At times the sun ejects energetic material into space which can have consequences for space-based and even ground-based electronic technology. Researchers aim to understand this phenomenon and find ways to forecast it, including how ejected material evolves as it travels through the solar system. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, made high-quality measurements of an evolving cloud of solar ejecta by using multiple space-based instruments which were not designed to do so, and observed the way the clouds reduce background cosmic-ray activity.

Milan, 13^th January 2025  - The Politecnico di Milano has created the first integrated and fully tunable device based on spin waves, opening up new possibilities for the telecommunications of the future, far beyond current 5G and 6G standards. The study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, was conducted by a research group led by Riccardo Bertacco of the Department of Physics of the Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with Philipp Pirro of Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität and Silvia Tacchi of Istituto Officina dei Materiali - CNR-IOM.

A key challenge in parallel adaptive Cartesian grid generation is significant computational load imbalance during k‑d tree searches. A new Dynamic Partition Weight approach, published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103921), solves this by predicting each cell’s required k‑d tree iterations and performing intelligent load rebalancing. This method enables the generation of billion‑cell grids for complex aircraft models in less than a minute, offering a breakthrough for high‑fidelity CFD simulations.

Researchers from the Optics Group at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón have managed to correct in real time problems related to image aberrations in single-pixel microscopy using a recent technology: programmable deformable lenses. The new method was described by the research team in an open-access article recently published in Nature Communications and is part of the development of the European CONcISE project.

The solution proposed by this team combines an adaptive lens (which “shapes” the light wavefront in real time) with a sensor-less method that evaluates image sharpness directly from the data, without complex algorithms. This approach corrects distortions caused both by the system and by the sample itself, producing sharper images, close to the physical resolution limit, without adding complexity to the microscope.

This adaptive lens is known as a “multi-actuator adaptive lens” (M-AL), which can be easily integrated into the system without significantly modifying the traditional configuration of a single-pixel microscope based on structured illumination. These types of lenses consist of an optically transparent and deformable membrane (similar to a thin sheet of glass or polymer) that can change shape via actuators distributed around or behind it.