Physicists at Peking University have uncovered a new way to confine light far beyond conventional limits — without relying on metals and their inherent energy dissipation. By formulating the singular dispersion equation, the team discovered narwhal-shaped wavefunctions that trap light at deep-subwavelength volumes in purely dielectric materials. The advance, dubbed singulonics, could pave the way for ultra-efficient photonic chips, new quantum technologies, and imaging tools with unprecedented resolution.

An ancient genetic event may hold the key to how plants survive in metal-contaminated environments. Scientists have discovered that a duplication of phytochelatin synthase (PCS) genes—crucial enzymes for detoxifying toxic metals—occurred millions of years ago and remains conserved in flowering plants today. These twin gene copies, known as D1 and D2, evolved distinct but complementary functions: while D1 plays a general role in detoxification, D2 exhibits exceptional catalytic activity against cadmium and arsenic. Functional tests in Malus domestica (MdPCS1, MdPCS2) and Medicago truncatula (MtPCS1, MtPCS2) revealed that both copies are indispensable for maintaining metal balance, unveiling a deep evolutionary strategy for resilience.

A zero-shot comprehensive benchmark of 19 universal machine learning interatomic potentials re- veals that strategic training data and particularly non-equilibrium atomic configurations deliver five to seventeen times greater improvement than architectural sophistication for predicting cleavage en- ergies, a property governing surface stability critical for catalysis, electron emission devices, and next- generation battery interfaces.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan report a link between deep sleep and cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds and supports the brain and spinal cord. The study demonstrates how changes in cerebrospinal fluid signals during sleep—as measured by fMRI—are time-locked to slow brain waves and other neural events. These findings, published in PNAS, offer a clue as to why stable sleep is important for normal brain function, particularly within the brain network that controls learning and memory.