Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine have identified a way to suppress the daily fluctuations in the activity of key immune cells known as neutrophils. The study, to be published December 12 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), suggests that inhibiting these fluctuations could prevent neutrophils from causing excessive tissue damage during daylight hours, a phenomenon that may underlie the fact that heart attacks in the early morning are more damaging than heart attacks suffered at night.

They enable high-precision measurements, define the unit of voltage, and form the heart of many quantum computers – the so-called Josephson junctions. However, the microscopic processes taking place in the superconductors are difficult to observe directly. Researchers at the RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau have therefore implemented a quantum simulation of the Josephson effect: They separated two Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) by means of an extremely thin optical barrier, which is generated by a focused laser beam and moved periodically. The result is impressive: even in this atomic system, the characteristic Shapiro steps – voltage plateaus at multiples of the drive frequency – appeared, as they do in superconducting Josephson junctions. The research paper published in the journal Science thus provides a textbook example of quantum simulation.