The Jingjing Wu group at the National Key Laboratory of Synergistic Materials Creation/Frontier Science Center for Transformative Molecules (FSCTM) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in collaboration with the Xiaosong Xue group at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently reported a novel biomimetic Schenck-ene/Hock/aldol tandem rearrangement reaction mediated by singlet oxygen and its synthetic applications. Using this tandem reaction, they synthesized four natural products, alstoscholarinoid A, masterpenoid D, leontogenin, and marsformoxide B, in a clustered, one- to four-step process from readily available, inexpensive naturally resourced molecules. The mild reaction conditions and high functional group tolerance suggest that this strategy could serve as a novel approach for molecular backbone editing of natural products. Computational chemistry studies further revealed the mechanistic details of the rearrangement reaction and the factors that control the different rearrangement pathways of the key intermediate hydroperoxide. This study, published in CCS Chemistry, provides new insights into the synthesis of related natural products and molecular backbone editing and reconstruction 

In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. Professor Keshav Dani, head of the unit, highlights the significance: "Dark excitons have great potential as information carriers, because they are inherently less likely to interact with light, and hence less prone to degradation of their quantum properties. However, this invisibility also makes them very challenging to study and manipulate. Building on a previous breakthrough at OIST in 2020, we have opened a route to the creation, observation, and manipulation of dark excitons."

Caltech physicists have created the largest qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.   

Led by Professor Bartosz A. GRZYBOWSKI, researchers at the Center for Robotized and Algorithmic Synthesis (CARS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Ulsan, South Korea, put their robots to the challenge and extend the traditional view of chemical reactions. Historically, such reactions have been represented as one-line formulas describing the conversion of substrates into a desired and rigidly defined major product, with byproducts acknowledged but undesirable and generally considered unproductive. The CARS work, to be published in Nature on Sept 24, tells us that reactions should be thought of as complex networks programmable to yield different products under different conditions.

Researchers at Seoul National University and Kyung Hee University report a framework to control collective motions, such as ring, clumps, mill, flock, by training a physics-informed AI to learn the local rules that govern interactions among individuals. The approach specifies when an ordered state should appear from random initial conditions and tunes geometric features (average radius, cluster size, flock size). Furthermore, trained on published GPS trajectories of real pigeons (Nagy et al., 2010), the model uncovers interaction mechanisms observed in real flocks.