Light bulbs come in many shapes and styles: globes, twists, flame-like candle tips and long tubes. But there aren’t many thin options. Now, researchers report in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they have created a paper-thin LED that gives off a warm, sun-like glow. The LEDs could light up the next generation of phone and computer screens and other light sources while helping users avoid disruptions to their sleep patterns.

Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and -electrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: they switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control. Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford now show that bi-stable ferroaxial states can be switched with single flashes of polarized terahertz light. This enables ultrafast, light-controlled and stable switching, a platform for next-generation non-volatile data storage.

Levitation has long been pursued by stage magicians and physicists alike. For audiences, the sight of objects floating midair is wondrous. For scientists, it’s a powerful way of isolating objects from external disturbances. This is particularly useful in case of rotors, as their torque and angular momentum, used to measure gravity, gas pressure, momentum, among other phenomena in both classical and quantum physics, can be strongly influenced by friction. Freely suspending the rotor could drastically reduce these disturbances – and now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed, created, and analyzed such a macroscopic device, bringing the magic of near-frictionless levitation down to earth through precision engineering. 

Researchers have created a polymer “Chinese lantern” that can snap into more than a dozen curved, three-dimensional shapes by compressing or twisting the original structure. This rapid shape-shifting behavior can be controlled remotely using a magnetic field, allowing the structure to be used for a variety of applications.

One of the key steps in developing new materials is “property identification,” which has long relied on massive amounts of experimental data and expensive equipment, limiting research efficiency. A KAIST research team has introduced a new technique that combines “physical laws,” which govern deformation and interaction of materials and energy, with artificial intelligence. This approach allows for rapid exploration of new materials even under data-scarce conditions and provides a foundation for accelerating design and verification across multiple engineering fields, including materials, mechanics, energy, and electronics.

KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced on the 2nd of October that Professor Seunghwa Ryu’s research group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Jae Hyuk Lim’s group at Kyung Hee University (President Jinsang Kim) and Dr. Byungki Ryu at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (President Namkyun Kim), proposed a new method that can accurately determine material properties with only limited data. The method uses Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML), which directly incorporates physical laws into the AI learning process.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba and The University of Tokyo have discovered that radio waves emitted from primordial hydrogen gas in the early Universe contain a "fingerprint" that reveals the properties of dark matter. Theoretical calculations have accurately reproduced the distribution of dark matter and the state of hydrogen gas in the early Universe. Radio observatories planned for construction on the Moon are expected to detect these signals, advancing our understanding of the true nature of dark matter.