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Acoustic driving enables controlled condensation of light and matter on chip

An international research team led by Alexander Kuznetsov at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics (PDI) in Berlin has demonstrated a fundamentally new way to control the condensation of hybrid light-matter particles. Using coherent acoustic driving to dynamically reshape the energy landscape of a semiconductor microcavity, the researchers achieved deterministic steering of a macroscopic quantum state into its lowest energy configuration.

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Astronomers capture birth of a magnetar, confirming link to some of universe’s brightest exploding stars

Astronomers have for the first time seen the birth of a magnetar—a highly magnetized, spinning neutron star—and confirmed that it’s the power source behind some of the brightest exploding stars in the cosmos. The finding corroborates a theory proposed by a UC Berkeley physicist 16 years ago and establishes a new phenomenon in exploding stars: supernovae with a “chirp” in their light curve that is caused by general relativity. A paper describing the phenomenon was published in the journal Nature.

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BWC: Calif. officer responding to domestic call shoots man chasing after woman with knife

Chino PD officers entered a home to find a man threatening a woman with a knife; the man refused instructions to drop the weapon and chased after the victim instead

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BWC: Fla. officer shot during confrontation with homicide suspect before fatal OIS

After Pasco County deputies located a man suspected of fatally shooting a neighbor over a property dispute, the suspect raised a gun and shot an officer

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Researchers mix X-rays and optical light to track speedy electrons in materials

To unlock materials of the future, including better photocatalysts or light-switchable superconductors, researchers need to understand how the valence electrons within materials respond to light at the atomic scale. Materials are made of atoms, and an atom’s outer electrons, or valence electrons, are responsible for chemical bonding as well as a material’s thermal, magnetic, and electronic properties.

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Hydrogen atmosphere could keep exomoons habitable for billions of years

Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.

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Scalable quantum batteries can charge faster than their classical counterparts

Over the past decades, energy engineers have developed increasingly advanced battery technologies that can store more energy, charge faster and maintain their performance for longer. In recent years, some researchers have also started exploring the potential of quantum batteries, devices that can store energy leveraging quantum mechanical effects.

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Watching quantum behavior in action: MagnetoARPES reveals time-reversal symmetry breaking in a kagome superconductor

Electron movement and structures described in quantum physics allow researchers to better understand how and why materials like superconductors behave as they do. Rice University researchers Jianwei Huang and Ming Yi have developed a new capability, magnetoARPES, building on angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) that allows researchers to study quantum behaviors they have been unable to resolve using ARPES alone. The work has been published in Nature Physics.

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Oval orbit casts new light on black hole–neutron star mergers

Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve.

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How jagged moon dust could support future astronauts

Lunar dust can be a pain—but it’s also literally the ground we will have to traverse if we are ever to have a permanent human settlement on the moon. In that specific use case, its clingy, jagged, staticky properties can actually be an advantage, according to a new paper recently published in Research from scientists at Beihang University, who analyzed the mechanical properties of samples returned by the Chang’e 6 mission to the far side of the moon.

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Fisherman sees a sasquatch while fishing at Clinton Lake, 19 miles SE of Topeka (Report 79792)

Class A; September 2025; Kansas, Douglas County

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Ultrafast computing: Light-driven logic tops 10 terahertz in WS₂

The future for our computers will literally be at the speed of light. Extremely short light pulses can perform ultrafast logical operations: these are the findings of a study recently published in the journal Nature Photonics. The study represents an important step toward developing a new generation of information processing technologies, potentially hundreds of times faster than what we have at present.

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Chemical shifts help track molecules breaking apart in real time

When molecules fall apart, their electric charge doesn’t stay put—it rearranges as bonds stretch and break. An international team of scientists has now tracked these ultrafast changes in the small molecule fluoromethane (CH₃F). It was the first time that the Small Quantum Systems (SQS) instrument at European XFEL could deliver detailed insights into transient states during chemical reactions. The research is published in the journal Physical Review X.

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Unexpected magnetic response in gold and silver atomic contacts contradicts previous theoretical predictions

Researchers from the Department of Physics and the University Institute of Materials at the University of Alicante (UA) and the Low Temperature and High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) have succeeded in measuring, for the first time, the electrical conductance of gold and silver atomic contacts subjected to extreme magnetic fields of up to 20 teslas, an intensity equivalent to 400,000 times Earth’s magnetic field.

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NASA finds extreme star collision in unlikely spot

A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before—and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results is forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and currently available on the arXiv preprint server.

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