The brain region used for speech decoding also supports BCI cursor control

30 Apr 2025

Cursor control Left: schematic of the cursor BCI; neural activity was recorded by four 64-electrode arrays located in the left ventral precentral gyrus. Right: 3D brain reconstruction showing implanted array locations (black squares) and brain areas. (Courtesy: J. Neural Eng. 10.1088/1741 2552/add0e5)

Sending an email, typing a text message, or streaming a movie. Many of us do these activities every day. But what if you couldn’t move your muscles and navigate the digital world? This is where brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) come in.

BCIs implanted in the brain can bypass pathways damaged by illness and injury. They analyse neural signals and produce an output for the user, such as interacting with a computer.

Scientists developing BCIs have primarily focused on interpreting brain activity associated with movements to control a computer cursor. The user drives the BCI by imagining arm and hand movements, which often originate in the dorsal motor cortex. Speech BCIs have also been developed, which restore communication by decoding attempted speech from neural activity in sensorimotor cortical areas such as the ventral precentral gyrus.

 

Ultrashort electron beam sets new power record

11 Apr 2025 Isabelle Dumé

Extreme beams: Claudio Emma and Brendan O’Shea examine experimental apparatus at FACET-II in 2022. (Courtesy: Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US have produced the world’s most powerful ultrashort electron beam to date, concentrating petawatt-level peak powers into femtosecond-long pulses at an energy of 10 GeV and a current of around 0.1 MA. According to officials at SLAC’s Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET-II), the new beam could be used to study phenomena in materials science, quantum physics, and even astrophysics that were not accessible before.

High-energy electron beams are routinely employed as powerful probes in several scientific fields. To produce them, accelerator facilities like SLAC use strong electric fields to accelerate, focus, and compress bunches of electrons.

 

KATRIN sets a tighter limit on neutrino mass

16 Apr 2025

Analysing electrons: Installation of the inner electrode system of KATRIN's Main Spectrometer. (Courtesy: Markus Breig, KIT)

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN) have announced the most precise upper limit yet on the neutrino’s mass. Thanks to new data and upgraded techniques, the new limit – 0.45 electron volts (eV) at 90% confidence – is half that of the previous tightest constraint, and marks a step toward answering one of particle physics’s longest-standing questions.

Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that barely interact with matter, slipping through the universe unnoticed. They come in three types, or flavours: electron, muon, and tau. For decades, physicists assumed all three were massless, but that changed in the late 1990s when experiments revealed that neutrinos can oscillate between flavours as they travel. This flavour-shifting behaviour is only possible if neutrinos have mass.

CERN releases plans for the ‘most extraordinary instrument ever built’

02 Apr 2025 Michael Banks

Bigger and better: the feasibility study involved examining some 100 different scenarios for the collider before landing on a ring circumference of 90.7 km. (Courtesy: CERN)

The CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva has released plans for the 15bn Swiss Francs (£13bn) Future Circular Collider (FCC), a huge 91 km circumference machine. The three-volume feasibility study, released on 31 March, calls for the giant accelerator to collide electrons with positrons to study the Higgs boson in unprecedented detail. If built, the FCC would replace the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will end in the early 2040s.

Work on the FCC feasibility study began in 2020, and the report examines the physics objectives, geology, civil engineering, technical infrastructure, and territorial and environmental impact. It also discusses the R&D needed for the accelerators and detectors, and the socioeconomic benefits and costs.

 

Photon collisions in dying stars could create neutrons for heavy elements

12 Apr 2025

Heavy duty A high-energy photonic jet (white and blue) blasts through a collapsing star with a black hole at its centre. The red shows the cocoon where free neutrons may be available for the r-process. (Courtesy: LANL)

Matthew Mumpower at Los Alamos National Laboratory and colleagues in the US have unveiled a model that could help explain how heavy elements are forged within collapsing stars. The team suggests that energetic photons generated by newly forming black holes or neutron stars transmute protons within ejected stellar material into neutrons, providing ideal conditions for heavy elements to form.

Astrophysicists believe that elements heavier than iron are created in violent processes such as the explosions of massive stars and the mergers of neutron stars. One way this is thought to occur is the rapid neutron-capture process (r-process), whereby lighter nuclei created in stars capture neutrons in rapid succession. However, exactly where the r-process occurs is not well understood.

 

Top-quark pairs at ATLAS could shed light on the early universe

22 Apr 2025

Top observation CERN’s ATLAS experiment has confirmed that heavy quark–antiquark pairs are created in the collision of lead ions. (Courtesy: CERN/ATLAS Collaboration)

Physicists working on the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are the first to report the production of top quark–antiquark pairs in collisions involving heavy nuclei. CERN’s LHC creates a fleeting state of matter called the quark–gluon plasma by colliding lead ions. This is an extremely hot and dense soup of subatomic particles, including deconfined quarks and gluons. This plasma is believed to have filled the early universe microseconds after the Big Bang.

“Heavy-ion collisions at the LHC recreate the quark–gluon plasma in a laboratory setting,” Anthony Badea, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and one of the lead authors of a paper describing the research. In addition to boosting our understanding of the early universe, studying the quark–gluon plasma at the LHC could also provide insights into quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of how quarks and gluons interact.

 

Spectacular images of the cosmos released to celebrate Hubble’s 35 years in orbit

24 Apr 2025 Michael Banks

During Hubble’s operational life, the telescope has made nearly 1.7 million observations

A series of spectacular images of the cosmos has been released to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope‘s 35th anniversary in space. The images include pictures of Mars, planetary nebulae, and a spiral galaxy.

Hubble was launched into low-Earth orbit in April 1990, stowed in the payload bay of the space shuttle Discovery. The telescope experienced a difficult start as its 2.4 m primary mirror suffered from spherical aberration. This fault caused the curvature of the mirror to not bring light to focus at the same point. This was fixed three years later during a daring space walk in which astronauts successfully installed the COSTAR instrument.