Light can tie knots—literally. Engineers at Duke University have managed to manipulate laser beams to form intricate 3D patterns called optical knots, using custom-designed optics.

These twisted beams could one day carry information or measure air turbulence, but researchers discovered that real-world conditions like turbulent air can distort them more than expected. To combat this, they modified the knot’s shape to make it more resilient, opening new paths for using light in surprising ways.

Light beams can tie knots too

CVE-2025–2492 flaw in ASUS AiCloud routers allows remote control; firmware fix issued for 4 versions.

Microsoft confirms that the weekend Entra account lockouts were caused by the invalidation of short-lived user refresh tokens that were mistakenly logged into internal systems.

On Saturday morning, numerous organizations reported that they began receiving Microsoft Entra alerts that accounts had leaked credentials, causing the accounts to be locked out automatically.

Impacted customers initially thought the account lockouts were tied to the rollout of a new enterprise application called “MACE Credential Revocation,” installed minutes before the alerts were issued.

A proposed protocol allows for the teleportation of collective spin-coherent states, as well as entangled spin-squeezed and Dicke states, between nuclear spin degrees of freedom in a two-dimensional trapped-ion crystal. Beyond teleportation, generalizations of the protocol could be used for retroactive squeezing generation and enhanced displacement sensing in a Penning trap, as well as in other systems featuring collective spin-spin interactions within synthetic dimensions or spatially separated arrays.

We hadn’t seen this cute critter in almost two centuries and believed it was extinct, until a lone baby randomly showed up.

Image display by cell-by-cell retina stimulation, enabling colors impossible to see under natural viewing.

The Tara Polar Station, a $23 million research vessel with a crew of 12, will drift across the Arctic ice to enable better monitoring of a rapidly changing environment