Arsenic contamination in drinking water is a global issue, with over 200 million people estimated to be at risk. While water treatment plants remove the metal, the problem persists in low-resource areas or undertreated well water. So, researchers reporting in ACS Omega have designed a simple solution: an arsenic-removing teabag. The system is inexpensive, costing around 7 cents to clean a liter of water, and highly effective, removing over 90% of the arsenic ions present. 

Modern technology demands compact, efficient optical devices for cameras, sensors, and quantum systems. Metasurfaces offer nanoscale control of light, yet strong confinement remains difficult. While traditional cavities rely on mirrors, bound states in the continuum (BICs) trap light through destructive interference. A recent review in Opto-Electronic Advances highlights BIC materials across wavelengths, machine-learning-driven designs, emerging topological forms like super-BICs, and scalable applications in lasing, sensing, and nonlinear optics.

In-memory computing, which processes data directly within memory units, is emerging as a powerful solution to overcome the energy and speed limitations of modern computers. Scientists in China have developed a quantum-enhanced stochastic system using a room-temperature quantum memory. It computes by accumulating randomly generated photons, enabling secure and accelerated processing. This approach turns intrinsic quantum randomness into a computational resource, provides intrinsic security against eavesdropping, and paves the way for future quantum computing architectures.

When laser flashes hit matter, electrons are knocked off their orbits around the atomic nuclei. This can generate extremely hot plasmas composed of charged particles – ions and electrons. As they report in the journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71429-5), researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now observed this ionization process in more detail than ever before. To do so, they combined two state-of-the-art lasers: the X-ray free-electron laser and the high-intensity optical laser ReLaX at the HED-HiBEF experiment station at the European XFEL in Schenefeld, near Hamburg. Their findings not only deliver fundamental insights into the interaction of high-energy lasers and matter under extreme conditions; this new method also opens up new possibilities for diagnostics in laser fusion research.

Kavli IPMU's Shigeki Matsumoto and Jie Sheng have shown torsion-balance experiments — precision instruments originally built to test the equivalence principle — could double as detectors for very light dark matter.

New theoretical models, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, connect, for the first time, the magnetism at the surface of long-dead stellar remnants (white dwarfs) with recent evidence of magnetism at the cores of their dying progenitors (red giants). The team, led by astrophysicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), argues that these magnetic fields might originate early in the stars’ lives, and survive their entire evolution, emerging as ‘fossil fields’ at the surfaces of older remnants.  A better understanding of these processes can also help to better understand our own Sun’s future.

A joint research team led by Professor PARK Kyoung-Duck and Associate Director SUH Yung Doug of the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has succeeded in realizing a high-efficiency quantum light source that emits bright lights even at room temperature. The achievement overcomes a longstanding limitation of two-dimensional semiconductors—atomically thin materials typically about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair—which previously required either cryogenic temperatures or complex electrical gating structures to produce efficient light emission.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) found in tap water, at levels currently considered safe, affected the development of embryos, causing irreversible damage that may be passed on to future generations.