In an experiment, the Ac2-26 peptide protected neurons from cell death, which is characteristic of the condition. The study also demonstrated differences in disease progression and protection between males and females.

Today’s electronics rely on electric currents, which generate heat as they move through ever-smaller circuits. This heat is becoming a major obstacle to making devices more compact and powerful. Researchers are therefore exploring another way to carry information: magnetic waves called magnons.

Some of these waves have a defined chirality, with atomic spins rotating clockwise or anticlockwise as the wave travels. These “chiral magnons” can transport spin information without an accompanying flow of electric charge, and thus less heating.

The challenge is to control these magnetic waves in materials that do not produce large stray magnetic fields, which could interfere with nearby components. This is why altermagnets, a newly recognised class of magnetic materials, are attracting attention: they could combine controllable ultrafast magnetic waves with better compatibility for densely packed devices.

Using polarised inelastic neutron scattering on the IN20 instrument at the Institut Laue-Langevin, researchers have for the first time seen these rotating magnetic waves directly inside an altermagnet. Moreover, they also showed that the direction of rotation can be switched by cooling the material in a small magnetic field.

This is the first unambiguous demonstration that chiral magnons in an altermagnet can not only exist separately, but also be controlled,an important step towards smaller devices and ultrafast spin-based information processing.

New experiment provides powerful testbed for ideas in quantum cosmology and gravity - theories relating to the early universe can now be tested in the laboratory. 

Researchers at the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore, have shown that the magnetic behaviour of electrons in graphene can be precisely controlled using electricity, revealing unusually large spin signals in a carefully engineered graphene system.

Thermal diffusion—a fundamental physical process pervasive in applications ranging from electronics to industrial systems—is inherently irreversible under the second law of thermodynamics. As temperature gradients spontaneously smooth out over time, crucial information regarding the initial thermal state is permanently lost due to entropy increase. This fundamental information loss leads to a severe ill-posedness in inverse thermal problems, where infinitesimal errors in the final observation can cause enormous uncertainties in the reconstructed initial state.

Birds in flocks, bacteria, cells: in many collective systems, individual elements respond to only part of their surroundings, seemingly defying Newton’s third law of motion — action equals reaction. These exceptions are known as non-reciprocal interactions. A Dresden physics team working with Roderich Moessner, a founding member of the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat, has now developed a theory that makes it possible to describe these interactions efficiently and simulate them far more precisely. This could help researchers study motion in swarms and flocks as well as biological processes in much greater detail. The findings have been published in Nature Physics.