The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has published its latest compilation of gravitational-wave detections, showing the universe is echoing all over with a kaleidoscope of cosmic collisions.

The catalogue of all the new 128 events observed by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA from May 2023 to January 2024 is being published. It reveals an even greater variety of binary pairs producing gravitational waves than previously known. The new observations allow us to better understand black hole formation, to probe the cosmological evolution of the universe and provide increasingly rigorous confirmations of the theory of general relativity.

Researchers at the University of Vienna have uncovered a surprising phenomenon: polymer chains with segments that simply fluctuate at different intensities can spontaneously develop directional, persistent motion when densely packed – even though nothing in the system points them in any particular direction. This "entropic tug of war," driven by fundamental physical constraints, could help explain how DNA organizes and moves inside living cells, and may lead to new materials. The study was currently published in Physical Review X.

University of Warwick and MIT scientists reveal hidden microscopic networks on catalyst surfaces that could lead to cleaner and greener chemical processes.

Electrons can be ‘kicked across’ solar materials at almost the fastest speed nature allows, scientists have discovered – challenging long-held theories about how solar energy systems work. The finding could help researchers design more efficient ways of harvesting sunlight and converting it into electricity.

In experiments capturing events lasting just 18 femtoseconds – less than 20 quadrillionths of a second – researchers at the University of Cambridge observed charge separation happening within a single molecular vibration.

“We deliberately designed a system that, according to conventional theory, should not have transferred charge this fast,” said Dr Pratyush Ghosh, Research Fellow, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and first author of the study. “By conventional design rules, this system should have been slow and that’s what makes the result so striking.

“Instead of drifting randomly, the electron is launched in one coherent burst. The vibration acts like a molecular catapult. The vibrations don’t just accompany the process, they actively drive it.”

A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second – one second holds about eight times more femtoseconds than all the hours that have passed since the universe began. At that scale, atoms inside molecules are physically vibrating. 

The research, published in Nature Communications, challenges decades of design rules in solar energy research.

Rechargeable batteries are everywhere — from portable electronic devices and electric vehicles to renewable energy storage. Battery failures are often due to the loss or chemical degradation of the electrolyte. An international research team involving the Helmholtz Institute Mainz, a branch of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin, and New York University has now addressed the question of how to enable nondestructive diagnosis of the electrolyte through the battery casing using special nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. The results have been published in the journal Chemical Science.

Distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing is an emerging technology that has been used for geophysical exploration, earthquake monitoring and structural health monitoring, etc., with continuous monitoring capability over long fiber spans. However, the technology still suffers from the trade-off between measurement speed and dynamic strain measurement range. Recently, researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Chile) have developed a frequency-comb spectrum-correlation reflectometry based distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing technique, which achieves an order-of-magnitude improvement in frequency response over the state-of-the-art fast frequency scanning methods, meanwhile it achieves more than tenfold enhancement in dynamic strain measurement range in comparison with the existing phase-demodulated systems. This breakthrough represents a new paradigm for distributed fiber-optic sensing and will meet the urgent demands across a wide range of industrial fields.

POSTECH Professor Kilwon Cho’s Team Develops a Wearable Vibration Sensor Capable of Accurately Detecting Minute Physiological Vibrations.