Colorado State University researcher Jessica Metcalf is studying foul-smelling substances to figure out what attracts the New World screwworm to its favorite meal – open wounds – so she can develop better lures for trapping this serious threat to the livestock industry.

Harvard engineers used standard industrial weft knitting to create dense fabrics that snap between multiple stable 3D shapes, turning ordinary textiles into mechanical metamaterials. 

‘Collapsible scissored surfaces’ complete trilogy of metamaterial design principles

The low endosomal escape efficiency of endocytosis-based delivery has become a key barrier restricting therapeutic biomacromolecule applications in biomedicine. A review published in Biomedical Analysis highlights emerging non-endocytic transmembrane delivery strategies that bypass conventional cellular uptake pathways and enable direct cytosolic delivery of proteins, nucleic acids, and gene-editing tools. Led by Dr. Yang Liu from Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, the review summarizes recent advances in physical, biomimetic, and bioengineered delivery platforms and discusses their potential for gene therapy, drug delivery, and cellular engineering.

Researchers from the Universities of Amsterdam and New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived and nearly stable states, and if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.

Real-time intelligent systems need processors that adapt as data change. Scientists from the University of Cambridge, Tsinghua University and collaborators developed a temporally plastic photonic processor (TPPP) that combines stable optical computation, fast dynamic modulation and recursive optical memory. The chip improves robustness in spectral sensing and autonomous-driving control, and projects up to 16 times higher energy efficiency and 100 times lower intrinsic compute delay than advanced electronic processors.

One of Europe's highest distinctions in condensed matter physics has been awarded for a discovery that is reshaping our understanding of magnetism: The 2026 Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society (EPS) Condensed Matter Division goes to Professor Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Dr. Libor Šmejkal, and Professor Tomas Jungwirth for their discovery of altermagnetism – a previously unknown fundamental class of magnetism. 

The promise of quantum computing is to solve complex problems faster and more energy-efficiently than today’s supercomputers – from optimizing logistics processes to simulating molecules. This goal is coming within reach as the number of qubits – the computational units of quantum computing – increases. But in addition to technological challenges of scaling, there is another, less-considered issue: In the New Journal of Physics (DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ae6e68), researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) demonstrate that in extreme cases, the so-called quantum Zeno effect can nearly halt computational processes as the number of qubits increases – a dreaded phenomenon comparable to a traditional computer “freezing”.