Cognitive impairment, including mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease, is a growing challenge in ageing societies. Early detection is crucial, as timely intervention can improve care planning, monitoring and quality of life. Yet cognitive decline is often identified only after symptoms have become more pronounced, limiting opportunities for support.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers developed an AI-driven transfer-learning method that refines volume size factor predictions from first-principles calculations, enabling more reliable prediction of properties in previously unexplored alloy systems.

Quantum random number generators play a crucial role in securing high-demand information contexts by producing true random numbers. Nevertheless, the large volume and high cost limit their widespread use. Here, a system on-chip is proposed that fully leverages the advantages of different photonic integrated platforms, where the interference optical paths and photodiodes are integrated on a standard silicon process, while the laser source on-chip is realized on a III–V platform. Using micro-lens coupling package technology with coupling loss lower than 2 dB, the components on different platforms are combined and packaged with the amplifier circuits in a 42 mm × 24 mm footprint in a butterfly form. This miniaturized and cost-effective entropy source enables outputting a vacuum noise signal with a 3-dB bandwidth of over 500 MHz. After sampling and post-processing, a random number generation rate of up to 6.57 Gbps is achieved.

Mars once had abundant liquid water, yet orbiters and rovers have found far less carbonate rock than expected for a planet that may have had a thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. A new geochemical modelling study led by Chang-Chin Wang, with Professor Tomohiro Usui at JAXA and the University of Tokyo, and Associate Professor Mohit Melwani Daswani at ELSI, shows that the type of rock water reacts with, not just water itself, controls whether calcium/iron-rich or magnesium-rich carbonates form. Feldspar-rich rocks, increasingly detected on the Martian surface, readily produce the calcium/iron-rich carbonates seen in many locations. The simulations also show how percolating groundwater could be quietly burying carbonates underground, helping explain their apparent scarcity on the surface.

Scientists have used X-ray images taken during a rocket flight to capture metal dendrites in microgravity for the first time, revealing insights that could improve manufacturing processes such as casting, welding and metal 3D printing.