EverythingScience

Scientists Discover a New Quantum State of Matter Once Considered Impossible A quantum state of matter has appeared in a material where physicists thought it would be impossible, forcing a rethink on the conditions that govern the behaviors of electrons in certain materials. The discovery, made by an international team of researchers, could inform advances in quantum computing, improve electronic efficiencies, and enhanced sensing and imaging. The state, described as a topological semimetal phase, was theoretically predicted to appear at low temperatures in a material composed of cerium, ruthenium, and tin (CeRu4Sn6), before experiments verified its existence. At extremely low temperatures, CeRu4Sn6 reaches quantum criticality, a point where a material teeters between changes in its phase, where conditions are so cold that quantum fluctuations dominate, effectively turning the material into a puddle of waves rather than a fog of particles. The plot twist in this study is that quantum criticality can give rise to states thought to be defined by interactions between particles, such as the behavior of electrons as discrete charge carriers. "This is a fundamental step forward," says physicist Qimiao Si, from Rice University in the US. "Our work shows that powerful quantum effects can combine to create something entirely new, which may help shape the future of quantum science." In physics, topology refers to the geometry of material structures. Particular topological states can protect properties of particles, unlike the way neighboring particles might jostle and disrupt each other's behavior. Source:ScienceAlert @EverythingScience

Made it. At 6:42pm ET on Jan. 17, the stacked Artemis II rocket and spacecraft reached Launch Pad 39B after a nearly 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAKennedy in Florida. Source: @NASAArtemis @EverythingScience

New Giant Virus Found in Japan May Rewrite the Origin of Complex Life Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

String Theory Can Now Describe a Universe That Has Dark Energy Source:Quanta Magazine @EverythingScience

Just One Gene May Be Responsible For Over 90% of Alzheimer's Cases Source:ScienceAlert @EverythingScience

Phages and bacteria accumulate distinctive mutations aboard the International Space Station Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Some fish can walk - and choose to! 🦵🏽 Find out how they do this, why, and see it in action in this week’s Surprising Science! 🐟 Source: @NHM_London @EverythingScience

Fluid gears rotate without teeth, offering new mechanical flexibility A team of New York University scientists has created a gear mechanism that relies on fluids to generate rotation. The invention holds potential for a new generation of mechanical devices that offer greater flexibility and durability than do existing gears—whose origins date back to ancient China. "We invented new types of gears that engage by spinning up fluid rather than interlocking teeth—and we discovered new capabilities for controlling the rotation speed and even direction," says Jun Zhang, a professor of mathematics and physics at NYU and NYU Shanghai and the senior author of the paper. Gears are among the oldest machine parts, dating back to 3,000 BCE in China, where they were used in two-wheeled chariots to cross the Gobi Desert. Over time, they've been deployed in the famous Antikythera mechanism, which predicted astronomical positions in ancient Greece, as well as in windmills, clocks, and, now, robotics. However, gears' teeth, whether wood, metal, or plastic, are inflexible, so they are vulnerable to breaking—and they must interlock perfectly to work. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Stanford Researchers Develop New Material That Changes Color and Texture Like an Octopus Octopus and cuttlefish are masters of disguise. Many species can quickly shift both the color and surface texture of their skin, and scientists have long tried to reproduce that trick using manmade materials. In a paper published in Nature, Stanford researchers report a major advance: a flexible material that swells into new textures and colors within seconds, forming patterns with details finer than a human hair. “Textures are crucial to the way we experience objects, both in how they look and how they feel,” said Siddharth Doshi, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Stanford and first author on the paper. “These animals can physically change their bodies at close to the micron scale, and now we can dynamically control the topography of a material – and the visual properties linked to it – at this same scale.” The team says the approach could improve dynamic camouflage for people and robots, and it may enable flexible, color-changing displays for wearable technologies. The findings also broaden the possibilities in nanophotonics, a field that precisely shapes how light behaves to support advances in electronics, encryption, biology, and more. “There’s just no other system that can be this soft and swellable, and that you can pattern at the nanoscale,” said Nicholas Melosh, a professor of materials science and engineering and a senior author on the paper. “You can imagine all kinds of different applications.” Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

The first-place-winning video in Nikon’s Small World in Motion Competition 2025 documents the self-pollination of a thymeleaf speedwell flower. Filming at 5X magnification, winner Jay McClellan used a custom-built motion-control system to capture the flower. on.natgeo.com/4jMSUwn Source: @NatGeo @EverythingScience

'Backward and upward and tilted': Spaceflight causes astronauts' brains to shift inside their skulls Spaceflight doesn't just change your perspective — it shifts the actual position of your brain inside your skull, a new study reports. Many of us know about the famed "overview effect," which describes how a trip to the final frontier changes how astronauts view the world and their place in it. But the new study focused on the physiological rather than the philosophical. Rachel Seidler and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took MRI scans of the brains of 26 astronauts and 24 non-astronaut participants to determine what, if any, impacts prolonged spaceflight has on one of our body's most important organs. Their study, published on Jan. 12, showed a consistent pattern of the brain shifting backward and upward, and rotating upward, after time in microgravity, with some positional changes still detectable months after astronauts return to Earth. Scientists have long tracked how spaceflight affects the human body, but exactly what microgravity does to the brain's anatomy remains an ongoing question. This study analyzed data from 15 astronauts who provided MRI scans before and after their missions to space, and combined that with MRI data from another 11 astronauts and two dozen participants of a long-duration, head-down tilt bed rest "microgravity analog" experiment. Source:Space.com @EverythingScience

This DVD with 616,400 digitized signatures is now part of Saturn. Starting in November 1995, postcards with signatures from people from 81 nations were received, scanned, stored on a DVD, and attached to the Cassini spacecraft before its 1997 launch. After Cassini completed its groundbreaking mission at Saturn, the spacecraft (including the DVD) was intentionally deorbited into Saturn's atmosphere, and it vaporized to become part of the planet. Want to make your mark on space history? Time is running out to send your name around the Moon on Artemis II! go.nasa.gov/49vl6z2 Source: @NASAhistory @EverythingScience