Selenium-based compounds play vital roles in human and animal health; however, accurately detecting their various forms has long been a challenge. Researchers from Chiba University have developed a new method that uses selenium’s unique isotopic “fingerprints” to identify its compounds with high precision. Using this approach, they discovered previously unknown selenium molecules produced by gut bacteria. This technique could contribute to the fields of biology, helping deepen our understanding of selenium’s functions in the body.

Different artists create different art, a new study has confirmed. Adults and children were asked to recreate a famous Jackson Pollock painting, and researchers analyzed the characteristics. They found artists of different ages created paintings with distinct characteristics, and that children’s paintings shared more similarities with artworks by some of the most famous expressionists of the last century than adults’. They also found that characteristics typical of children’s and expressionists’ paintings may make art more pleasant to look at, which could be due to humans’ million-year-long exposure to similar shapes and patterns in nature.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore, together with their collaborators, have successfully coaxed lanthanide nanocrystals – stubbornly strong insulators – to emit light using electricity. This breakthrough paves the way for durable, tunable light technologies.

Using lasers as tweezers to understand cloud electrification might sound like science fiction but at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) it is a reality. By trapping and charging micron-sized particles with lasers, researchers can now observe their charging and discharging dynamics over time. This method, published in Physical Review Letters, could provide key insights into what sparks lightning.

A previously unknown type of DNA damage in the mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside our cells, could shed light on how our bodies sense and respond to stress. The findings of the UC Riverside-led study have potential implications for a range of mitochondrial dysfunction-associated diseases, including cancer and diabetes.

A new technique uses ‘molecular antennas’ to funnel electrical energy into insulating nanoparticles, creating a new class of ultra-pure near-infrared LEDs for medical diagnostics, optical communications, and sensing.

Researchers from HSE University and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences analysed seven years of data from the ERG (Arase) satellite and, for the first time, provided a detailed description of a new type of radio emission from near-Earth space—the hectometric continuum, first discovered in 2017. The researchers found that this radiation appears a few hours after sunset and disappears one to three hours after sunrise. It was most frequently observed during the summer months and less often in spring and autumn. However, by mid-2022, when the Sun entered a phase of increased activity, the radiation had completely vanished—though the scientists believe the signal may reappear in the future. The study has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly transforming scientific research, with researchers across multiple areas of physics leading the development and application of these tools. To meet the needs of this fast-growing research community, the American Physical Society is launching PRX Intelligence, a highly selective open access journal that will welcome manuscripts on AI and machine learning methods and their application to advance scientific understanding. The journal will accept submissions starting February 2026.

When cells face a lack of oxygen, they switch to energy-saving mode: A team at Bielefeld University shows how they deliberately slow down their secretory transport pathway to do so.