Multicellularity is one of the most profound phenomena in biology, and relies on the ability of a single cell to reorganize itself into a complex organism. It underpins the diversity in the animal kingdom, from insects to frogs, to humans. But how do cells establish and maintain their individuality with such precision? A team led by Jan Brugués at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at Dresden University of Technology has uncovered fundamental mechanisms that shed light on this question. The findings, now published in the scientific journal Nature, reveal how cells establish physical boundaries through an inherently unstable process, and how different species have evolved distinct strategies to circumvent this process.

New research shows quarks create wakes as they speed through quark-gluon plasma, the material that existed during the first microseconds of the early universe. The findings could help physicists understand the earliest moments of the infant universe.

Small enough to fit in a smartphone, the optical amplifier developed at Stanford could not only improve fiber optic networks that are the backbone of the internet, but also spur new technologies such as biosensing for environmental toxin detection and medical diagnostics.

A development at Stanford turns qubits, quantum bits of information, stored in atoms into light, and for the first time, collects that information using one photon for each atom simultaneously. This “parallel interface” makes it possible to get information out of the quantum computer quickly and could be scaled up to create networked quantum supercomputers.