Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises a more effective protection against cyber threats. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles. Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the ‘quantum repeater’. They report their results in Nature Communications.

The IPCC has developed the Global Warming Potential metric, a unit that compares a specific gas’s contribution to climate change to that of carbon dioxide. Nitrogen trifluoride is particularly bad, with a GWP about 17,000 times higher than carbon dioxide. But NF3 is critical in the semiconductor industry for etching and cleaning, and its use has increased more than twentyfold over the past 30 years. In the JVST:B, researchers develop a machine learning framework to predict the GWP of potential alternative materials.

When aggressive cancer cells spread through the body, they cause metastasis, which significantly reduces a person’s chance of survival. For this spreading to take place, they can switch between different cell states that move with different strategies. In Biomicrofluidics, by AIP Publishing, a team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience explored the mechanics at play that enable two types of metastatic cancer cells to achieve the same result of movement, with only one doing so via tissue manipulation. The research is among the first to reveal a direct link between cancer cell deformability and active migration through small gaps.

Our body’s “blood factory” consists of specialized tissue made up of bone cells, blood vessels, nerves and other cell types. Now, researchers have succeeded for the first time in recreating this cellular complexity in the laboratory using only human cells. The novel system could reduce the need for animal experiments for many applications.