People love their electric cars. But not so much the bulky batteries and related power systems that take up precious cargo space. Help could be on the way from a gallium oxide-based transistor under development at the University at Buffalo.

In a study published in the June edition of IEEE Electron Device Letters, electrical engineers describe how the tiny electronic switch can handle more than 8,000 volts, an impressive feat considering it’s about as thin as a sheet of paper.

The tr...

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) play a major role in galaxy evolution. Astronomers from SRON and RuG have now used a record-setting sample of galaxies to confirm that galaxy mergers have a positive effect on igniting AGNs. They were able to compile about 10 times more pictures of merging galaxies than previous studies by using a machine-learning algorithm.

One of the bigger questions in astronomy is how galaxies evolve from clouds of gas and dust to the beautiful spiral structures observed in our galactic neighborhood. So-called active galactic nuclei (AGNs) comprise interesting research objects to answer part of the question, because there appears to be co-evolution between AGNs and galaxies...

A team of researchers at UCLA has set a new record for preparing and measuring the quantum bits, or qubits, inside of a quantum computer without error. The techniques they have developed make it easier to build quantum computers that outperform classical computers for important tasks, including the design of new materials and pharmaceuticals. The research is published in the peer-reviewed, online open-access journal, npj Quantum Information, published by Nature and including the exceptional research on quantum information and quantum computing.

Currently, the most powerful quantum computers are “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” (NISQ) devices and are very sensitive to errors...

Astronomers have caught a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. This flare-up was captured in a new movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The black hole and its companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth. The black hole in MAXI J1820+070 has a mass about eight times that of the sun, identifying it as a so-called stellar-mass black hole, formed by the destruction of a massive star. (This is in contrast to supermassive black holes that contain millions or billions of times the sun’s mass.)

The companion star orbiting the black hole has about half the mass of the sun...