In a paper published in Science Bulletin, an international team of physicists from Singapore and China demonstrates how quasi-bound states in the continuum (QBICs) can induce abrupt lateral beam shifts in the terahertz regime. By applying Brillouin zone folding to a compound grating waveguide, the researchers created a QBIC band that enables sudden and significant beam shifts, offering new insights into real-space QBIC properties and potential applications in sensing and wavelength multiplexing.

A recent paper published in National Science Review presents a multi-space alignment approach for cross-species and cross-modality electroencephalogram (EEG) based epileptic seizure detection. By employing deep learning techniques, including domain adaptation and knowledge distillation, it aligns cross-species and cross-modality EEG signals to enhance the detection capability beyond traditional within-species and within-modality models. Experiments on multiple scalp and intracranial EEG datasets of humans and canines demonstrated substantial improvements in the detection accuracy, achieving over 90% AUC scores for cross-species and cross-modality seizure detection with extremely limited labeled data from the target species/modality. This is the first study that demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating heterogeneous data from different species and modalities to improve EEG-based seizure detection performance.

Black holes are fundamental to the structure of galaxies and critical in our understanding of gravity, space, and time. A stellar mass black hole is a type of black hole that forms from the gravitational collapse of a massive star at the end of its life cycle. These black holes typically have masses ranging from about 3 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. 

Sometimes black holes generate beams of ionized gas (plasma) that shoot outward at nearly light speed. Although discovered more than a century ago, how and why jets occur has remained a mystery, described as one of the “wonders of physics”. 

Prof. Kazutaka Yamaoka from Nagoya University in Japan, along with his colleagues from University of Toyama and other international institutes, have discovered key conditions needed for a stellar black hole to create plasma jets. Their findings, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, show that when superheated gas material experiences a rapid shrinkage towards the black hole, jet formation occurs.

Development of a new type of optical receiver, able to restore chaotic signals in free-space optical communication links distorted by atmospheric turbulence. By use of a system of optical antennas integrated into a programmable photonic chip, the receiver can adapt in real time, maintaining the integrity of the signal even in harsh atmospheric conditions. The study by a team of researchers led by Télécom Paris and the Politecnico di Milano, has just been published in Light: Science & Applications, and paves the way for the use of chaos-based encryption for secure, high-speed communication in hostile environments.

Imagining a future where we can monitor the health of the planet's forests and crops with millimetre precision is no longer science fiction. This is the objective of INTERSEN, a project included in the 2021 State Research Plan and led by the Visual Engineering (eViS) research group at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, which is committed to the intelligent combination of spatial data to improve the way we understand and care for our environment.

What if humanity's search for life on other planets returns no hits? An international team of researchers, led by ETH Zurich's Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics studied what insights can be gained from a 'no life detected' scenario in future exoplanet surveys.