Scientists have discovered a class of metal that can unexpectedly resist extreme cold using an unusual mechanism. Normally such temperatures would make similar materials brittle and vulnerable to breaking. The findings point to new principles for designing materials for cryogenic environments.

An international team led by University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Oxford has uncovered ¹ a novel microscopic mechanism that allows two metal alloys to remain remarkably damage-tolerant at just 20 kelvin, or -253°C.

Most metals become stronger when they are cooled, but some pay a price. The class of metals called body-centred cubic metals (such as iron, tungsten and chromium) have a particular atomic structure which can make them increasingly brittle as temperatures fall. At extremely low temperatures, a crack that might normally be absorbed by the metal bending or deforming can instead cause it to fracture.

The new study discovered that two experimental niobium-titanium-based alloys can avoid this problem even at just 20 kelvin, or -253°C. The metals remained remarkably resistant to cracking, with no measurable transition to brittle behaviour at the lowest temperature tested. The researchers found that this is due to the alloys effectively switching how they deform as they enter the deep freeze.

Normally, bending and deformation of body-centred cubic metals relies heavily on the movement of line-like defects in their crystal structure known as dislocations. At low temperatures, these become increasingly difficult to move, restricting the material’s ability to deform around a crack and making a fracture more likely.

In the alloys studied, however, a different process takes over. The researchers observed nanoscale ‘twinning’, in which small regions of the crystal reorganise into mirror-image orientations, coupled with a local transformation of the crystal structure. When these newly formed structures reach the boundaries between neighbouring crystals, they create concentrated points of stress that trigger new defects in the metal. These defects then allow the material to keep deforming rather than cracking.

The process is a little like a road network responding to frozen, blocked roads by opening new routes. As the conventional routes for deformation become increasingly difficult to use, the formation of twins creates new sites from which the defects needed for deformation can emerge. This helps the metal to absorb the forces building up around a crack, rather than breaking.

The discovery could provide scientists with a new strategy for designing metals capable of operating in exceptionally cold environments, including for energy, transport and aerospace sectors.

To find out how the alloys behaved in such extreme cold, the researchers used the Engin-X instrument at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in Oxfordshire. They cooled samples to around -253°C using gaseous helium. They then exposed the samples to a beam of neutrons while a testing machine pulled them from either end, precisely measuring how much force they could withstand and how far they stretched before breaking.

The team then used powerful electron microscopes to examine the tested metal at extremely small scales, allowing them to see the tiny structural changes that had taken place around cracks and inside the material. They also used atom-probe analysis to map the distribution of individual elements, alongside computer modelling to understand how the different mechanisms worked together to prevent brittle failure.

The study involved researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of Oxford; the University of Bristol; the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Science and Technology Facilities Council; the University of California, Irvine; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Texas A&M University; and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

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Scientists have developed remarkably long, precisely patterned molecular threads that could open new possibilities for designing advanced materials. The scientists also discovered these threads — called supramolecular polymers — can dramatically enhance brain cell activity. ¹

Built from self-assembling molecules, the longest threads reach dimensions greater than the diameter of a cell. By molecular standards, they are giant — roughly 100 times more massive than even very large conventional polymers and the largest known proteins in biology. Yet despite their enormous size, scientists can precisely control their lengths and organize them into chemically distinct segments with defined dimensions carrying opposite electrical charges.

That precision also produced an unexpected biological effect. In cell culture studies, the structures enhanced the growth and organization of neurons and increased synapse formation.

The findings introduce a new way to use self-assembly to build highly controlled supramolecular materials with precise physical arrangement of chemical structures. Ultimately, the work could inform materials’ design for a range of applications, including biomaterials for regenerative medicine.

“These structures represent a breakthrough in materials design, and we already discovered one useful application: their superbioactivity toward neurons, which will bring new opportunities in regenerative medicine,” said Northwestern’s Samuel I. Stupp, who led the study. “Typically, when we design a regenerative material, we add biological signals, designed to activate cell receptors. Here, the material itself becomes highly bioactive simply through the precise organization of electrical charges and its dynamic behavior. That introduces a very different way of thinking about how materials can communicate with cells.”

Bringing precision to self-assembly

The new study builds on Stupp’s long history working with supramolecular materials, dynamic structures that form when molecules spontaneously organize through weak, reversible interactions. While conventional polymers, like plastics, hold together using strong, permanent chemical bonds, supramolecular polymers are dynamic, allowing their components to move and reconfigure, which generates life-like properties in synthetic systems. Supramolecular polymers exist in all living organisms, where they perform essential functions and hold promise for future soft matter technologies.

That flexible, dynamic nature can be useful for interacting with living cells in biomedical applications, but it also makes the structures difficult to control. Scientists can design the individual molecular building blocks but then struggle to control how long the resulting structures grow and how they organize their chemical components.

Stupp’s team overcame that limitation by using novel designs of molecules and carefully controlling their assembly process. With this strategy, the researchers could dictate the threads’ lengths and keep them uniform. Once the growth stopped, the structures maintained their precise lengths rather than fusing together or rearranging.

“We let these filaments sit in a test tube for months, and they surprisingly didn’t change,” Stupp said. “They remained the same length and retained their segmented structures.”

Grow, stop, grow again

Stupp and his team traced that unusual ability to a previously unknown process his laboratory calls “self-capping supramolecular polymerization.” As a thread grows, flexible portions at the ends remain highly dynamic and, at proper temperatures, allow new molecules to join in a synchronized manner. Once the available building blocks are consumed, those flexible portions fold over and protect the ends. This effectively shuts down further growth by preventing threads from fusing together or undergoing “Ostwald Ripening,” a process in which smaller structures disappear while larger ones grow.

“To make them longer and longer, we just kept adding new molecules,” Stupp said. “The new molecules stick with strong noncovalent bonds to the growing thread and elongate the assembly, which led to a breakthrough in terms of size control.

“The collective molar mass of their noncovalently bonded monomers reaches billions of daltons, and thus they are ‘giga-assemblies.’ These are the largest supramolecular polymers ever made with this degree of precision. Once the monomer is fully consumed, they finish growing and their dimensions remain stable.”

Approximately the size of one proton or neutron, a dalton is a tiny unit that scientists use to measure the mass of molecules and atoms. More than a billion daltons is enormous by molecular standards. For comparison, the largest common polymers of plastics have molar masses in the range of 10 million daltons, and the largest proteins in nature reach approximately 3 to 5 million daltons.

Researchers can later restart growth by supplying more building blocks. By adding different types of molecules in sequence, the researchers can create precisely defined segments with different chemical properties. In the study, Stupp and his team created threads with positively and negatively charged segments. Because opposites attract, the researchers expected the threads to clump together. Instead, they remained stable in water because the “capping” mechanism prevented the assemblies from fusing together.

Small anchor, big difference

To explore how the pattern of electrical charges might interact with living cells, Stupp and his team turned to neurons, which carry a strong negative charge. The team exposed several threads with different designs to cellular cultures containing cortical neurons.

“The first thing we did was make a structure with only positively charged segments, and it basically killed the neurons,” Stupp said. “Then, we tried a structure with only negatively charged segments, and nothing happened because the neurons repelled the materials.”

When Stupp’s team used supramolecular assemblies with randomly mixed positive and negative charges, the neurons didn’t respond in a notable way. But then the team designed a thread with the breakthrough polymerization strategy comprising a small positively charged segment sandwiched between two negatively charged segments of different lengths. Something interesting and unexpected occurred.

The small positive region anchored the thread to the negatively charged surface of a neuron. Repelled by the neuron’s negative charge, the thread’s negative segments remained highly mobile and in constant motion since they could not escape.

“When we used only positively charged segments, they suffocated the neuron and killed it,” Stupp said. “But with only one positively charged segment surrounded by negative ones, it couldn’t do that anymore. And the negative segments, which ordinarily couldn’t get near the neuron, were forced to stay near it because they were anchored.”

Neurons grow and spring to life

Neurons treated with the precisely segmented threads grew longer neurites — the long projections neurons use to communicate with other cells. The treated neurons also formed more elaborate branches, gaining the ability to connect with neighboring cells.

“The neurons matured to an amazing level,” Stupp said. “They grew long and highly branched neurites, which is how they can start making synaptic connections in the brain and in the spinal cord.”

After just seven days, treated neurons were much more active than untreated neurons. When stimulated, treated neurons produced a calcium response — a sign of neuronal activity. Their overall calcium activity was four times greater. And, after 14 days, treated neurons formed more synapses than untreated neurons.

Stupp and his team saw another striking effect in cultures of human neural progenitor cells, which are immature cells that can develop into neurons. Although these cultures typically grow in flat layers, the cells instead organized into raised, three-dimensional clusters connected by axons. This organization resembled aspects of the brain’s white and gray matter, where somas are separated from axons.

No signals required

Perhaps most surprisingly, the molecular threads produced these effects without carrying biological signals specifically designed to encourage neurons to grow. Stupp posits the negatively charged segments recruit specific proteins already present around the cells that help neurons survive, grow and communicate. These proteins, called neurotrophic factors, have positively charged domains. Stupp’s team also found laminin — an important protein that holds tissues together and has positively charged domains — accumulating along the supramolecular threads near neurons.

Stupp hypothesizes that the interplay between attraction and repulsion causes the threads’ negative segments to rapidly move toward and away from the neurons in a “tapping” motion. Proteins recruited by the negative segments may be drawn toward receptors on the neurons, while electrostatic forces push the segments away. This repeated tapping, occurring on millisecond timescales, could help enhance biological signaling. A live cell movie included in the Science paper has captured this phenomenon.

Beyond neurons, Stupp says the new polymerization strategy could eventually enable scientists to build long molecular structures containing many carefully positioned chemical segments. That could open opportunities to create new materials and devices with features that extend over very long distances.

“We discovered something we had never seen before in chemistry or in biology,” Stupp said. “This work gives us a new level of control over supramolecular materials. In the future, we can imagine creating many segments with different properties. The unknown functions of these structures are likely to be as surprising as the superbioactivity observed on neurons. We’re just beginning to imagine the possibilities.”

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A giant volcanic eruption acted a little like Vesuvius, but across an entire landscape in the Andes, burying the terrain beneath it and preserving information that would otherwise have been lost to erosion and deformation. Recently, the researchers looked at this vast expanse of volcanic rock that erupted from the Lauca Caldera in northern Chile 21.9 million years ago. A caldera is a large volcanic depression formed during major eruptions. A mountain’s worth of rock, called ignimbrite, covered an area six times larger than Chile’s capital Santiago (or nearly three times larger than Greater London), reaching a kilometre deep in places.

The research team simulated hundreds of possible ancient landscapes, using models of how rivers shape mountain ranges, to test which ones could plausibly have been buried beneath the volcanic deposit. They found that only relatively low-relief landscapes – akin to gentle mountain foothills – could have done so. ¹

From this, the team inferred that this part of the Andes was being built slowly, with rocks pushed upward by no more than a quarter (0.26) of a kilometre every million years – equivalent to 2.5 cm, or about an inch, every 100 years.

If rocks had been pushed upward faster in this region, the landscape would probably have developed steeper slopes that could not have fitted beneath the immense volcanic deposits.

The finding lends support to the idea that the Andes grew slowly and steadily over tens of millions of years rather than popping up more recently, in the last few million years.

This rate is slow compared with many rapidly uplifting parts of active mountain belts, including parts of the Himalaya, where uplift and erosion can occur at rates of several millimetres to centimetres per year.

A hidden ‘Pompeii’ of Andean landscapes

Lead author Dr Byron Adams, based at UCL Earth Sciences, said: “This landscape was buried by a giant volcanic eruption – a little like Pompeii, but on a vastly larger scale. Instead of covering a town, hot mixtures of volcanic ash, rock fragments, and gas swept across an entire landscape, engulfing the terrain beneath them.

“Pompeii shows how volcanic eruptions can freeze a moment in human history. This study shows that much larger eruptions can also freeze moments in Earth history, burying whole landscapes beneath volcanic deposits and preserving clues to how mountains were being built before the eruption.

“We cannot dig down to see the buried landscape, but we can use the shape of the volcanic blanket and what we know about how rivers shape mountains to infer what is hidden beneath it.”

A new way of piecing together geological history

The paper’s authors noted their estimate of rock uplift was consistent with earlier research looking at minerals in the rock that recorded specific changes in temperature over the last 50 million years. These changes of temperature represent the rock cooling as it travels upward through the Earth’s crust.

Dr Adams added: “This approach gives us a new way to look back at Earth’s history. Current methods to estimate the speed at which mountains build look at chemical ‘clocks’ in the rock but these are limited to specific moments in time. Our method can estimate rock uplift over a much longer period.

“In this case, we estimate it would have taken millions of years to produce the subdued landscape we infer prior to the eruption.

“There is debate over whether the Andes grew slowly and steadily over 40 or 50 million years or whether they rose extremely slowly and then popped up more recently, in the last six to 10 million years. Our findings, which cover a large part of the middle of that history, support the slow but steady hypothesis.”

Co-author Dr Frances Cooper, also based at UCL Earth Sciences, said: “We’ve been working in this part of the Andes for many years to understand how the mountains developed. The Andes have a major influence on regional and global climate, so reconstructing their history is important for understanding long-term climate change.

“What’s particularly exciting about this study is that it gives us a new way of piecing together that history. The same approach could be applied to volcanic deposits elsewhere in the world, helping us reconstruct landscapes buried for millions of years.”

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Researchers at Nagoya University have built a graphene nanoribbon that can switch which way it twists using a natural solvent. Graphene nanoribbons are thin ribbon-shaped structures made of fused carbon rings. Twisted or helical versions of these ribbons show promise for advanced light and electronic devices. However, no graphene nanoribbon could switch that twist on demand, until now.

Scientists have worked out how to switch between a right-handed and left-handed twist (chirality) by changing the solvent around it. The discovery ¹ opens opportunities for new optical switches, chemical sensors, and spintronic components that adapt to changing environments.

Tomoyuki Ikai, lead author and professor at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Engineering, is a polymer chemist inspired by natural helical structures such as DNA and proteins. Polymers are large molecules built from many small, repeating units linked together in a chain. Ikai had been working on ladder polymers, where each repeating unit is locked into place and cannot freely rotate around the bond connecting to its neighbor (unlike a typical flexible linear polymer).

In 2019, Ikai and his collaborators built the first rigid, helix-shaped polymer. In 2021, they perfected a chemical method to fuse these building blocks together without flaws. This method is what let them build the new graphene nanoribbon.

“We used the same fusion approach already used to make predictable helical ladder polymers. But instead of a stable building block, such as [6]helicene, we used [4]helicene, a 4-ring unit written off as too unstable to be useful,” Ikai said.

Soak, twist, repeat

These units are difficult to control on their own because they switch their chirality too fast to hold one handedness. The team’s method fuses these small, restless units into one long chain. Once joined, they found that a neighbor effect took hold: each unit’s twist began to match its neighbors, and long stretches of the ribbon settled into a single, shared spiral.

To lock it in one overall direction, the researchers dissolved the ribbon in a natural chiral liquid, a liquid made of molecules that come in two mirror-image versions. They tested six candidates before they found the right one: beta-pinene, a compound found in pine trees and citrus peel.

Because beta-pinene molecules can be arranged in left- and right-hand mirror-images, these two versions each push the ribbon toward the opposite spiral. This also changed the twist direction of light the ribbon gave off, a property called circularly polarized luminescence, and is the first graphene nanoribbon shown to switch its light this way.

The switching induced a remarkably high degree of helical bias, with almost all of the helicene units aligning in the same direction. The switching effect is strongest at –90°C and grows weaker as the temperature rises toward room temperature.

“For a long time, people saw [4]helicene as unsuitable for chiral materials, because it could not be controlled,” Ikai said. “In this paper, we show that once you link enough of these units together, the instability itself becomes the useful part.”

A chiral solvent’s nudge toward one handedness is usually very weak on its own. Here, the ribbon’s own structure, with each unit mechanically linked to its neighbors, amplifies that weak nudge into a strong, nearly one-handed result.

An adaptive material

The researchers point to several possible future uses: The switchable light could serve optical devices. The ribbon’s chemical sensitivity to beta-pinene suggests it may work as a chiral sensor, and a similar design could one day help detect hazardous or unstable chemicals. Because graphene conducts electricity well, the ribbon may also suit electronic sensors.

The molecule’s twisted shape connects to spintronics, a field that uses the spin of electrons rather than just their charge. Ikai noted that a right-handed or left-handed structure can, in principle, let electrons of one spin pass through more easily than the other, a property helical structures are known for in physics literature.

The current design only holds its twist while it stays in the chiral liquid. If the solvent is removed, the ribbon drifts back to a mixed, unstable state. Ikai’s next goal is a form of “chiral memory,” a way for the ribbon to lock in its twist even after the solvent is gone. This next step builds on memory techniques the researchers have explored in other helical systems and is now applied to graphene for the first time.

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The kind of technology that can deliver sound to a single listener—like something out of a spy film—may soon become a reality. Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have developed a speaker system that can direct speech to a specific person. ¹

Light and sound behave differently. Light from a flashlight or laser travels in a straight line, whereas sound readily spreads in all directions—that is why voices can be heard over a wall. The question, “Could sound, like light, be sent only where we want it?” led to the team’s highly directional speaker, MiPAL. By modulating ultrasound with audible content, the system can deliver sound only within a targeted area. A representative technology is the parametric array loudspeaker (PAL), which uses the nonlinear interaction of two ultrasonic waves in air to generate and concentrate audible sound in a specific direction.

 

Compared with conventional speakers, PALs can confine sound to a much narrower region. Traditional systems, however, require tens to hundreds of ultrasonic emitters to be precisely arranged and individually controlled, making them expensive and structurally complex. More recent PAL designs have simplified the hardware, but the vibrating diaphragm can also excite unwanted vibration modes, allowing sound to leak sideways and undermining directivity.

 

The team addressed this problem by integrating two types of metamaterials into a single ultrasonic transducer. An acoustic metasurface was mounted at the front. Acting like a lens for sound, it reshapes the irregular ultrasonic wavefronts radiated by the diaphragm into a straight, narrow beam, much like a laser. Elastic meta-units were placed at the rear. Acting more like a sound barrier, they suppress unwanted vibrations at selected frequencies and keep sound from leaking to the sides. In effect, the design uses a double safeguard: it focuses the sound at the front and blocks parasitic noise at the back.

As a result, the single-element device directed sound over a frequency range of 500 Hz to 10 kHz—more than four octaves, covering a large portion of the audible spectrum. The researchers also conducted an experiment simulating aircraft seating, where different announcements or music might need to reach individual passengers without disturbing their neighbors. After playing real broadcast and music signals and measuring sound intensity at different angles, they observed a clear improvement after the elastic meta-units were added.

 

Another key advantage is ease of fabrication and adaptation. The metamaterial structures are modular and can be produced using 3D printing, allowing the device to be readily redesigned for different seat spacing, angles and other operating conditions.

 

Once commercialized, the technology could let passengers on planes or trains listen to personalized announcements or content without disturbing the person next to them. In museums and exhibition halls, explanations could be heard only by visitors standing in front of a particular display. The “sound only I can hear” once seen only in films may soon become part of everyday life.

 

“By co-designing the metamaterials and the ultrasonic device as a single system, we overcame the limitations of cost, complexity and design flexibility at the same time,” said Professor Junsuk Rho. “Research on acoustic and elastic metamaterials has largely remained at the stage of validating principles and demonstrating concepts. This study is the first to integrate metamaterials into functional device and demonstrate their potential for practical use.”

 

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At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe.

Some stars that venture too close to such black holes live to tell the tale. Rather than being completely destroyed, they survive to make repeated close passes, producing a new flare of light each time.

These repeating partial tidal disruption events (rpTDEs) give astronomers the opportunity to watch the same star and black hole interaction unfold again and again, thanks to wide-field time-domain surveys that repeatedly scan large areas of the sky for objects that change in brightness.

But in several cases, researchers have noticed a puzzling pattern: The successive flares grow progressively dimmer. For years, theoretical models couldn’t explain why.

Now, a team of astrophysicists at Syracuse University has shown that the answer may lie in a previously overlooked factor—the star’s spin.¹

When stars meet black holes

In a typical tidal disruption event (TDE), a black hole’s tidal force—the difference in gravitational pull across a nearby star—tears the star completely apart.

As the disrupted stellar debris falls toward, or “accretes” onto, the black hole, it loses energy that is emitted in the form of light over the course of days to months.

While black holes themselves emit no light, TDEs provide a short-lived supply of fuel that lights up the surrounding region, allowing astronomers to study these otherwise invisible objects indirectly.

If a star orbiting a black hole does not come close enough to be completely ripped apart, it can, however, lose a fraction of its mass, resulting in a partial TDE. In a repeating partial TDE, the surviving core continues orbiting the black hole, losing more material with each new close pass, a few months to several years apart.

The dimming mystery

How much material a star loses during repeated encounters depends partly on its internal structure. Bandopadhyay compares a low-mass star to a fluffy meringue, which can become increasingly vulnerable to the black hole’s tidal forces. By contrast, a higher-mass star has a more centrally concentrated, onion-like star and can shed its outer layers while its dense core remains relatively unaffected, losing decreasing amounts of mass over time.

Those differences can help explain why rpTDEs don’t all behave the same way. But one pattern in particular has mystified researchers. Of the roughly 10 repeating systems identified to date, four have produced flares that grow progressively dimmer.

Decreasing mass loss might seem like an obvious explanation. But previous hydrodynamical simulations showed that, surprisingly, even as the material lost decreased with each encounter, the predicted flares retained roughly the same brightness.

“We were puzzled by this for two years,” Bandopadhyay says.

Their previous work had revealed another effect of the black hole’s tidal forces.In addition to stripping material from the star, they exert a torque that causes the star to spin faster with each close encounter. As a result, although less material falls back toward the black hole, it returns over a shorter period of time, helping to keep the predicted flare at roughly the same brightness.

To reproduce the dimming astronomers were actually observing, the researchers needed what Bandopadhyay called “a new ingredient”—a star that was already spinning rapidly before its first encounter with the black hole.

The new study found that this initial rotation prevents the star from being significantly spun up during each passage. Without that additional spin-up, the timescale over which the stripped material falls back remains relatively constant. As the star loses less material with each encounter, the peak fallback rate—and the predicted brightness of the flare—can finally decline.

Tracing the star’s past

But why would the star already be spinning so rapidly?

“It is also extremely difficult to ‘bind’ a star to a supermassive black hole so tightly that it orbits the black hole in a matter of months, and yet they seem to do so in rpTDEs,” Coughlin says.

The so-called Hills mechanism may explain both. Under this scenario, a pair of closely orbiting stars passes near a supermassive black hole, which tears the binary apart, ejecting one star and capturing the other.

In a close binary, the stars can become tidally locked, causing each to rotate on its axis at the same rate that the pair orbits each other. The tighter the binary, the shorter that orbital period and the faster a tidally locked star spins. The binaries capable of leaving a captured star on the short orbit observed in rpTDEs would have to be extremely tight—also leaving a tidally locked star spinning rapidly before its capture.

“Ananya’s work demonstrates that each of these peculiarities can be explained by the same underlying phenomenon: the tidal destruction of a binary system and the capture of one of the stars,” Coughlin says. “From a theoretical standpoint, this is a major step forward in our understanding of the physics at play in these systems.”

Zooming out, Coughlin notes that Hills capture may also have produced some of the stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The new findings could therefore help explain some of the properties of stars in what he calls “our own cosmological backyard.”

 

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Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate. The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”

The team discovered the new object using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The scientists conclude ¹ that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”

If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.

“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

A singular source

Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.

“There’s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,” Naidu says. “What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’”

As they looked through JWST’s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.

“When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” Simcoe explains. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.”

But there were other signatures in the light that didn’t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared.

This spectral drop-off is known as a “Balmer break” — a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern.

“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Naidu says. “But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.”

What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.

Pure light

To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.

“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Simcoe says. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.”

Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.

“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu says. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”

Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole’s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated “black hole star” with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.

From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.

The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1.

“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu says. “But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”

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How much ice is stored in the world’s glaciers? And where exactly is it located? A new study led by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP), provides an updated global map of glacier ice volume.

The study ¹ introduces IceBoost v2.0, a machine-learning model developed by Niccolò Maffezzoli, physicist and researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and affiliated with CNR-ISP. IceBoost v2.0 was trained on more than 7 million ice-thickness measurements collected from glaciers across the globe. The model combines these observations with 26 physical and geometrical variables (including topographic slope and curvature, ice velocity, and temperature) to reconstruct on a point-by-point basis the ice thickness, and thus the volume, of every glacier included in the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI), the world’s most up-to-date global glacier inventory, excluding the polar ice sheets.

An interactive web-app allows users to explore the data from Maffezzoli’s model for every glacier worldwide.

According to the new estimates, the world’s glaciers contain approximately 150,000 cubic kilometres of ice, equivalent to 32.3 centimetres of global mean sea-level rise if they were to melt completely (excluding Antarctica and Greenland). While this figure is consistent with previous global estimates, IceBoost v2.0 provides a far more realistic estimation of each glacier’s distribution, matching field observations up to 40% more accurately.

One of the most striking examples is the Geikie Plateau in eastern Greenland, where the glacier is up to 2 kilometres thick. In this area, IceBoost v2.0 estimates nearly twice as much ice as previously reported. “The distribution of glacier ice thickness is a fundamental variable for glaciological and climate models,” explains Niccolò Maffezzoli. “To predict how glaciers will evolve by 2100 and quantify their contribution to sea-level rise, we first need the most detailed possible picture of their current state. Researchers involved in the Glacier Model Intercomparison Project (GlacierMIP4), who are producing the next generation of glacier simulations to inform the IPCC’s assessments of glacier evolution through to 2100, will use IceBoost v2.0 as their sole representation of present-day situation.”

The new dataset also provides valuable guidance for future field campaigns and scientific investments. In fact, IceBoost v2.0 maps identify regions where model estimates are most reliable, as well as areas where additional observations are most urgently needed, including the Himalaya and the Karakoram ranges, and the major Patagonian ice fields. The research also has significant implications for freshwater management. Glaciers sustain rivers, ecosystems, agriculture, and local communities, supporting the livelihoods of around 1.9 billion people worldwide. Better estimates of glacier thickness and ice volume make it possible to produce more reliable projections of future freshwater availability, particularly in increasingly arid and desertifying regions such as parts of South America.

“Glaciers are highly complex systems. Although the governing physics is well understood, many of the parameters involved in the equations remain unknown, poorly constrained or  extremely difficult to measure,” Maffezzoli concludes. “Machine-learning models offer an alternative approach: they learn directly from data, generating predictions without imposing a predefined physical description. When sufficient data is available, this approach often proves highly effective. The future lies in hybrid models, where physical modelling and learning from experimental measurements work together to produce even more accurate estimates. We must move quickly: glaciers at mid-latitudes, including those in the Alps, are expected to disappear within the next few decades.”

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Arctic terrestrial permafrost ecosystems store around 1,300 gigatonnes of carbon from organic sources, such as from the remains of plants. Sediments in oceans and river deltas contain a further 400 gigatonnes. Global warming, however, is taking its toll on this natural freezer: temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else on our planet, with the result that permafrost in the region is thawing rapidly. The carbon stored here can then enter the Arctic Ocean via rivers and eroding coastlines. “Consequently, up to 0.02 gigatonnes are entering the sea each year, and according to forecasts, this outflow could rise by 70 to 150 per cent by the year 2100,” says Dr Manuel Ruben, lead author of the study from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). “However, how much of this is released back into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas and how much is stored in the seabed has, until now, been largely unknown.” Yet, this knowledge is essential for assessing the climate impact of thawing permafrost.

To get to the bottom of this unknown, the researchers retrieved and analysed sediment cores taken at various intervals off the coast of the Canadian island of Herschel Island ¹. The cores contain deposits spanning around 50 years. Analysis of the sediments revealed something surprising: “Although the sea here carries away huge quantities of organic carbon from the coast, surprisingly little of it ends up in the ocean’s active carbon cycle,” says Manuel Ruben. “Microorganisms convert around ten per cent of the organic carbon from the sediments into gases, which rise into the water and can then enter our atmosphere.” The major share, however, is stored in the seabed.

In conducting their analysis, the researchers first examined the composition of the sediment cores in detail and also investigated how rapidly permafrost deposits accumulate on the seabed. To this end, they measured how much inorganic dissolved carbon accumulates in tiny cavities within the sediment layers – known as pore water. This provides an indication of how much CO₂ microorganisms have ‘exhaled’ after ‘digesting’ the organic carbon. The isotopic composition of the pore water provides insights into which organic material from which source has been broken down. ”Carbon isotopes represent our atomic indicators that can identify the food source of the microorganisms,” says Prof. Gesine Mollenhauer, a geochemist at the AWI and co-spokesperson for the ‘The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Unexplored Interface’ cluster of Excellence. “The ¹³C isotope, for example, tells us whether they have consumed carbon from land or from the sea. By way of the ¹⁴C isotope, we were able to determine whether the single-celled organisms preferred old organic carbon from permafrost or fresh organic carbon from algae remains.”

One explanation for this lies in the eating habits of these tiny organisms: “The sediment is home to ‘gourmet’ bacteria that apparently prefer fresh carbon stemming from, for example, more recent algal remains over the ‘old’ carbon from permafrost deposits,” explains Gesine Mollenhauer. This suggests that the organic carbon entering the sea from land contributes less to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than originally feared. “However, we do need further research here. This is because some of the organic carbon from the permafrost may already have been broken down before it reaches the seabed.”

In addition to the impact of land-ocean carbon transport on atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, further effects are possible. For instance, this transport influences the biogeochemistry of coastal waters, which also play an important role in providing food for the local population. This is because the sediments alter the amount of sunlight available: on the one hand, the freshly broken-off fragments cloud the coastal ocean, while on the other hand, the organic carbon they contain discolours the water as it dissolves into it. Single-celled organisms such as algae, however, need light to convert this into biomass and oxygen. This primary production, in turn, forms the foundation for marine life such as fish, crustaceans and seals. The researchers aim to investigate these complex interrelationships, among other things, as part of the international ‘Arctic Pulse’ campaign planned for 2027. Through coordinated measurement campaigns aboard the Polarstern research icebreaker, using the AWI’s research aircraft and on land, they will investigate how rapid environmental change is altering ecosystems in the Arctic.

“Our study shows, more precisely than ever before, how much carbon is safely stored in the seabed – and just how much of the decomposed material actually originates from the old permafrost,” says Manuel Ruben. “This provides an important foundation for climate models that can predict the consequences of permafrost thawing for the global climate.”

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Many of today’s electronic devices — from the semiconductors in your cell phone to the photovoltaic cells in your solar panels — are built on thin-film substrates. The thin film is an electronically conductive material while the substrate is an inert material. Or is it?

Physicists and materials scientists have long assumed substrates do not react to electrical stimulus, but new research from the University of California San Diego Alex Frañó’s lab and a team of collaborators has shown that substrates are not inert after all. The discovery ¹ has the potential to help engineers build the dense, three-dimensional, brain-inspired computer chips needed for more energy-efficient computing.

In a human brain, a vast network of neurons works across different regions, enabling every thought and action we take. Yet thoughts that are quick and simple for humans — recognizing faces, differentiating a cat from a dog or solving a captcha — can be devilishly hard and energy-intensive for computers. Quantum materials may provide a solution.

It was this quest to develop new materials that led Frañó’s lab to study vanadium dioxide thin-film devices. When a voltage is applied to the thin film, an electric filament forms — something similar happens when the Earth and atmosphere create a voltage strong enough to result in lightning. The filament in the thin film drives the device’s electrical spiking, much like the signals in our neurons.

This reaction has been studied countless times in labs around the world, but Frañó’s lab was implementing a new technique, developed by graduate student Elliot Kisiel, called dark-field X-ray microscopy. Kisiel, who spent most of his graduate studies at Argonne National Laboratory and is now a Mayer Postdoctoral Fellow there, developed the tool to combine the best of two worlds: electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction.

“Dark-field X-ray microscopy gives us the ability to look at an entire device in one image, which not only greatly improves how fast we can perform these measurements, but also allows us to study the areas surrounding the devices with high fidelity,” he stated.

A changing substrate

Since the lenses for X-rays are often thick and, therefore, absorb most of the X-rays that pass through them, the team needed to look at something that provided more signal, which is why they decided to look at the substrate during some of their preliminary testing with this new technique.

What they saw was completely unexpected: not only was there a change in the thin film, but there was also a change in the substrate, showing for the first time that the two parts were sharing energy or “coupled.” This discovery went against everything scientists had assumed about substrates for decades.

 Materials for a new age of computing

Thin films are so called because they are vanishingly thin — around 100 nanometers — while the substrates they sit on can be 10,000 times thicker. Despite their lopsided sizes, in this experiment, the thin film was able to push and pull on the substrate. Frañó likened the discovery to a tree on a mountaintop being able to move the entire mountain. Furthermore, the substrate also acted on the thin film, each pushing and pulling on the other.

They spent the next four years making sure what they saw wasn’t a fluke. They not only reproduced the results doing the research exactly as they had done it the first time, but they also reproduced the results when they changed certain aspects of the sample, such as the thickness and material of the substrate. They also tested their results using different instrumentation. Much of that work was done at Argonne, which has a synchrotron facility that produces high brilliance X-rays, and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, home to the world’s only all-electric ultrafast electron microscope, which is able to capture exactly how a working device behaves under realistic operating conditions.

It wasn’t a fluke.

“The assumption that substrates are inert needs to be rethought,” Frañó stated. “Going forward, we have to assume that the substrate is undergoing changes when the film is. This is a transformational notion that counters decades of previous supposition.”

This paper is a companion to a paper that was published last year in ACS Nano ². In that paper, they used dark-field X-ray microscopy to study the thin film, while this paper focuses on the substrate. Together they illustrate how one research result leads to the next research inquiry.

In Frañó’s case, the question he now asks himself is, “What can we do with this new substrate discovery? If a tree is moving the whole mountain, let’s find a way to capitalize on that.”

One idea is that the substrate can act as a medium that can couple materials on either end of the substrate. Currently, thin film devices are connected two-dimensionally, but if researchers could build on both sides of a substrate, it would allow for three-dimensionality, opening up the possibility of denser, more interconnected computer chips, and bringing us one step closer to the next generation of computing.

 

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Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a device that enables them to control the flow of electrons through a semiconductor using only laser light—no electrical power source required.

This device was built ¹ to explore fundamental physics and realize a previously unobserved behavior, but it could also open doors for new applications in areas that bridge optics and electronics, including sensing, imaging and telecommunications. The phenomenon could help improve how signals are sent through and between devices, as well as create new opportunities to store more information in those signals.

 

“This electrical device that we manufactured at the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility has the potential to turn into something that measures different aspects of light,” said Yiming Gong, who helped lead the project as a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Physics. “But this originates from a very fundamental level of physics, which is the interference between different optical absorption processes.”

 

The researchers showed they could induce the orderly flow of electrons through a semiconductor using two different colors of light. By rotating the polarization of the two optical fields—the direction that the light waves wiggle—the researchers could also control the direction of the electronic current.

 

“This isn’t the way things normally work. When you think about electrons moving through a material, they’re moving because you’ve applied an electrical field and they actually bounce around and drift across the materials. Here, using light, you can actually sort of squirt the electrons in a specific direction without applying an electric field,” said U-M physicist Steven Cundiff, senior author of the team’s report.

 

Although previous work had shown the ability of light to get electrons flowing with light alone, this work goes a step further and shows the light gets electrons flowing in a narrow beam in a specific direction.

 

“The light no longer merely switches the current on; it also aims it,” Cundiff said.

 

Cundiff likens this to a lighthouse, which sweeps a beam of light by rotating its lamp. Here, the beam is made of electrons and that beam can be rotated by rotating the polarization of the two phase-coherent optical fields.

 

The phenomenon relies on quantum interference, which arises when two colors of light drive different absorption pathways to the same final state. The light transfers energy to the semiconductor material in discrete, or quantized, packets called photons, which mobilize the material’s electric charge carriers.

 

In the set-up, the incident light is absorbed by two routes at once, and the routes can be thought of as overlapping ripples, Cundiff said. Those ripples line up and enhance each other for electrons traveling a certain direction, but cancel each other out for electrons moving in other directions.

 

A collaborator on an earlier project, J.E. Sipe of the University of Toronto, had predicted it would be possible to create such an “electron lighthouse.” Now, working with the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility, Gong was able to realize such a device.

 

“The LNF is an amazing facility,” Gong said, adding it was a painstaking process to meld the device’s materials together in a way that didn’t introduce any extraneous electric fields.

 

“That was the biggest puzzle to solve for me, because there isn’t a standard way to do that. So I worked with the LNF staff to play around with different recipes and temperatures to come up with a manufacturing process.”

 

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Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis of the first nucleic acids. Despite their importance, one of the major questions in origin-of-life research is how the first sugars formed on Earth, since laboratory experiments show that they do not form in enough quantities under prebiotic conditions. Sugars such as ribose and glucose have previously been detected in meteorite and asteroid samples, suggesting that some of these molecules may have originated in the primordial molecular cloud from which our Solar System formed. However, until now, no sugar had ever been directly detected in the interstellar medium.

An international team led by Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra has now identified ¹ the first sugar in interstellar space: erythrulose. This molecule is the only possible four-carbon ketose, and on Earth it is commonly found in raspberries and sunless tanning products. Erythrulose was detected toward the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, located near the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery was made possible by ultra-sensitive, broadband spectroscopic surveys carried out with the 40-m Yebes radio telescope and the 30-m telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM).

The team identified 12 spectral lines matching the laboratory spectrum of erythrulose measured at the University of the Basque Country. The study also shows that this sugar is at least eight times more abundant than similar three-carbon sugars, none of which were detected in the same region. “This finding was unexpected, as the prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms”, says Izaskun Jimenez-Serra.

Working in collaboration with chemists from the University of Extremadura and Radboud University (the Netherlands), the CAB team discovered that erythrulose can form within interstellar ices from simpler two-carbon alcohols and aldehydes.

Based on the abundance of erythrulose measured in the G+0.693−0.027 molecular cloud, the researchers estimate that between 0.5 and 50 million tonnes of this sugar could have reached Earth’s surface during the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. The presence of erythrulose in interstellar space therefore provides an alternative source of sugars that may have contributed to the emergence of the first metabolic and replication processes on the early Earth.

“The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life,” says Carlos Briones, co-author of the study.

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For millennia, farming in Switzerland did not reduce plant diversity but helped increase it, researchers have shown in a detailed reconstruction covering the past 7000 years. Only recent decades paint a different picture.

The fall of the Roman Empire and major plague outbreaks: These events not only affected people but also reduced plant diversity on the Swiss Plateau, as human land use temporarily declined. Researchers led by Dr. Fabian Rey and Professor Oliver Heiri at the University of Basel report ¹.

 

Their analyses are based on sediment deposits in three Swiss lakes: Moossee near Bern, Burgäschisee near Herzogenbuchsee, and Hüttwilersee in Thurgau. The researchers extracted sediment cores from these lakes and then analyzed the material deposited in the sediments over the course of millennia. This allowed them to infer and date variations in both plant diversity and agricultural land use in the areas surrounding the lakes.

 

“This is an exceptionally comprehensive and precisely dated dataset,” says Oliver Heiri. “It allows us to reconstruct changes in plant diversity around the lakes over the past 7000 years at a time resolution comparable to long-term ecosystem studies in modern ecology – and for a period long before modern ecology existed.”

 

Agriculture made the landscape more diverse

 

Since the Neolithic period, plant diversity increased with increasing agricultural activity. “You might think that human impact must be bad for plant diversity, because that’s what we see today,” says Fabian Rey. “But agriculture back then made the landscape more diverse.” Before early agricultural activities, the Swiss Plateau was largely covered by forest and was therefore a relatively uniform ecosystem.

 

“As agriculture expanded, a mosaic of habitats emerged over time,” says Rey. Fields, pastures, hedgerows, and later orchards of tall fruit trees alternated across relatively small areas. This provided varied conditions for plants adapted to those specific environments.

 

However, there were also recurring periods when plant diversity declined sharply: For example, during the Migration Period following the fall of the Roman Empire, or when plague outbreaks claimed many lives in the Middle Ages. “In times when people were less able to continue farming, the forest grew back and plant diversity declined at the landscape level,” explains Heiri.

 

Times of crisis caused diversity to decline

 

More agriculture, more biodiversity: However, this parallel trend lasted only until around World War II. Over the past 80 years, plant diversity has declined sharply. The research team attributes this to the intensification of agriculture since then.

 

Instead of a fragmented mosaic of habitats, large, uniform areas have emerged that are easier to farm using heavy machinery. The increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides also caused many specialized plant species to retreat.

 

“However, our data also show that plant diversity has recovered from earlier declines when people returned to farming practices that included varied landscapes,” says Rey. This suggests that the trend of the past 80 years could also be reversed if farming practices change again.

 

Pollen from seven millennia

 

The data for the study are based on more than a decade of analyses of sediment cores, conducted in close collaboration with researchers from the University of Bern and the Department of Archaeology of Canton Thurgau. To collect the data, Fabian Rey extracted pollen samples from every centimeter of the cores, which he chemically processed, prepared, and analyzed under a microscope. For each sample, he identified 500 pollen grains, enabling him to determine the diversity of plants around the lake.

 

The intensity of agricultural use during each period was determined based on the presence of specific pollen in the samples – including both cultivated plants and species that thrive on farmland – as well as a comparison with archaeological and historical data.

 

The scientists dated the layers using the 14C method, a technique for determining the age of organic material. The sediment cores date back approximately 7000 years, to the Neolithic period.

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