SAN ANTONIO — June 24, 2025— Southwest Research Institute has delivered the novel Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument for final integration into NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft. Scheduled to launch in late 2025, IMAP will help researchers better understand the boundary of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds and protects our solar system.

A Japanese research team has successfully achieved direct observation of the charge distribution at the interface of ferroelectric domains. This nanometer-scale distribution was measured using a combination of advanced local charge imaging with a state-of-the-art electron microscope and atomic displacement analysis at the picometer (one trillionth of a meter) scale.

These findings represent a significant breakthrough in understanding the behavior of ferroelectric devices—such as multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs)—which are increasingly in demand for miniaturization and enhanced performance.

A pioneering research lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has achieved another milestone using light-driven enzymatic reactions to convert simple biological building blocks into valuable chemicals. The team, part of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), developed a clean, efficient way to make complex chemicals called chiral ketones through photocatalysis. Chiral molecules — commonly used in agrochemicals and medicines — exist in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands, and often only one “hand” is effective or safe. This study offers a precise and eco-friendly way to make specific chiral molecules with complicated structures, supporting new opportunities to transform renewable carbon sources like bioenergy crops into high-value molecules.

Researchers at Tampere University and their collaborators from Germany and India have experimentally confirmed that angular momentum is conserved when a single photon is converted into a pair – validating a key principle of physics at the quantum level for the first time. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for creating complex quantum states useful in computing, communication, and sensing.

The distribution of halogens like chlorine reveals much about the formation of the lunar crust. An international research team has now shown in laboratory experiments that rocks with surprisingly high chlorine content formed on the near-side of the Moon. The results were published in "Nature Communications".