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Tuning in to fluorescence to farm smarter: Monitoring plant light use saves indoor farm energy costs

Plant owners with a so-called green thumb often seem to have a more finely tuned sense of what their plants need than the rest of us. A new “smart lighting” system for indoor vertical farms grants this ability on a facility-wide scale, responsively meeting plants’ needs while reducing energy inefficiencies, clearing a path for indoor farms as an energy-efficient food security strategy.

The system was designed and tested in a study led by Professor of Plant Biology Tracy Lawson, who conducted the research at the University of Essex and is now a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The work, published in Smart Agricultural Technology, emerged from her goal to help establish the viability of vertical farming for large-scale food production.

“One of the key aspects of [vertical farming], of course, is the energy cost associated with using LED lighting,” Lawson said. “So that’s where it all started, trying to save energy.”

Alloy-engineered valleytronics: Microscopic mechanism gives scientists precise control over how excitons behave

Scientists have observed a new microscopic mechanism enabling precise control of the magneto-optical properties of excitons in alloys of two-dimensional semiconductors. This discovery opens up tangible prospects for technological applications in devices exploiting valleytronics. The research findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The team includes researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with teams from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Sapienza University of Rome, University of Central Florida, Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses, National University of Singapore, CNR-IFN, as well as research centers in the Czech Republic (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague) and Japan (National Institute for Materials Science).

System isolates single extracellular vesicle surface proteins to map function

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny biological bubbles that carry nucleic acids and proteins between cells, playing an essential role in tissue repair, neuroprotection and immune health. By isolating the surface proteins of these bubbles, researchers can understand more about their biology and build tools to transform extracellular vesicles into next-generation drugs for cancer, neurological conditions and other diseases.

UC Davis biomedical engineers are using EVs to crack the code of the body’s message system. Their findings are detailed in a paper published in ACS Nano.

“EV-mediated intercellular communication is a very powerful system that controls many physiological and pathophysiological phenomena,” said Aijun Wang, a corresponding author of the new study. Wang is Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of biomedical engineering and surgery. “We know that EVs are therapeutically useful. But how do we define what dictates their functions?”

Auroras on Ganymede and Earth share striking similarities

New observations of Ganymede reveal a striking similarity between the auroras on the largest moon in the solar system and those on Earth. The international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers from the University of Liège, has produced new results indicating that, despite different conditions, the fundamental physical processes that generate auroras are common to different celestial bodies, and not just planets.

A team of astrophysicists from the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Planetary Physics (LPAP) has observed for the first time the fine details of the auroras on Ganymede, the only moon in the solar system to have its own intrinsic magnetic field, similar to that of Earth. The observation of auroras is a cornerstone of space weather analysis, as it provides a comprehensive view of the characteristics and effects of space particle precipitation into atmospheres.

For centuries, humanity has witnessed a diffuse and changing glow that occasionally illuminates the night sky with red, green, purple and blue lights—known as the “aurora.” Auroras are typically observed at polar latitudes, although we have just passed the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, which is producing many instances of intense auroras at mid-latitudes.

Diamond owl swoops in with new method to keep electronics cool

At Rice University, a research lab’s signature keepsake has helped perfect a method for growing patterned diamond surfaces that could help decrease operating temperatures in electronics by 23 degrees Celsius. The paper is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

“In the world of electronics, heat is the enemy,” said Xiang Zhang, assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice and a first author on the study. “A reduction of 23 C is significant—it can extend the lifespan of a device and allow it to run faster without overheating.”

Heat management is one of the major challenges facing today’s high-power technologies, from the gallium nitride transistors used in radar and 5G devices to the processing units powering the data center infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence. Diamond outshines most other materials when it comes to handling heat, but its hardness makes it difficult to work with. Growing diamond in technology-relevant forms is particularly challenging.

Researchers copy viral strategies to get mRNA medicines into cells in one piece

Drugs made of mRNA have the potential to transform medicine—if only they could get into cells in one piece. Now, University of Connecticut researchers have shown that packaging mRNA like a virus could smuggle it into cells safely, opening up a new way to deliver mRNA into cells to treat diseases such as cancer. Their research is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a single strand of ribonucleic acids that tells the protein-making machinery inside cells what to do. Usually RNA strands are made using the DNA blueprints inside a cell’s central nucleus, and then travel out to the protein production areas. Getting a medicinal mRNA into a cell from outside, though, is another matter. Most things trying to enter a cell have to pass through an endosome. An endosome is like a decontamination bubble. Its interior becomes acidic, which activates enzymes that chew up anything potentially dangerous—like foreign RNA.

But many viruses have evolved to hijack this system.

Can a chatbot be a co-author? AI helps crack a long-stalled gluon amplitude proof

Like many scientists, theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger was unimpressed with early attempts at probing ChatGPT, receiving clever-sounding answers that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. So he was skeptical when a talented former graduate student paused a promising academic career to take a job with OpenAI. Strominger told him physics needed him more than Silicon Valley.

Still, Strominger, the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics, was intrigued enough by AI that he agreed when the former student, Alex Lupsasca, Ph.D., invited him to visit OpenAI last month to pose a thorny problem to the firm’s powerful in-house version of ChatGPT.

Strominger came away with much more than he expected—and the field of theoretical physics appears to have gained a little something too.

Twisting optical fiber creates a robust new pathway for light

Light powers everything from communications to sensing, yet even tiny imperfections can scatter it and weaken signals. To address this, a team led by the University of Bath—working with the University of Cambridge and international partners—has developed a new structure that keeps light flowing smoothly even through bends, twists or damage, with the potential to operate over unprecedented distances.

Quantum algorithm beats classical tools on complement sampling tasks

Quantum computers—devices that process information using quantum mechanical effects—have long been expected to outperform classical systems on certain tasks. Over the past few decades, researchers have worked to rigorously demonstrate such advantages, ideally in ways that are provable, verifiable and experimentally realizable.

A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task—known as complement sampling—dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem.

“We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project,” Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them.”

Quantum computers go high-dimensional with a four-state photon gate

The collaboration of TU Wien with research groups in China has resulted in a crucial building block for a new kind of quantum computer: The realization of a novel type of quantum logic gate makes it possible to carry out quantum computations on pairs of photons that are each in four different quantum states, or combinations thereof. The advancement is an important milestone for optical quantum computers. The study has now been published in Nature Photonics.

The basic idea of quantum computers is simple: While a classical computer only works with the values “0” and “1,” quantum physics allows for arbitrary combinations of these states. In a certain sense, a quantum bit (“qubit”) can be in the states 0 and 1 simultaneously. This makes it possible to develop algorithms that can solve some problems much faster than a comparable classical computer.

However, such superpositions can in principle involve more than two states. Depending on what degree of freedom one considers, a quantum system such as a photon may not just have two different settings—two different outcomes of a potential measurement—but many. In this case, one refers to the system as a “qudit” rather than a “qubit.”

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