ice University physicist Guido Pagano has won a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study quantum entanglement and develop new error-correcting tools for quantum computation.

Researchers from NOAA and William & Mary developed the first three-dimensional operational storm surge model. The model simulates compound surge and flooding — especially hard in transition zones where the river meets the sea. Since April 2021, NOAA has run daily 2D and 3D compound flood models on the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. During Tropical Storm Claudette (June 2021), the three-dimensional, real-time storm surge model closely matched observations across the Gulf Coast.

Metabolic differences could explain why some metastatic breast cancer cells rapidly generate tumors after migrating from primary tumors to the brain, while others linger for months or years before forming these secondary tumors, UT Southwestern scientists report in a new study. The findings, published in Cell Metabolism, highlight metabolic vulnerabilities in malignant cells that could eventually lead to new cancer therapies.

Flat materials that can morph into three-dimensional shapes have potential applications in architecture, medicine, robotics, space travel, and much more. But programming these shape changes requires complex and time-consuming computations. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a platform that uses machine learning to program the transformation of 2D stretchable surfaces into specific 3D shapes.

Because rivers are in near-constant motion, researchers previously assumed lightweight microplastics quickly flowed through rivers, rarely interacting with riverbed sediments. With new simulations, researchers now have discovered hyporheic exchange — a process in which surface water mixes with water in the riverbed — can trap lightweight microplastics that otherwise might be expected to float.

Most biologists expect bird songs learned from parents to drift with time. But this idea may be biased by a focus on Northern Hemisphere birds. Among sky-island populations of the eastern double-collared sunbird of East Africa, a stable environment may explain these birds' stable song over hundreds of thousands of years. Their plumage hasn't changed much either. The findings suggest that learned song and plumage evolve in pulses punctuated by long periods of stasis.

Using the 4.1-meter SOAR Telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered the first example of a binary system where a star in the process of becoming a white dwarf is orbiting a neutron star that has just finished turning into a rapidly spinning pulsar. The pair, originally detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is a “missing link” in the evolution of such binary systems.