EurekAlert! News by Subject: Chemistry & Physics - News by Subject: Chemistry & Physics

Chemistry & Physics

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 6-Aug-2025 05:11 ET (6-Aug-2025 09:11 GMT/UTC)

Toward sustainable computing: Energy-efficient memory innovation

Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Data centers currently account for about one percent of global energy consumption, amounting to 200 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. This immense energy demand has driven researchers to explore innovative ways to reduce energy usage. A team of scientists has now achieved a groundbreaking advancement in memory technology in close collaboration with Antaios, a magnetic random access memory company in France. Their innovation, based on Spin-Orbit Torque (SOT) Magnetic Random-Access Memory (MRAM), offers a highly efficient and powerful solution for data processing and storage—a transformative step forward for technologies ranging from smartphones to supercomputers.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: Antaios, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, European Research Council, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Norges Forskningsråd

A new way to detect inflammation

Case Western Reserve University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Nearly every disease has an inflammatory component, but blood tests can’t pinpoint inflammation in specific organs or tissues in the human body.

Now researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed a method to detect inflammation using antibodies, potentially leading to blood tests for disease-specific biomarkers such as for heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and various cancers. Their breakthrough also holds promise for drug discovery.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation

Food: Cracking the method for the ‘perfect’ boiled egg

Springer Nature
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new method pioneered to optimally cook both the yolk and white (or albumen) of a boiled chicken egg has been published in Communications Engineering...

Journal: Communications Engineering

Alien ocean could hide signs of life from spacecraft

University of Reading
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study focusing on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, shows that the physics of alien oceans could prevent evidence of deep-sea life from reaching places where we can detect it.

Journal: Communications Earth & Environment

The CRISPR technique helps reveal how bean genes could improve nitrogen fixation

University of Córdoba
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A UCO team has applied the genome editing technique, which garnered a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, to unravel the functions of two genes involved in the metabolism of beans and that could not be characterized using other methodologies

Journal: Journal of Experimental Botany

Entanglement inside proton ‘X-rayed’ with quantum information tools

The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In recent years, there have been attempts to describe the inside of a proton using quantum information tools, with partial success. It has been discovered that quantum entanglement in the proton is maximal, and that its main sources are constantly ‘boiling’ seas of virtual gluons and quarks. In the article just published, this new formalism has already become so universal that it correctly reproduces, for the first time, all currently available experimental data.

Journal: Reports on Progress in Physics
Funder: U.S. Department of Energy, European Union’s Horizon 2020, BNL Laboratory Directed Research and Developement

Optical control of phase and group velocities in everyday liquids

Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The phase and the group velocity of light propagating in conventional optical media cannot exceed the speed of light in vacuum. However, in so-called epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials, light exhibits an infinite phase velocity and a vanishing group velocity for a particular color (frequency). So far, such properties were only observed in very few solids and nano-engineered materials. The present work opens a completely new avenue by transiently turning ordinary liquids, such as water and alcohols, into ENZ materials at terahertz (THz, 1 THz = 10¹² Hz) frequencies through the interaction with intense femtosecond laser pulses.

Journal: Physical Review Letters