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Category: mapping

Mapping ‘figure 8’ Fermi surfaces to pinpoint future chiral conductors

One of the biggest problems facing modern microelectronics is that computer chips can no longer be made arbitrarily smaller and more efficient. Materials used to date, such as copper, are reaching their limits because their resistivity increases dramatically when they become too small. Chiral materials could provide a solution here. These materials behave like left and right hands: they look almost identical and are mirror images of each other, but cannot be made to match.

“It is assumed that the resistivity in some chiral materials remains constant or even decreases as the chiral material becomes smaller. That is why we are working on using electronic chirality to develop materials for a new generation of microchips that are faster, more energy-efficient and more robust than today’s technologies,” says Professor Niels Schröter from the Institute of Physics at MLU. Until now, however, it has been difficult to produce thin layers of these materials without the left-and right-handed areas canceling each other out in their effects.

This is precisely where the new study, in which the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle was also involved, comes in. “For the first time, we have found materials that are not yet chiral themselves. However, they have the potential to be converted into electronically chiral materials with only a single-handedness through targeted distortion. These achiral materials can serve as so-called parent materials for engineering chiral conductors with reduced resistivity,” explains Schröter.

Synaptic-resolution connectomics: towards large brains and connectomic screening

Connectomics has delivered on its promise to map neuronal circuits at scale and at synaptic resolution. In this Review, Helmstaedter describes recent methodological achievements and remaining challenges in synaptic-resolution connectomics while synthesizing expanding connectomic mapping ambitions that include resolving local circuits of larger brains and screening of connectomes.

Framework sets new benchmarks for 3D atom maps in amorphous materials

Researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA published a step-by-step framework for determining the three-dimensional positions and elemental identities of atoms in amorphous materials. These solids, such as glass, lack the repeating atomic patterns seen in a crystal. The team analyzed realistically simulated electron-microscope data and tested how each step affected accuracy.

The team used algorithms to analyze rigorously simulated imaging data of nanoparticles—so small they’re measured in billionths of a meter. For amorphous silica, the primary component of glass, they demonstrated 100% accuracy in mapping the three-dimensional positions of the constituent silicon and oxygen atoms, with precision about seven trillionths of a meter under favorable imaging conditions.

While 3D atomic structure determination has a history of more than a century, its application has been limited to crystal structures. Such techniques depend on averaging a pattern that is repeated trillions of times.

We do not discover reality, we create it

We tend to think reality is out there waiting to be discovered. But philosopher Manuel Delaflor argues that experience, meaning, and ontology are active constructions, not passive receptions of a knowable world. Once we see that categories are created, not discovered, realism gives way to responsibility, and the question shifts from what reality is, to what reality are we choosing to create.

My sister is a graphic designer, someone who has spent two decades swimming in colour palettes. She once laid out some blues on her screen and asked me to name them. Azure, cerulean, cobalt, sapphire, she rattled off, pointing at squares I could only call “blue.” To her, they were as different as a dog and a horse. Her visual system had carved the continuous spectrum into slices mine simply could not access. That moment has stayed with me. If her blues are not my blues, and if training made the difference, then what else have I been missing? What categories do we walk around believing we discovered in the world, when in fact we manufactured them ourselves, through language, through habit, through purpose? And if this is true of something as basic as colour, what does it mean for everything else we think we see?

We tell ourselves a flattering story: out there is a world, pre-sorted into kinds, and our job is to discover those kinds. Rocks as rocks. Faces as faces. Colours sit waiting in the spectrum like crayons in a box. This is the myth of discovery, and it runs so deep we rarely notice it. It feels grounded, and we need grounding. It feels like the opposite of arrogance. Right? But examine it closely and the story collapses. I give you a hint on the reason: when something makes sense, it never means it is right. It means it clicks into place inside your existing maps. And that is why when we go around pretending to be certain about what “makes sense” is the easiest form of self-deception.

Hubble Images of 3I/ATLAS During Its Rare Alignment with the Sun-Earth Axis on January 22, 2026

Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026.

A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted here. The exposures display brightness maps of the glowing halo surrounding 3I/ATLAS. The glow is elongated by about 100,000 kilometers in the direction of the Sun, a length scale which is about ten times larger than the Earth’s diameter.

In a new paper that I published with Mauro Barbieri here, we alerted astronomers to this “full Moon phase” of 3I/ATLAS when observers from Earth will see it from the direction of the Sun to within an extremely small misalignment angle of just 0.012 radians. This rare alignment resulted in a brightness surge whose magnitude and growth rate are dictated by the composition and structure of the particles shed by jets of 3I/ATLAS. No new data other than the Hubble images was made public as of yet.

An ultrastructural map of a spinal sensorimotor circuit reveals the potential of astroglia modulation

Using cell reconstructions and synapse mapping in zebrafish, Koh and Avalos Arceo et. al. reveal a vertebrate local spinal sensorimotor circuit map, revealing how neurons and glia are structurally positioned in a circuit. This resource provides insight into how glia and synaptic thresholding could modulate information flow through complex neural networks.

A “living fossil”: for the first time, divers from France capture rare images of an emblematic species in the waters of Indonesia

The encounter, deep beneath the surface of Indonesia’s Maluku Islands, did not just produce striking images. It opened a rare window on one of the ocean’s most mysterious creatures: the coelacanth, a fish once written off as extinct for millions of years.

In October 2024, French divers Alexis Chappuis and Julien Leblond descended to around 145 metres off the Maluku archipelago, in eastern Indonesia. They were using advanced rebreather systems and specialised suits designed for long, deep technical dives.

For two years, Chappuis had been poring over charts and sonar data, mapping underwater cliffs and cold upwellings that might harbour coelacanths. The terrain he targeted was steep, fragmented rock riddled with ledges and crevices, a layout similar to known coelacanth habitats in other parts of the Indian Ocean.

Vibrational spectroscopy technique enables nanoscale mapping of molecular orientation at surfaces

Sum-frequency generation (SFG) is a powerful vibrational spectroscopy that can selectively probe molecular structures at surfaces and interfaces, but its spatial resolution has been limited to the micrometer scale by the diffraction limit of light.

In a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, investigators overcame this limitation by utilizing a highly confined near field within a plasmonic nanogap and successfully extended the SFG spectroscopy into a nanoscopic regime with ~10-nm spatial resolution.

The team also established a comprehensive theoretical framework that accurately describes the microscopic mechanisms of this near-field SFG process. These experimental and theoretical achievements collectively represent a groundbreaking advancement in near-field second-order nonlinear nanospectroscopy, enabling direct access to correlated chemical and topographic information of interfacial molecular systems at the nanoscale.

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