NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency will begin building a moon base with near-monthly robotic landings starting in 2027, with astronauts potentially living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
An astronaut’s mystery illness could change the way NASA plans future missions
A health scare prompted the first ever early return from the International Space Station for a medical reason. Does it change the plan for deep space missions?
The strange quantum property of tomorrow’s insulator
Ultra-fast data transfer and superconductivity: Quantum materials offer significant technological prospects—if we can understand them at the atomic scale. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Salerno, the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, and the National Research Council of Italy, has succeeded in observing the “quantum metric” in a topological insulator—a unique geometric property of these materials, which conduct electricity only on their surface.
Published in Nature Materials, this work represents a major step toward mastering the materials of the future.
Not all materials conduct electricity in the same way. These differences arise from the behavior of the electrons that make up the material. Among them, topological insulators—discovered in 2006—are of particular interest to scientists. Like conventional insulators, they block the flow of electric current through their interior, yet, remarkably, allow it to flow freely across their surface.
Structural plasticity of the membrane-bound protein degradation assembly supports bacterial adaptation to stress
Iqbal et al. show that HflK/C conformational dynamics regulate bacterial adaptation to aminoglycoside stress. Using disulfide crosslinking to constrain the closed state, they demonstrate that stabilizing a closed HflK/C assembly impairs stress recovery and reveal a stress-induced conformation with dual openings that may facilitate FtsH-dependent membrane proteolysis.
Prof. RHO Jun-seok Advances Metalens Technology from Manufacturing to Display Applications in Two Nature Papers
Nanoprinting imprinting metalenses 100x faster than lithography.
Professor RHO Jun-seok from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at POSTECH has gained international attention for developing a mass-production process for metalenses and a switchable 2D-3D display technology based on them. The two studies were simultaneously published in the April 30 issue of Nature. This marks the first case in Korea of a researcher publishing two separate papers as corresponding author in the same issue of the journal.
A metalens is a flat optical device that controls light using nanoscale structures rather than curved glass. By replacing bulky glass lenses with engineered surface patterns, optical systems become far thinner and lighter. Because this enables control of light at scales smaller than its wavelength, metamaterials are often regarded as a Nobel Prize–worthy field of research.
The first study addressed a key barrier to commercialization: large-scale manufacturing. Production has so far relied on expensive and complex semiconductor fabrication processes due to the extreme precision required, making it slow, costly, and largely limited to laboratory research. To overcome this, Prof. RHO’s team developed a Roll-to-Roll Nanoimprint process enabling continuous production using a cylindrical roller. Instead of fabricating nanoscale structures one by one on rigid molds, flexible polymer molds were used to imprint patterns onto thin films. This shifts fabrication from a one-at-a-time process to continuous factory-scale production. The team produced over 300 metalenses per second, about 100 times faster than conventional methods, while maintaining consistent performance over a 200-meter process.
Quantum computing may need far more than power as future data centers scale up
As quantum computing moves closer to large-scale deployment, new research is examining its future energy, water, and material demands.
David McCollum, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory distinguished scientist, is leading the project. McCollum is also a joint faculty professor in the Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environmental Policy (CETEP) at the Howard H. Baker Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The work aims to inform the rollout of quantum infrastructure over the coming decades. It examines technologies evolving from experimental environments to commercial-scale use. Quantum computing is expected to unlock advances in drug discovery, material science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
“Quantum computing presents extraordinary opportunities, from accelerating scientific discovery to solving complex optimization problems,” McCollum said. “At the same time, it introduces new questions about the energy, water, and materials required to operate these systems at scale. Our research aims to get ahead of those questions before resource and supply chain constraints start to bite.”
GD2 CAR T Cells Show Promise Against DMG
In a small clinical trial, a CAR T-cell therapy—a type of immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer—shrank tumors in several children and young adults with diffuse midline gliomas. This fast-growing form of brain and spinal cord cancer typically causes death within a year of diagnosis.
In the trial, several participants were still alive 2 years or more after receiving the treatment.
Patients in the trial had a type of diffuse midline gliomas known as H3K27M mutant, a genetic change that is found in about 80% of younger patients with these cancers Exit Disclaimer. Researchers at Stanford University, who led the study, designed the experimental CAR T-cell therapy to target a molecule called GD2 that is produced in large amounts by H3K27M-mutant diffuse midline gliomas.
The Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a formally defined Theoretical model of Consciousness
Manuel Blum (Carnegie Mellon University)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/man…
The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning.
We define the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a formal global workspace model of consciousness specified as a 7-tuple. Its 10 million processors self-define a multimodal language, Brainish, together with a dictionary of chunks. Each chunk is a 5-tuple that contains and defines a 2-tuple Brainish word.
Our principal contribution is not theorems—though there is one—but theoretical insights into several central puzzles of consciousness. From this formal definition follow a proposed solution to the binding problem, an explanation of how the suffering of pain is generated, and testable predictions derived from the CTM.