Located in modern-day Turkey, the ancient underground city Derinkuyu spanned seven levels, with four main ventilation channels and over 50,000 other smaller shafts. Researcher Sezin Nas re-created its ancient soundscape, studying both the history of the city as well as its architecture. She analyzed three types of spaces — a church, a living area, and a kitchen — and considered the room functions, sources of sounds, and even reverberations when creating a 3D virtual soundscape that will eventually allow a listener to experience the sounds of the city.

Soliton microcombs face challenges from timing jitter, which limits their precision in applications like lidar and optical communications. To overcome this, researchers developed a dispersion-managed silicon nitride microresonator that suppresses avoided mode crossings. The device operates at an 89 GHz repetition rate and achieves femtosecond-level jitter, setting a new performance benchmark for chip-scale combs and enabling advances in space navigation, ultrafast data transfer, and quantum metrology.