. The platform, called QARPET (Qubit-Array Research Platform for Engineering and Testing) and reported in Nature Electronics, allows hundreds of qubits to be characterized within the same test-chip under the same operating conditions used in quantum computing experiments.

“With such a complex, tightly packed quantum chip, things really start to resemble the traditional semiconductor industry,” states researcher Giordano Scappucci.

When viewed under a microscope, the structure of the QARPET chip appears almost woven. Fabrication was in fact a stress test for engineering capabilities.

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