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Möbius-inspired surface controls light in two directions

Light is an unusually rich carrier of information. Its direction of travel, wavelength, and polarization can all be used to encode signals or images. Yet controlling these properties independently remains difficult, especially when light can enter a device from either side.

In most optical materials—and even in many metasurfaces—the laws of reciprocity and time-reversal symmetry tightly link how a device behaves for forward and backward illumination. As a result, truly different responses in the two directions are hard to achieve in a compact optical element.

The challenge grows sharper when polarization is included. Many metasurfaces work only with simple polarization states, such as horizontal and vertical or left-and right-circular polarization.

Thermogenetics: How proteins are controllable by heat

Protein activity can be precisely regulated via subtle changes in temperature using heat-sensitive switches. Underlying this capability is a novel modular design strategy developed by researchers at the Institute of Pharmacy and Molecular Biotechnology of Heidelberg University. The strategy allows the integration of sensory domains in various proteins regardless of function or spatial structure.

This new approach in the field of thermogenetics is broadly applicable and opens up new possibilities for precise, non-invasive control of different cellular processes. It was developed by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Dominik Niopek and Dr. Jan Mathony and is published in Nature Chemical Biology

Proteins are the molecular machines of the cell. They regulate nearly all vital processes and their responses are highly dynamic. To better understand these processes and their chronological sequence, scientists need tools that can be used to change individual parameters precisely and in a controlled manner. The most suitable proteins are those that can be turned on and off like technical devices. Especially attractive in this context are heat-sensitive protein switches that tightly regulate the temperature spatiotemporally and are able to deeply penetrate tissue or complex biological samples as a signal.

What Geminga’s 100 TeV cutoff may mean for cosmic-ray acceleration in the Milky Way

For the first time, the Tibet ASγ Experiment has successfully measured magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence on scales below one parsec (approximately 3.3 light-years) within the gamma-ray halo surrounding the Geminga pulsar wind nebula (PWN). This observation extends to the highest energies, above 100 tera-electron volts (TeV), providing new insights into the behavior of cosmic rays and magnetic fields within the Milky Way.

The findings are published in Science Advances. The study was conducted by the Tibet ASγ Experiment, including the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Astronomical Observatories of CAS.

From water splitting to H₂O₂: A new method narrows carbon nitride photocatalyst design

Photocatalysis promises an efficient conversion of abundant solar energy into usable chemical energy. Polyheptazine imides have some key structural and functional twists that make them especially interesting for photocatalysis. So far, there is only limited knowledge about how structural changes affect the electronic and optical properties of the many material candidates in this class. A team led by researchers from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at HZDR has now presented a reliable and reproducible theoretical method to solve this challenge that was confirmed by measurements done on genuine candidate materials.

Polyheptazine imides belong to the family of carbon nitrides, which are layered, graphene-like compounds composed of nitrogen-rich, ring-shaped units. Unlike graphene, which exhibits excellent electrical conductivity but lacks photocatalytic activity, polyheptazine imides possess band gaps suitable for visible-light absorption.

Carbon nitride-based materials impress due to their low production cost, nontoxicity and thermal stability. However, the first generation of such materials were not ideal photocatalysts as the materials possessed properties that hindered charge separation. If a material has a low charge separation, the electron excited by an incoming photon quickly recombines with the hole it was propelled from—and releases energy only as heat or light. No energy is available to drive chemical reactions.

Why conversation is more like a dance than an exchange of words

Think about the last time you told a story to a friend. You probably adjusted it halfway through. You saw their eyebrows lift. You noticed them lean in, or glance away. You clarified a detail. You sped up the ending. That constant fine-tuning is not a bonus feature of communication: it is communication. And you can read all about this real-time coordination process in a new review by Judith Holler and Anna K. Kuhlen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), published in Nature Reviews Psychology.

Holler and Kuhlen argue that conversation is not simply one person speaking while another listens. It is a process in which both participants continuously monitor, predict, and shape each other’s behavior. “Conversation is not a linear exchange of words,” Holler writes. “It is a jointly managed activity in which meaning emerges through coordination.”

Eye tracking and brain signals reveal how some skills become second nature

Expertise isn’t easy to pass down. Take riding a bike: A seasoned cyclist might talk a beginner through the basics of how to sit and when to push off. But other skills, like how hard to pedal to keep balanced, are more intuitive and harder to articulate. This implicit know-how is known as tacit knowledge, and very often, it can only be learned with experience and time.

But a team of MIT engineers wondered: Could an expert’s unconscious know-how be accessed, and even taught, to quickly bring a novice up to an expert’s level?

The answer appears to be “yes,” at least for a particular type of visual-learning task.

Trapping light on thermal photodetectors shatters speed records

Electrical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated the fastest pyroelectric photodetector to date, which works by absorbing heat generated by incoming light. Capable of capturing light from the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the ultrathin device requires no external power, operates at room temperature and can be readily integrated into on-chip applications.

The advance could form the basis of a new class of multispectral cameras capable of impacting a wide range of fields such as skin cancer detection, food safety inspection and large-scale agriculture.

The results appear in Advanced Functional Materials.

‘Nano-origami’ reshapes liquid droplets into six-pointed stars

For the first time, researchers in France and Israel have observed how an emulsified liquid droplet can transform from a hexagon into a six-pointed star shape in response to rising temperature. Publishing their results in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Eli Sloutskin at Bar-Ilan University has shed new light on the mechanisms underlying this striking behavior, revealing a previously unseen form of “nano-origami,” that could inspire future generations of self-assembling nanostructures.

When tiny amounts of liquid are isolated, surface tension usually drives them to adopt a spherical shape—but over the past decade, researchers have uncovered far more complex behavior in emulsions of oil and water. In these systems, droplets are stabilized by surfactant molecules, which reduce the surface tension between the two liquids.

Under carefully controlled temperature changes, these droplets can undergo dramatic shape transformations. Previous studies have shown spheres turning into icosahedra, and then flattening into triangular, parallelogram or hexagonal, lens-like shapes with exclusively convex edges.

What’s going on inside quantum computers? New method simplifies process tomography

Quantum computers work by applying quantum operations, such as quantum gates, to delicate quantum states. Ideally, quantum computers can solve complex equations at staggeringly fast speeds that vastly outpace regular computers. In real hardware, the operations of quantum computers often deviate from the ideal behavior because of device imperfections and unwanted noise from the environment. To build reliable quantum machines, researchers need a way to accurately determine what a quantum device is actually doing.

Quantum process tomography (QPT) is a standard method for this. However, traditional QPT becomes very costly as the system grows, because the number of required measurements and calculations increases rapidly with the number of qubits.

To address this challenge, a research team from Tohoku University, the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), and the University of Information Technology (Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City) has introduced a new framework called compilation-based quantum process tomography (CQPT). The work is published in Advanced Quantum Technologies.

NA62 Collaboration refines measurement of rare particle decay

The NA62 Collaboration has dramatically reduced the uncertainty in its measurement of an extremely rare particle decay, in results just presented at the 2026 La Thuile conference.

The study of rare decays gives physicists the chance to probe the Standard Model of particle physics. Researchers can determine what is known as the branching ratio of a decay, which describes how many particles decay through a particular process as a fraction of the total number of decays that occur.

The branching ratio of the decay that the NA62 Collaboration has studied—the decay of a positively charged kaon into a positively charged pion and neutrino–antineutrino pair (written K+→π+νν)—can be predicted theoretically with a very high degree of precision. Thanks to this “theoretical cleanliness,” this particular kaon decay is extremely sensitive to new physics beyond the Standard Model but, with a predicted branching ratio of less than one in 10 billion, it is extremely rare and very challenging to observe.

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