A Harvard study shows that commercially available sensors worn on a runner's body can provide useful data on what researchers call ground-reaction forces. These insights could open avenues to devices and products that deliver this data in real time to help runners avoid injury and improve their form.

With the help of a five-year, nearly $1.98 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) (R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, researchers at Wayne State University aim to make strides in understanding how proteins move and interact in living cells through the development of next-generation computational modeling tools.

Around a hundred times more heat is transferred between objects that are only a few molecular diameters apart than physics theory predicts. This phenomenon, first observed several years ago, has now been confirmed by a research team at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, using highly accurate measurements. In the current issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers report that they cannot yet explain the cause of this effect physically. The study could pave the way for better temperature control in nanosystems, for example in electronics or optics.

Scientists from China have developed a highly scalable on-chip photonic neural network that solves key bottlenecks long limiting the progress of optical computing. The team's new architecture, called a partially coherent deep optical neural network (PDONN), achieves unprecedented network depth by using a cascadable nonlinear activation function with positive net gain. This, combined with the innovative use of more accessible, partially coherent light sources (like LEDs) instead of narrow-linewidth lasers , enable s a chip with the largest input size and deepest structure of its kind to date. The chip successfully performed image classification tasks with high accuracy, marking a critical step toward energy-efficient, scalable, and widely accessible optical computing.

Professor Wang's team and their collaborators have creatively combined the three-dimensional (3D) magic cube configuration with the design structure of metamaterials, opening up a channel connecting information science and mathematical physics. A new paradigm of mechanically reconfigurable metamaterials characterized by high information entropy and visual interactivity has been successfully established. Different magic cube architectures and variable meta-elements allow for complicated and precise customization of electromagnetic waves, holding potential applications in electromagnetic shielding, target camouflage, and holographic encryption. The results of this work were recently published in Science Bulletin.

Optimal packing problems have inspired mathematicians for centuries. Biophysicists now add a layer to the question: how do chloroplasts arrange themselves optimally within cells, when the meaning of “optimal” changes over time? Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Emory University in Atlanta show how certain plants have managed to solve this problem strikingly well.

Supersolids, a state of matter that combines the rigidity of a solid with the frictionless flow of a superfluid, exhibit surprising synchronization when rotated. Innsbruck researchers found that quantum vortices—tiny whirlpools in the quantum fluid— cause the precession and revolution of the superfluid crystal structure to synchronize their motion. This discovery provides a new tool for studying fundamental properties of quantum systems.