Manganese dioxide can convert amino acids into hydrogen cyanide (HCN) without requiring methane, solving a long-standing puzzle about the origin of this key prebiotic molecule on early Earth, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. Although HCN is central to origin-of-life theories, recent evidence suggests early Earth's atmosphere didn’t contain sufficient methane needed for classic HCN-producing reactions. The newly found chemical pathway shows that HCN could instead have been continuously supplied from abundant amino acids.

Magnons are tiny waves in magnetisation and ideal building blocks for hybrid quantum systems and quantum metrology. However, their previously too-short lifetime of at most a few hundred nanoseconds has been a hurdle. An international team of physicists led by Andrii Chumak from the University of Vienna has now succeeded in extending this lifetime a hundredfold to up to 18 microseconds – paving the way for a quantum computer the size of a 1-cent coin. The scientists have also made the crucial discovery that it is not a fundamental law of physics that governs the lifetime of magnons, but rather a question of materials. The study has recently been published in the prestigious journal Science Advances.

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new mechanism by which distinct vibrations in a crystal – normally decoupled by symmetry – can be dynamically linked. Using a light scattering technique, the team showed that in a special class of crystals with a built-in sense of rotation, known as ferroaxial materials, collective fluctuations of this ordered state act as a dynamical bridge between otherwise independent vibrational modes. This unconventional channel, called resonant chiral dressing, has also been fully explained theoretically. The findings, published in Nature Physics, open new routes to detect and control exotic quantum phases with light.

Diazoacetic acid esters are important intermediates in drug and agrochemical synthesis, but their preparation typically requires hazardous diazomethane. Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science developed a safer method using a Michael addition-mediated azide-to-diazo conversion. By pretreating 2-azidoacrylic acid esters with a bulky phosphine followed by nucleophile addition, they produced β-heteroatom-substituted diazo esters without toxic precursors. This simpler approach offers a practical and flexible route to access diverse organonitrogen compounds.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated a new type of quantum interaction using a single trapped ion. By creating and controlling increasingly complex forms of “squeezing” – including a fourth-order effect known as quadsqueezing – the team has, for the first time, made previously unreachable quantum effects experimentally accessible. The approach also provides a new way to engineer these interactions, with potential applications in quantum simulation, sensing, and computing. Their results have been published today (1 May) in Nature Physics.