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Spectral shaper sculpts 10,000 laser comb lines for exoplanet detection and beyond

Researchers have developed a new technology that can shape the spectrum of light emitted from a laser frequency comb across the visible and near-infrared wavelengths with more precision than previously possible. This advance could provide an important new tool in the hunt for Earth-like planets outside our solar system.

When searching for exoplanets, astronomers use high-precision spectroscopy to detect tiny shifts in starlight that reveal a star’s subtle “wobble” due to an orbiting planet. But for Earth-sized planets, these wavelength changes are smaller than the spectrograph’s natural instabilities, so laser frequency combs—lasers that emit thousands of evenly spaced —are needed to provide a reference, acting like precise wavelength rulers.

“For astronomers, the big prize would be to find a planet with a mass similar to Earth and orbiting a star similar to our sun,” said research team leader Derryck T. Reid, from Heriot-Watt University in the U.K. “Our spectral shaper can make the lines on a more uniform, which allows the spectrograph to detect smaller stellar motions, such as those from Earth-like planets, that would otherwise be hidden in the noise.”

Research confirms Meissner effect in high-pressure nickelate superconductor

A research team led by Prof. Liu Xiaodi from the Hefei Institute of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with researchers from Jilin University and Sun Yat-sen University, has achieved simultaneous detection of zero electrical resistance and the Meissner effect in lanthanum nickelate (La3Ni2O7−δ) single crystals under high pressure.

The researchers combined diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum sensing with electronic transport measurements to provide unambiguous evidence of high-temperature superconductivity in this nickelate system. The results are published in Physical Review Letters.

Superconductivity in La3Ni2O7−δ was first reported in 2023 through transport measurements, which revealed zero resistance around 80 K. However, confirming superconductivity requires detecting diamagnetism, or the expulsion of magnetic fields—the Meissner effect—which had remained elusive due to associated with high-pressure environments and small superconducting volume fractions.

Creepy Science That’s Changing the World in Surprising Ways

From mini-brains and spider-inspired gloves to edible wolf apple coatings and microplastic-filled retinas, scientists are transforming creepy concepts into life-improving innovations. Lab-grown brain organoids could replace animal testing, web-slinging gloves can spin instant wound dressings, and wolf apple starch may keep veggies fresh longer. Meanwhile, the discovery of microplastics in human eyes reveals a haunting truth about our environment’s reach inside us.

Lab-Grown “Mini-Brains” Offer New Insight into the Human Mind

Scientists writing in ACS Sensors have successfully grown a small brain organoid in a petri dish, creating a powerful new tool for studying how nerve cells interact without the use of animal testing. Over two years, human nerve cells multiplied and organized themselves into a three-dimensional “mini-brain” that displayed electrical activity similar to real brain tissue. Researchers say this breakthrough could help scientists better understand how the human brain communicates and functions—or, as they joke, provide “a lab-grown lunch option for zombies.”

The Sun’s Fiery Secret Waves Discovered After 80 Years of Searching

Scientists have finally observed long-sought twisting magnetic waves, known as torsional Alfvén waves, in the Sun’s corona—ending an eight-decade search that began in the 1940s.

Using the powerful Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, researchers captured the first direct evidence of these small, constant waves, which may be responsible for heating the Sun’s outer atmosphere to millions of degrees.

Hidden Solar Magnetic Waves Revealed

Corollary Discharge Dysfunction to Inner Speech and its Relationship to Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH)—the experience of hearing voices in the absence of auditory stimulation—are a cardinal psychotic feature of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. It has long been suggested that some AVH may reflect the misperception of inner speech as external voices due to a failure of corollary-discharge-related mechanisms. We aimed to test this hypothesis with an electrophysiological marker of inner speech.

Study Design.

Participants produced an inner syllable at a precisely specified time, when an audible syllable was concurrently presented. The inner syllable either matched or mismatched the content of the audible syllable. In the passive condition, participants did not produce an inner syllable. We compared the amplitude of the N1, P2, and P3-components of the auditory-evoked potential between: schizophrenia-spectrum patients with current AVH (SZAVH+, n = 55), schizophrenia-spectrum patients without current AVH (SZAVH−, n = 44), healthy controls (HC, n = 43).

Frontiers: Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?

The first distinction is between the notion of the level of consciousness and the notion of the contents of consciousness. In the first sense, consciousness is a property associated with an entire organism (a creature) or system: one is conscious (for example, when in a normal state of wakefulness) or not (for example, when in deep dreamless sleep or a coma). There is an ongoing vibrant debate about whether one should think of levels of consciousness as degrees of consciousness or whether they are best characterized in terms of an array of dimensions (11) or as “global states” (12). In the second sense, consciousness is always consciousness of something: our subjective experience is always “contentful”—it is always about something, a property philosophers call intentionality (3, 13). Here, again, there is some debate over the terms, for example, whether there can be fully contentless global states of consciousness (14) and whether consciousness levels (or global states) and contents are fully separable (11, 15).

The second distinction is between perceptual awareness and self-awareness (note that in this article, we use the terms consciousness and awareness interchangeably). Perceptual awareness simply refers to the fact that when we are perceptually aware, we have a qualitative experience of the external world and of our bodies within it (though of course, some perceptual experiences can be entirely fictive, such as when dreaming, vividly imagining, or hallucinating). Importantly, mere sensitivity to sensory information is not sufficient to be considered as perceptual awareness: the carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula and the camera on your phone are both sensitive to their environment, but we have little reason to think that either has perceptual experiences. Thus, mere sensitivity is not sufficient for perceptual awareness, as it does not necessarily feel like something to be sensitive. This experiential character is precisely what makes the corresponding sensation a conscious sensation (16).

Eclipse Foundation Revokes Leaked Open VSX Tokens Following Wiz Discovery

Eclipse Foundation, which maintains the open-source Open VSX project, said it has taken steps to revoke a small number of tokens that were leaked within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions published in the marketplace.

The action comes following a report from cloud security company Wiz earlier this month, which found several extensions from both Microsoft’s VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX to have inadvertently exposed their access tokens within public repositories, potentially allowing bad actors to seize control and distribute malware, effectively poisoning the extension supply chain.

“Upon investigation, we confirmed that a small number of tokens had been leaked and could potentially be abused to publish or modify extensions,” Mikaël Barbero, head of security at the Eclipse Foundation, said in a statement. “These exposures were caused by developer mistakes, not a compromise of the Open VSX infrastructure.”

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