Harvard researchers built a racetrack-shaped quantum cascade laser that makes bright, stable, mid-infrared frequency combs on a chip.

A multidisciplinary team bringing together the European Centre of Archaeometry (University of Liège, ULiège), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB), CNRS-Sorbonne University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice has published a study on the conservation condition of The Temptation of St Anthony (1946) by Salvador Dalí, a major work held by the RMFAB since 1965. The research shows that the visual changes observed today (irregular transparency, loss of binding medium, roughness) are not solely the result of aesthetic intentions: they correspond to degradation phenomena that began very early, probably during the drying and maturation of the paint layers, and were already visible before the painting was acquired in 1965.

Proton affinity or transfer is crucial in determining the activity and selectivity of the electroreduction of CO₂. However, optimizing proton supply during CO₂ reduction while simultaneously enhancing the activity of catalytic sites and inhibiting hydrogen evolution poses a significant challenge. It has been found that introduce another active site around the CO₂ reduction catalytic site to supply proton for the proton process has been proved been an effective strategy to modulate the leverage relationship in electrochemical CO₂ reduction (ECR).

The inherent dispersion of laser beams limits their effectiveness in precision applications. Researchers at Chiba University, with collaborators in the USA and India, developed a compact approach combining a Bessel lens and a flat multilevel diffractive lens to generate sharply defined, robust nondiffracting optical bottle beams. These beams feature alternating high-contrast regions and remain propagation-invariant over distances beyond 5 cm, enabling applications in advanced imaging, optical trapping, harmonic generation, micromachining, and high-fidelity quantum operations.

Researchers from the Biomedical Data Science Laboratory (BDSLab) at the ITACA Institute of the Universitat Politècnica de València have developed a new method based on magnetic resonance imaging that enables objective quantification of the growth of the most aggressive brain tumours, particularly glioblastoma.

The study, published in the scientific journal Medical Physics, addresses one of the main clinical challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of this tumour: its high capacity to infiltrate healthy brain tissue.

In their work, the UPV's BDSLab team presents a new biomarker, the Dynamic Infiltration Rate (DIR), capable of identifying different patterns of tumour growth and independently predicting patient survival.