Research at Lund University in Sweden has found a new way to create nano-sized magnetic particles using ultrafast laser light pulses. The discovery could pave the way for new and more energy-efficient technical components and become useful in the quantum computers of the future.

Magnetic skyrmions are sometimes described as magnetic vortices. Unlike ferromagnetic states — which occur in conventional magnets such as compasses and refrigerator magnets — the skyrmion state is quite peculiar: the orientation of the magnetization does not point in the same direction everywhere in the material, but is instead best described as a kind of swirling magnetism.

Skyrmions are of great interest to both basic researchand industry, as they can be used to manufactu...

Saturn’s moon Titan looks very much like Earth from space, with rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain tumbling through a thick atmosphere. While these landscapes may look familiar, they are composed of materials that are undoubtedly different — liquid methane streams streak Titan’s icy surface and nitrogen winds build hydrocarbon sand dunes.

The presence of these materials — whose mechanical ...

A new era of mitochondrial genome editing has begun. Scientists successfully achieve A to G base conversion, the final missing piece of the puzzle in gene-editing technology.

Researchers from the Center for Genome Engineering within the Institute for Basic Science developed a new gene-editing platform called transcription activator-like effector-linked deaminases, or TALED. TALEDs are base editors capable of performing A-to-G base conversion in mitochondria. This discovery was a culmination of a decades-long journey to cure human genetic diseases, and TALED can be considered to be the final missing piece of the puzzle in gene-editing technology.

From the identification of the first restriction enzyme in 1968, the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 1985, and the demo...

Scientists have made a major breakthrough on how the spin evolves in the nanoworld on extremely short time scales. Sharing real-time information requires complex networks of systems. A promising approach for speeding up data storage devices consists of switching the magnetization, or the electrons’ spin, of magnetic materials with ultra-short femtosecond laser pulses. But, how the spin evolves in the nanoworld on extremely short time scales, in one millionth of one billionth of a second, has remained largely mysterious...