Year: 2025

Scientists at King’s College London have developed a nanoneedle-studded patch that can painlessly collect detailed molecular information from tissues, without cutting, scarring, or removing a single cell. The development could be a game-changer for patients who currently endure invasive procedures to diagnose conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Traditional biopsies are a common procedure performed worldwide. It involves removing small chunks of tissue, often with a needle or scalpel, causing pain, risk of complications, and delays in diagnosis.

For organs like the brain, repeat biopsies are rarely possible. But this new patch with tens of millions of nanoneedles 1,000 times thinner than a human hair offers a pain-free alternative. For many, this could mean earlier diagnosis and more regular monitoring, transforming how diseases are tracked and treated.
“We have been working on nanoneedles for twelve years, but this is our most exciting development yet. It opens a world of possibilities for people with brain cancer, Alzheimer’s, and for advancing personalised medicine,” said Dr Ciro Chiappini, the lead author of the study.

In science fiction films like Frankenstein and Re-Animator, the idea of reviving the dead has fascinated audiences for generations. While these tales were once purely fantastical, recent scientific research suggests a similar phenomenon may be occurring in real life—a “third state” of existence that lies between life and death.

Researchers have found that after an organism dies, some of its cells can continue functioning. Even more remarkably, these cells can sometimes acquire new capabilities they never exhibited while the organism was alive.

For years, physicists have worked to design clocks capable of measuring incredibly small durations of time with extreme precision. Quantum clocks, in particular, have advanced this goal by using the strange and powerful principles of quantum mechanics to reach astonishing levels of accuracy.

Yet, there has always been a trade-off. As these clocks become more precise, they consume more energy and generate more entropy—essentially, disorder and wasted heat. This link between precision and thermodynamic cost has long been considered unavoidable.

Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) technologies are playing a growing role in efforts to address climate change by trapping carbon dioxide emissions and converting them into useful fuels or chemicals. However, for these systems to be commercially viable, they must run continuously for thousands of hours—a goal that has been hampered by persistent technical issues like salt buildup inside electrochemical reactors.

Researchers at Rice University have discovered a surprisingly straightforward solution to one of the most critical bottlenecks in CO₂ electroreduction systems. Instead of using water to humidify carbon dioxide gas before it enters the reactor, the team bubbled the gas through a mild acid solution. This small change allowed the system to remain stable for over 4,500 hours—more than 50 times longer than standard water-based setups.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have achieved the most accurate control of a quantum bit (qubit) ever recorded, making just one mistake in 6.7 million single-qubit operations—an error rate of 0.000015 percent. This breakthrough, nearly ten times more precise than their previous world record set a decade ago, will be published in Physical Review Letters under the title Single-qubit gates with errors at the 10⁻⁷ level.

To illustrate how rare these errors now are, the team notes that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year (a probability of 1 in 1.2 million) than for one of their quantum logic gates to fail. This leap in reliability addresses one of the biggest obstacles to building practical quantum computers: maintaining accuracy across millions of operations.

Researchers in Japan have developed an ultra-compact, low-power radio module operating in the 150 GHz band, bringing 6G wireless connectivity closer to everyday mobile devices. Designed specifically for future 6G user equipment, the new module integrates a phased-array transceiver with key innovations that overcome the technical barriers traditionally associated with sub-terahertz communication.

The team, led by Professor Kenichi Okada from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the School of Engineering, Institute of Science Tokyo, developed the module in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and other partners. Their findings were presented at the 2025 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto.