Move over silicon: scientists want to use neurons to make powerful computers with minuscule energy needs.
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New photonic chips passively convert laser light into multiple colors on demand
Over the past several decades, researchers have been making rapid progress in harnessing light to enable all sorts of scientific and industrial applications. From creating stupendously accurate clocks to processing the petabytes of information zipping through data centers, the demand for turnkey technologies that can reliably generate and manipulate light has become a global market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
One challenge that has stymied scientists is the creation of a compact source of light that fits onto a chip, which makes it much easier to integrate with existing hardware. In particular, researchers have long sought to design chips that can convert one color of laser light into a rainbow of additional colors—a necessary ingredient for building certain kinds of quantum computers and making precision measurements of frequency or time.
Now, researchers at JQI have designed and tested new chips that reliably convert one color of light into a trio of hues. Remarkably, the chips all work without any active inputs or painstaking optimization—a major improvement over previous methods. The team described their results in the journal Science on Nov. 6, 2025.
A Radical New Kind of Particle Accelerator Could Transform Science
A particle accelerator that produces intense X-rays could be squeezed into a device that fits on a table, my colleagues and I have found in a new research project.
The way that intense X-rays are currently produced is through a facility called a synchrotron light source. These are used to study materials, drug molecules, and biological tissues. Even the smallest existing synchrotrons, however, are about the size of a football stadium.
Our research, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows how tiny structures called carbon nanotubes and laser light could generate brilliant X-rays on a microchip. Although the device is still at the concept stage, the development has the potential to transform medicine, materials science, and other disciplines.
Water-based plasma forges novel alloy to turn CO₂ into useful chemicals
A new water-based plasma technique is opening fresh possibilities for carbon conversion.
Chinese researchers have created stable high-entropy alloy nanoparticles—containing five metals in nearly equal ratios—directly in solution, thereby overcoming long-standing challenges in nanoscale alloy synthesis.
These particles form a self-protecting, oxidized shell, delivering strong photothermal performance that utilizes visible and infrared light to drive carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide more efficiently than single-metal catalysts.
Black hole blast outshines 10 trillion Suns
A distant supermassive black hole has set a new cosmic record, unleashing the brightest flare ever seen as it devoured a gigantic star that wandered too close. A colossal black hole 10 billion light-years away has been caught devouring one of the universe’s biggest stars, unleashing a flare 30 times brighter than any seen before. The flare, detected by Caltech’s ZTF, likely marks a tidal disruption event — when a star is shredded by a black hole’s gravity.
The Universe’s most massive stars typically end their lives in spectacular explosions known as supernovae before collapsing into black holes. But one enormous star seems to have met a very different fate. Instead of exploding, it strayed too close to an immense black hole, which tore it apart and consumed it piece by piece.
That scenario best explains the findings of a new Nature Astronomy study describing the most powerful and most distant flare of energy ever seen from a supermassive black hole. The object was first detected in 2018 by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a sky survey funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. It was also tracked by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, another NSF-funded Caltech project. The flare brightened dramatically — by a factor of 40 within months — and at its peak was 30 times more luminous than any black hole flare observed before. At maximum intensity, it shone with the light of 10 trillion suns.
Scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry
One of humanity’s most ubiquitous infectious pathogens bears the blame for the chronic autoimmune condition called systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus), Stanford Medicine investigators and their colleagues have found.
The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which resides silently inside the bodies of 19 out of 20 Americans, is directly responsible for commandeering what starts out as a minuscule number of immune cells to go rogue and persuade far more of their fellow immune cells to launch a widespread assault on the body’s tissues, the scientists have shown.
The work is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Drift logs destroy intertidal ecosystems, study shows
Logs are a familiar sight on the beaches along the coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii and are often viewed positively, as they can stabilize the banks, be used for firewood or act as benches by beach-goers. However, new research from the University of Victoria (UVic) shows that these logs are not as innocuous as they seem.
According to a study published by UVic biologist Tom Reimchen and two of his students, free-floating logs that wash ashore, referred to as drift logs, are causing widespread destruction of rocky intertidal ecosystems communities along the coast of Western Canada. The paper is published in the journal Marine Ecology.
“In this study, we looked at both the ecological impact of drift logs, and at log abundance and movement over time,” says Reimchen. “Both aspects of the study had worrisome results.”
Invasive Israeli-founded bloatware is harvesting data from Samsung users in WANA
IronSource Expands Samsung Partnership, Launching on Samsung Mobile Devices in MENA https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221103005106/en/iro…es-in-MENA
Across West Asia and North Africa (WANA), growing concerns about digital surveillance have placed Israeli cybersecurity firms and their software under intense scrutiny. Among the most alarming cases is AppCloud, a pre-installed application on Samsung’s A and M series smartphones.
The bloatware cannot be uninstalled easily because it runs on the device’s operating system. Uninstalling it requires root access (the highest level of control in a computer system) of the phone to remove the AppCloud package. Its privacy policy is nowhere to be found online and opting out is not always available.
But the real concern lies in who owns AppCloud. When investigating further, we discovered that AppCloud’s privacy policy can be traced back to the controversial Israeli-founded company ironSource (now owned by the American company Unity). ironSource is notorious for its questionable practices regarding user consent and data privacy.