Category: 7. Science

In a significant advance for materials science, Cornell University researchers have developed a groundbreaking one-step 3D printing technique that produces superconductors with unprecedented magnetic strength. The innovation could accelerate the development of next-generation technologies, from quantum computers to powerful MRI magnets.

Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled to low temperatures. While their potential is immense, manufacturing complex high-performance superconductors has been a multi-step, resource-intensive process. The Cornell team’s new method simplifies this dramatically.

The research, led by Professor Ulrich Wiesner and published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a streamlined process using a specialized “superconducting ink.” The ink is made from a blend of copolymers and inorganic nanoparticles that self-assemble during the 3D printing process.

A final, targeted heat treatment then converts the printed structures into their final, porous crystalline form. The performance of the resulting material is what sets this method apart. When the researchers 3D-printed niobium nitride using this technique, the resulting nanostructured porosity boosted its upper critical magnetic field to a record-setting 40–50 Tesla. This is the highest confinement-induced value ever reported for this compound and represents a major leap in performance.

“This is a critical step forward,” said Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Cornell’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “This one-step process not only simplifies fabrication but also allows for the creation of new, more efficient, and complex superconducting components”.

Beyond niobium nitride, the research team plans to extend the technique to other superconducting compounds, including titanium nitride. This could unlock a wide range of new applications and lead to more powerful and compact devices across multiple industries.

The research was conducted at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, with additional support from the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Turning sunlight directly into fuel has come closer to reality after scientists developed a molecule that can hold enough energy to mimic the way plants capture light.

The discovery addresses one of the biggest obstacles to artificial photosynthesis – a technology long seen as a potential source of carbon-neutral fuels.

Unlike conventional renewables, which generate electricity, artificial photosynthesis would make fuels that can be stored and used in ships, planes and heavy industry – sectors that are difficult to electrify.

The breakthrough study, published by a team at the University of Basel, shows how a specially designed molecule can store four charges of energy from light – two positive and two negative – in a stable state. Storing multiple charges is essential because most fuel-making reactions, such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, require more than one electron at a time.

Until now, attempts to replicate photosynthesis in the lab have relied on intense laser light far stronger than natural sunlight. The new molecule can hold multiple charges under much dimmer conditions, close to those found outdoors, and keep them stable long enough to be used in chemical reactions such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The molecule is built from five connected parts, each with a role. Two units on one side release electrons, becoming positively charged. Two on the other side absorb electrons, becoming negatively charged. In the centre sits a light-absorbing unit that kickstarts the process. After two exposures to light, the molecule holds two positive and two negative charges – effectively bottling solar energy in a chemical form.

“This stepwise excitation makes it possible to use significantly dimmer light. As a result, we are already moving close to the intensity of sunlight,” said doctoral student Mathis Brändlin, lead author of the study in Nature Chemistry.

It doesn’t mean the researchers have created a functioning artificial photosynthesis system, but professor Oliver Wenger, his supervisor, said “we have identified and implemented an important piece of the puzzle”.

Artificial photosynthesis has been described as the holy grail of clean energy because it would create carbon-neutral fuels. Unlike batteries, which are heavy and expensive to store at scale, liquid fuels could be used in ships, planes and heavy industry where electrification is difficult. They could also be shipped worldwide through existing infrastructure, offering an alternative to fossil fuels that does not add new carbon to the atmosphere.

Burning them would release only as much carbon dioxide as was absorbed to produce them, effectively closing the loop. It could also solve the intermittency problem of renewables – storing solar power in liquid form for use when the sun is not shining.

So far pilot projects in Europe, Japan and the United States mostly remain confined to labs or small test sites, although many have demonstrated some progress.

Japan has invested heavily in photocatalyst research as part of its hydrogen strategy, while the European Union has funded “Sun-to-Liquid” projects aimed at producing jet fuel from sunlight. US laboratories have developed prototypes for solar-driven hydrogen production. But scaling up has proved difficult, both because of efficiency losses and the cost of materials.

With global demand for energy still rising, and fossil fuels remaining dominant in sectors like aviation and shipping, researchers say the need for storable, carbon-neutral fuels is urgent.

“We hope that this will help us contribute to new prospects for a sustainable energy future,” Mr Wenger said.

Astronomers have unveiled a remarkable discovery that could transform our understanding of planet formation.

An international research team, co-led by scientists at the University of Galway, has identified a giant planet in the earliest stages of development, orbiting a young star that closely resembles our own Sun in its infancy.

The newly detected world, named WISPIT 2b, is estimated to be just five million years old – an astronomical blink of an eye compared to the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

Based on its size and characteristics, researchers believe it is a gas giant roughly comparable to Jupiter.

Unveiling WISPIT 2b with cutting-edge technology

The discovery was made possible using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Considered one of the world’s most advanced astronomical facilities, the VLT allowed researchers to capture the glowing planet in near-infrared light. This wavelength revealed WISPIT 2b as it continues to radiate heat from its initial formation.

Dr Christian Ginski, lecturer at the School of Natural Sciences, University of Galway and second author of the study, explained: “We used these really short snapshot observations of many young stars – only a few minutes per object – to determine if we could see a little dot of light next to them that is caused by a planet.

“However, in the case of this star, we instead detected a completely unexpected and exceptionally beautiful multi-ringed dust disk.

“When we saw this multi-ringed disk for the first time, we knew we had to try and see if we could detect a planet within it, so we quickly asked for follow-up observations.”

The planet’s detection marks a milestone in astronomy. It is only the second confirmed discovery of a planet caught at such an early evolutionary stage around a young solar-type star.

Even more striking, WISPIT 2b is the first clear example of a planet embedded within a multi-ringed disk of dust and gas, offering an unprecedented laboratory for studying how planets interact with their birth environment.

Evidence of a growing atmosphere

In addition to its infrared glow, researchers from the University of Arizona confirmed the planet’s presence in visible light using a highly specialised instrument.

This detection at a specific wavelength indicates that WISPIT 2b is still actively accreting gas – a sign that it is in the process of forming its atmosphere.

This evidence strengthens the view that astronomers have captured WISPIT 2b at a crucial moment of growth, offering a front-row seat to processes that shaped not only our Solar System but countless planetary systems across the galaxy.

The cosmic cradle of planet formation

WISPIT 2b resides within a vast protoplanetary disk surrounding its host star. These disks, composed of gas and dust, are the birthplaces of planets.

The one encircling WISPIT 2b has an immense radius of 380 astronomical units – about 380 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

These disks often display striking structures such as rings and spiral arms, which astronomers believe are carved by forming planets.

Observing such features in real time helps researchers better understand how planetary systems evolve into the diverse configurations observed today.

A new chapter in understanding planet formation

For astronomers, WISPIT 2b represents far more than just another exoplanet. It offers a living snapshot of the planet formation process, bridging the gap between theoretical models and observable evidence.

As technology advances, researchers expect that systems like this will reveal why planetary systems – our own included – can look so dramatically different from one another.

The discovery is already drawing global attention. With WISPIT 2b now in the spotlight, scientists anticipate years of follow-up studies that could redefine what we know about the birth and evolution of planets.

A study team from Oxford University has identified a fermentation method that creates the perfect balanced diet for honey bees who can’t get enough natural pollen.

Synthetic pollen substitutes are often fed to bees as a dietary supplement to natural pollen, but until now it’s been difficult to replicate the blend of lipids, called sterols, found in pollen that they need to thrive.

But with Oxford’s bees rearing 15-times more larvae, the scientists from England and Denmark are confident they’ve perfected this sterol recipe.

While it would obviously be preferable for bees to get all their essential nutrients from wildflowers, declines in flowering native plants across Europe are making this harder and harder. At the same time, honey bees aren’t exactly native either, in fact they often crowd native, solitary bee species and other pollinators out of local ecosystems.

If humans are going to unleash thousands of extra pollinators on a pollen-deficient landscape, it’s only right we help provide for their nutrition.

Scientists from Oxford, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark, engineered the yeast species Yarrowia lipolytica to produce the 6 essential sterols bees need to thrive, and fed it to a study colony enclosed in a greenhouse.

A control colony was fed a commercially-available synthetic diet.

Oxford University news reported that by the end of the study period, colonies fed with the sterol-enriched yeast had reared up to 15 times more larvae to the viable pupal stage, compared with colonies fed control diets.

Colonies fed with the enriched diet were also more likely to continue rearing larvae up to the end of the three-month period, whereas colonies on sterol-deficient diets ceased brood production after 90 days.

ALSO CHECK OUT: Pollen Replacement Food for Honey Bees Brings New Hope for Struggling Colonies and the Crops They Support

“For bees, the difference between the sterol-enriched diet and conventional bee feeds would be comparable to the difference for humans between eating balanced, nutritionally complete meals and eating meals missing essential nutrients like essential fatty acids,” said study lead author Dr. Elynor Moore. “Using precision fermentation, we are now able to provide bees with a tailor-made feed that is nutritionally complete at the molecular level.”

In order to understand which sterols were missing from the bees’ diet, the team had to employ surgical dissection of individual bees. The authors were then able to identify 24-methylenecholesterol, campesterol, isofucosterol, β-sitosterol, cholesterol, and desmosterol.

MORE POLLINATOR-POSITIVE NEWS: European Orchard Bee is Now a Valuable Pollinator in UK–Since the Weather Got Warmer

Using CRISPR gene editing, they altered a strain of Yarrowia lipolytica yeast to produce these compounds in a sustainable, economic way. Y. lipolytica is already used to produce food-grade products for the supplement industry.

Many commercially-grown fruits require bees and other pollinators to reproduce, and they play a critical role in the supply chains of fruit and nut orchards. Sustaining them with high-quality bee supplement will help guarantee hive resilience and preserve fruit and nut production into the future.

SHARE This Positive News For Bees Hard At Work In Our Orchards… 

Hopfions are three-dimensional topological textures whose internal “spin” patterns weave into closed, interlinked loops. They have been observed or theorized in magnets and light fields, but previously they were mainly produced as isolated objects. The authors show how to assemble them into ordered arrays that repeat periodically, much like atoms in a crystal, only here the pattern repeats in time as well as in space.

The key is a two-color, or bichromatic, light field whose electric vector traces a changing polarization state over time. By carefully superimposing beams with different spatial modes and opposite circular polarizations, the team defines a “pseudospin” that evolves in a controlled rhythm. When the two colors are set to a simple ratio, the field beats with a fixed period, creating a chain of hopfions that recur every cycle.

Starting from this one-dimensional chain, the researchers then describe how to sculpt higher-order versions whose topological strength can be dialed up or down. In their scheme, one can tune an integer that counts how many times the internal loops wind and even flip its sign by swapping the two wavelengths. In simulations, the resulting fields show near-ideal topological quality when integrated over a full period.

Beyond time-only repetition, the paper outlines a route to true three-dimensional hopfion crystals: a far-field lattice formed by an array of tiny emitters with tailored phase and polarization, all driven at two close colors. The lattice naturally divides into subcells with opposite local topology, yet preserves a clean, alternating pattern across the whole structure. The authors sketch practical layouts using dipole arrays, grating couplers, or microwave antennas to realize the source arrangement.

Unlike earlier optical hopfions that relied on beam diffraction along the propagation axis, this design works in the joint spacetime domain at a fixed plane, with periodic beating doing the heavy lifting. The team also discusses when the structures can “fly” some distance while maintaining their topology, and when diffraction undermines their integrity.

Why it matters: topological textures like skyrmions have already reshaped ideas for dense, low-error data storage and signal routing. Extending that toolkit to hopfion crystals in light could unlock high-dimensional encoding schemes, resilient communications, atom trapping strategies, and new light-matter interactions. “The birth of spacetime hopfion crystals,” the authors write, opens a path to condensed, robust topological information processing across optical, terahertz, and microwave domains.

Now, however, a team of Chinese scientists has developed a high-performance iron-based catalyst for these fuel cells that could potentially reduce reliance on platinum. The new design, described as “inner activation, outer protection,” enables record efficiency and long-term durability.

The findings were published in Nature.

Traditional Fe/N-C catalysts typically rely on outer surface of graphene or carbon supports, limiting the exposure of active sites and hindering their practical application. In general, PEMFCs have also been hampered by overly strong binding with oxygen intermediates, poor reaction kinetics, and vulnerability to Fenton reactions in oxidative environments (e.g., H₂O₂ and ·OH), leading to metal leaching and performance degradation.

To address these challenges, the research team led by Prof. Dan Wang (currently at Shenzhen University) and Prof. ZHANG Suojiang from the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed an inner curved-surface single-atom iron catalyst (CS Fe/N-C) with a unique nanoconfined hollow multishelled structure (HoMS). Each nano hollow particle, about 10 nm × 4 nm in size, consists of multiple shells where Fe atoms are concentrated on the inner layers at high density.

This catalyst is composed of numerous nano HoMS dispersed on 2D carbon layers, with single-iron-atom sites primarily embedded within the inner curved surface of the nano HoMS. The outer graphitized carbon layer of the nano HoMS not only effectively weakens the binding strength of the oxygenated reaction intermediates but also reduces the hydroxyl radical production rate, forming a distinctive “inner activation, outer protection” microenvironment. The Fe/N-C catalyst delivers one of the best-performing platinum-group-metal-free PEMFCs.

Synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy revealed that these inner Fe atoms predominantly exhibit a +2 oxidation state and an FeN₄C₁₀ coordination structure. Mössbauer spectroscopy further confirmed that 57.9% of the Fe sites are in a catalytically active low-spin D1 state.

Theoretical calculations showed that increasing curvature alone strengthens intermediate binding and hinders desorption, thereby reducing catalytic activity. However, introducing a nitrogen-doped carbon outer shell with Fe vacancies induces significant electrostatic repulsion (0.63-1.55 eV) between the outer-layer nitrogen atoms and the oxygen atoms of adsorbed intermediates on the inner shell. This repulsion weakens the binding strength, breaks the linear scaling relationship among ΔG_*OH, ΔG_*O, and ΔG_*OOH, and significantly enhances the catalytic performance.

According to the researchers, the catalyst achieved an oxygen reduction overpotential as low as 0.34 V, which is far better than that of planar structure. It also suppressed hydrogen peroxide formation and improved selectivity and durability. Additionally, it delivered a record power density of 0.75 W cm^-2 under 1.0 bar H₂-air with 86% activity retention after more than 300 hours of continuous operation.

This work establishes a new type of CS Fe/N-C for highly active and durable oxygen reduction catalysis in fuel cells. The graphitized outer N-C layer effectively weakens the binding strength of oxygenated intermediates and suppresses ·OH generation, thereby improving both activity and stability. It provides a new paradigm for developing high-performance catalysts for next-generation electrocatalyst.

In a new study published in Light: Science & Applications, researchers led by Professor Markus A. Schmidt from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology and Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany have introduced a novel solution: the tunable Metafiber. This fully fiber-integrated device uses a 3D nanoprinted phase-only hologram directly on the end face of a dual-core fiber to achieve remote focus control by simply adjusting the relative power between the fiber’s guided modes.

The hologram is designed to be sensitive to changes in the interference pattern of the light emitted from each core, enabling a shift in the focal spot’s position without the need for any moving parts. Experimental results confirm that precise and continuous focus modulation of over 3 microns can be achieved while maintaining high beam quality.

This new approach allows for compact, robust, and fast tunable focusing using optical fibers, significantly advancing the field of reconfigurable photonics. Potential applications include high-speed optical trapping, integrated endoscopic tools for minimally invasive diagnostics or surgery, and improved signal routing in fiber communication systems.

The Metafiber’s tunability arises entirely from power modulation — a method much faster than traditional mechanical or liquid-crystal-based approaches — and is compatible with existing fiber systems. This makes it ideal for rapid implementation in both research and industrial applications.

The study marks a milestone in on-fiber photonic integration and opens exciting avenues for developing next-generation fiber-based optical systems.

An illustrative image of the power-controlled, fully fiber-integrated spatial focusing using a phase-only 3D nanoprinted hologram coupled to a single-mode dual-core fiber is shown in Fig. 1. To illustrate the functional principle, two focusing light beams related to two relative power differences of the guided modes (green and red) are shown by the yellow and red magenta areas (dashed dark blue line: central fiber axis). The middle left inset shows an example of the intensity distribution of the interfered Gaussian beams in the hologram plane when the power in the modes is equal. The top right (scale bar: 20µm) and center (scale bar: 100µm) insets show images of the nanoprinted 3D hologram and the expansion section on the end face of the dual-core fiber, respectively. The bottom inset shows the spatial focus tuning with a total focus shift of more than 3 µm by adjusting the relative power difference of the two fiber cores.

It sounds like something out of science fiction: In the late 1950s, the US Army carved a tiny “city” into the Greenland ice sheet, 800 miles from the North Pole. It had living facilities, and scientific labs, and working showers, all powered by one small nuclear reactor.

The research base was called “Camp Century,” a Cold War scientific project that helped researchers deepen their understanding of ice. As part of their efforts, they wound up drilling close to a mile down through the ice sheet to pull up an ice core: a series of long cylinders of ice that serve as a record of Earth’s history, with everything from atmospheric gases to volcanic fallout preserved in their tightly packed layers.

The ice from Camp Century has been thoroughly sampled and studied since it first came out of the ice sheet. It, along with the ice from many other ice cores, has taught us a lot about Earth’s climate going back tens of thousands of years — about how abruptly climate can change and the role that greenhouse gases play in warming.

But the drillers at Camp Century brought up more than just ice. They also brought up several feet of sediment from beneath it. Except, as a geoscientist named Paul Bierman, who wrote a whole book about the ice and sediment from Camp Century, explains, these samples went largely understudied for decades, with just a handful of papers written about them.

“ I think the focus of the community was almost laser on the ice and not on the stuff beneath it,” he says.

These sediments from underneath the ice were so undervalued, in fact, that they disappeared into some freezers in Denmark for years. Until, in 2017, some researchers found them again. And when scientists finally started to study these sediments in earnest, they discovered a bonanza of former lifeforms and a trove of information.

On the most recent episode of Vox’s Unexplainable podcast, we explore these long-ignored sediments, and learn what they can teach us about our climate past — and future.