That's why the scientists pioneered Quantum Phononic Links (QPLs) — an approach for long-range coupling between qubits that leans on phonons — quasiparticles that carry vibration energy — to convey information. By contrast, conventional methods, like surface acoustic waves — high-frequency sound vibrations — demand complex designs and extra hardware.
"One of the key challenges in quantum computing is long-range qubit connectivity," Maksym Myronov, an associate professor of semiconductor materials and devices at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and first author of the study, said in a statement. "Our work introduces a new concept in which phonons act as a quantum bus, enabling distant qubits to exchange quantum information while remaining fully compatible with semiconductor technology."
In the study, the scientists said the most promising way to achieve a quantum computer that's capable of large-scale processing and takes advantage of QPLs would be a qubit modality known as "semiconductor hole spin qubits."
A "hole" here refers to the absence of an electron in a material, but it can act like a particle and have a spin state — a property used to encode quantum information — where the 1s and 0s of data would be represented by the direction of the particle's spin state.
To demonstrate this technology, they created a prototype QPU consisting of silicon with a thin germanium crystal layer, a specialized material they called compressively strained germanium on silicon (cs-GoS). Germanium is an especially useful material for quantum computing, the scientists said, as it has natural properties that reduce decoherence — the loss of quantum information due to external interference.
Hole spin qubits combine long quantum coherence times — how long they can retain quantum information — with the ability to communicate using electron impulses in control systems. But they struggle to form bonds and share quantum information with qubits they don't directly neighbor. In any large-scale system, for instance, enabling this "quantum coupling" between distant qubits is essential for quantum error correction techniques to work effectively across the breadth of a massive system, the scientists said.
Other proposed long-range communications approaches, such as "charge shunting" — redirecting capacitors to reduce sensitivity to charge noise, or surface acoustic waves — have fundamental limitations regarding scalability, both in terms of their size and in maintaining coherence. That's where QPLs come in.
QPLs are engineered phononic waveguides and cavities that both confine and guide acoustic modes within a compressively strained germanium "quantum well," where a quantum well is an ultrathin layer that acts as a guide.
In the study, the researchers focused on qubits using valence-band holes — the absence of electrons at absolute zero — hosted using cs-GoS. With QPLs, the scientists sent sound-like vibrations through the specialized material to carry quantum information between the distant qubits.
Spin states in this material are highly sensitive to lattice deformations, which enable precise control and the coupling of spin states with vibrational energy. Essentially, this allows the spin state to be distinguishable from its electron counterpart, enabling the phononic coupling strategies. The technique they adopted permitted direct coupling between the phonons and the hole spins.
By using a slow wave velocity (the speed of a quantum particle) and a short wavelength for acoustic excitations, the scientists used QPLs to link qubits separated by less than a micrometer (one-thousandth of a millimeter) and those up to 300 mm (11.8 inches) apart.
QPLs are not only promising for quantum computing, the scientists pointed out in the study. By utilizing phonons as the connections, this technique offers a versatile interface for hybrid quantum systems — conventional computers with quantum computing functionality. This could enable coherent interconnection of semiconductor spin qubits with other quantum platforms, such as cloud-based quantum computing.
The combination of phononic engineering and hole-spin physics makes cs-GoS a promising platform for next-generation quantum architectures, they added, since it could achieve both long-range coherent coupling and large-scale integration.
Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!
'> New quantum chip taps into weird quasiparticles to get qubits to communicate over long distances filled the universe in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.
Physicists want to pin down how this soup-ification happened, by measuring the so-called equation of state of nuclear matter. "For water, it tells you how pressure, temperature and density are linked, and therefore when it freezes, boils or expands," study co-author Rutik Manikandhan, a postdoctoral physics scholar at The Ohio State University, told Live Science in an email. For nuclear matter, "it is the basic rulebook for matter under the most extreme conditions in nature, such as the cores of neutron stars," Manikandhan added.
The "critical point" is a key landmark in that rulebook "For water, it is the point where the boundary between liquid and steam disappears," Manikandhan said, and theorists have long suspected that nuclear matter has a similar point. At extremely high temperatures, matter melts smoothly and gradually into quark-gluon plasma, but at higher densities, the change may become abrupt.
The critical point would mark where one kind of transition turns into the other. Some recent calculations place this point within reach of RHIC's lower-energy collisions. "But all of this is still conjectured and there is nothing concrete yet, either from the experimentalists or theorists," Manikandhan said.
The work also matters for cosmology. "Because the matter we create in these collisions resembles the matter that filled the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang, mapping how it behaves helps us understand how the universe evolved from a hot soup of quarks and gluons into the protons and neutrons that make up everything today," Manikandhan said.
The central part of the three-story STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Scientists recently used the detector to study the conditions of the early universe, just milliseconds after the Big Bang. (Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)A dip where a smooth trend was expected
To explore this territory, the researchers ran RHIC at a range of collision energies. The lower the energy, the more tightly the colliding matter was squeezed. For its lowest-energy runs, STAR used a "fixed-target" setup, in which a beam of gold nuclei strikes "a thin gold foil placed inside the detector," Manikandhan said, instead of a second, oncoming beam. This produces the densest matter RHIC can make.
Collision energies are measured in electron volts (the energy an electron gains when accelerated across 1 volt). That is a minuscule amount, so particle physicists usually work in billions of electron volts, or giga electron volts (GeV). One GeV is roughly the energy locked up in the mass of a single proton, according to Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. The team analyzed roughly 1 billion collisions at energies between 3 and 7.7 GeV per pair of colliding protons or neutrons. That is the bottom of RHIC's range, which reaches 200 GeV.
In each collision, the team measured how hard charged particles were flung sideways out of the fireball — a quantity known as transverse momentum. The researchers then looked for correlations between the particles. A correlation measures whether two things tend to change together. Here, the team checked whether pairs of particles from the same collision tended to both be flung harder than average, or both more gently. That reveals something about the fireball as a whole. If a fireball is slightly hotter, or expands more forcefully, all of its particles get an extra sideways kick together.
"Those correlations reflect how much the temperature and the flow of the fireball fluctuate," Manikandhan said.
Close to a critical point, the matter's heat capacity — the amount of energy needed to raise its temperature — is expected to shoot up. That makes the fireball's temperature harder to budge, so the correlations should weaken. "If the matter approaches a critical point or a phase change, we would expect to see those correlations change in an unusual, non-smooth way as we vary the collision energy," Manikandhan said.
That is what the team saw in the most head-on collisions. "Instead of changing smoothly with energy, the correlations show a dip," Manikandhan said. The researchers compared the data with a smooth trend anchored by earlier STAR measurements at higher energies. The dip departs from that trend with a statistical significance of 5 sigma, the standard physicists usually demand before treating a signal as real. It means that if the true trend were smooth, random scatter in the data would produce such a pronounced dip only about once in 3.5 million tries.
"A smooth trend is what you'd expect from ordinary nuclear matter, so a dip suggests something more interesting is happening at those conditions," Manikandhan said.
By contrast, a widely used computer simulation of the collisions, which contains no critical point, reproduced the overall trend but not the dip. Off-center collisions showed only a faint hint of the same feature, which is too weak to count as evidence on its own.
Not the final word yet
"The result is suggestive, not proof of a critical point," Manikandhan said. Effects unrelated to a critical point can also shape these fluctuations, and how much of the dip they could explain remains unclear, the researchers noted.
Still, the dip "does point to a set of conditions where the behavior of nuclear matter changes, and it gives theorists a new, precise measurement to test their calculations against," Manikandhan said.
Next, the team plans to use the correlations to "extract the specific heat of the hot matter," Manikandhan said. They will then compare it with supercomputer simulations that calculate the behavior of quarks and gluons from first principles.
The researchers also plan to test the dip against more theoretical models and combine it with other measurements, such as fluctuations in the number of protons produced in the collisions. "Only when different measurements agree can we say confidently whether a critical point exists," Manikandhan said.
'> Scientists recreate the universe's first moments and find something they didn't expect
Earth glows like a half moon while a giant aurora writhes over the North Pole in this ultraviolet image from the new Smile spacecraft. (Image credit: ESA & CAS/Smile/UVI CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)Quick facts
What it is: An aurora on the sunlit side of Earth
Where it is: Over the North Pole, as seen from about 75,000 miles away
When it was shared: Sept. 30
The debut images from a new Earth-observing satellite have just given us a view of the impossible: giant auroras rippling over the North Pole in broad daylight.
Earth's auroras are one of our planet's signature wonders — a sight worth advertising in interstellar travel guides, alongside our perfect total solar eclipses, bright shooting stars and majestic blobfish. They are the beautiful result of electrical storms in the atmosphere, appearing when charged solar particles skate along Earth's magnetic-field lines and collide with light-emitting molecules near the poles. (Auroras do exist on other planets, but they are usually not in bright visible colors like ours.)
To human eyes, auroras come out only at night and rarely stray from the poles. That's what makes these first observations from the joint European-Chinese Smile mission, which officially began science operations this week, so special.
Captured in ultraviolet light, the stunning images show a huge, serpent-like ring of charged particles coiling around the North Pole in July 2026. In the foreground, Earth appears ghostly and featureless, glowing like a half moon. The aurora writhes around our planet's sunlit side, covering about a third of it, while Earth's dark nightside bleeds into the background sky. Far behind, bright stars fall like raindrops as Smile shifts subtly in its orbit.
Smile tested its soft X-ray imager on the light of the distant supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (center), located 11,000 light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO )The view alone is worth smiling about, but the new images also promise exciting science to come. Taken just two weeks after scientists first turned Smile's Ultraviolet Aurora Imager on, the observations show that the satellite's instruments are working as they should and that the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Chinese Academy of Sciences mission can officially begin.
Launched on May 19, Smile will spend the next three years watching Earth from a highly elliptical orbit that takes it about 75,000 miles (121,000 kilometers) over the North Pole — about a third of the way to the moon. From there, Smile can observe the North Pole for a record-breaking 45 hours at a time, offering an unprecedented view of solar activity there.
In addition to the Ultraviolet Aurora Imager, Smile carries three more science instruments to detect X-rays, magnetic fields and light ions over Earth.
This week, scientists also tested the spacecraft's soft X-ray imager by pointing it at the distant supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, located about 11,000 light-years from Earth (image above). Although the camera is working fine, the detector is still picking up a bit too much light when aimed at Earth, so it will require a bit more calibration from scientists on the ground.
'> First photos from Smile spacecraft show Earth like you've never seen it before
, who often struggled to breathe from severe
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
But it wasn't just the imitation that made Jack famous; it was also that she seemed to relish the suffering of a man she purportedly hated. In the video, Jack's owner even claimed that she had a favorite cough.
The parrot appeared to be experiencing a complex emotion that in humans is known as schadenfreude, or pleasure at seeing another's pain. Literally translated from German as "harm joy," it's a feeling that might emerge when a rival coworker gets fired, or when a rude neighbor has their package stolen.
When a cat seems a little too happy watching a human stub their toe, or a horse seems to grin at a person stepping in poop, their owners might also interpret their behavior as schadenfreude.
But can any animals really experience such a complicated emotion? Or is this a classic case of anthropomorphization?
A complex emotion
Animals probably do not experience schadenfreude, according to researchers who study animal behavior and intelligence. However, the question hasn't received much attention in formal research. That's partly due to limitations of animal behavior methodology, but also because the question is bound up with how we define and communicate emotion in the first place.
"The study of complex emotions is incredibly difficult when you're talking about an animal that cannot communicate their emotions linguistically," Zachary Silver, an assistant professor of psychology who leads the canine intelligence lab at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told Live Science. "We don't have the ability to be as precise as we like to be in the scientific community."
Silver explained that researchers can look at behavior, neurological signals or hormonal activity to make an educated guess about what an animal might be feeling. A dog that has its ears back and tail tucked, for instance, is probably experiencing a negative emotion, while one wagging its tail is feeling a positive one.
But "aside from positive and negative, without words to describe the emotion, it becomes very difficult to disentangle," Silver said. The dog could be happy, but it could also just be interested in something new. "It's just so hard for us to say with any definitive nature that we really can know exactly what emotion is going on there," Silver said.
Animal behavior researchers try to avoid anthropomorphizing animals (attributing human qualities to them) without evidence. When a cat or dog comforts a grieving human, for example, it could just be that the behavior was previously reinforced by rewarding the animal with treats or pets, rather than a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Similarly, Jack the parrot could have been mimicking coughs just for attention.
When cats make trouble for their owners, they may not be experiencing schadenfreude but rather just want attention. (Image credit: Zhenny-zhenny via Shutterstock)To truly experience a complicated emotion like schadenfreude, an animal needs to understand the emotional states of both itself and others — a concept called theory of mind.
"Dogs may have some ability to attribute mental states like emotions, thoughts, beliefs, intentions to other individuals, but this really only occurs in very select contexts and in really kind of a rudimentary way," Silver said. Because of this, "it's exceedingly unlikely that dogs would be able to experience schadenfreude in the way that we as humans do."
David Stahlman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Mary Washington, agreed that such emotional capacity in animals is unlikely. He said that animals do not seem to have the ability to recognize their own emotional states, though he noted that not all animal behavior researchers agree.
"There's a difference between the affect, the emotional behavior, and then the recognition of the emotional behavior in oneself," Stahlman said. If nonhuman animals were to have this capability, he suspected it would probably be found in highly social great apes, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Schadenfreude, in particular, would require animals to live in close social groups, since it requires knowledge of the individual experiencing the harm and whether it's deserved.
In hierarchical groups, it's possible that the suffering of one animal might benefit another and lead to something resembling happiness, Stahlman said, but he doubts this would ever qualify as true schadenfreude.
"The kind of Machiavellian stuff is a very human thing," he said.
Nevertheless, “there is a lot of data pointing in the direction that animals do have really deep capacities for emotional intelligence,” said Kaeli Swift, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Washington and author of the Corvid Research blog.
Swift noted that studies of some corvid species have found evidence of emotional recognition, fairness and "some of the strongest evidence across the animal world" for theory of mind. However, when it comes to studying an emotion as complex and subjective as schadenfreude, she said that researchers "haven’t quite crossed that threshold."
In the study of animal emotions, she said "we have barely started to scratch the surface."
'> Do animals experience schadenfreude?
"When combined with other risk factors such as tobacco use, alcohol consumption, appropriate diet, physical activity, and environmental pollution, it is estimated that about 50 to 60 percent of all cancers in India are avoidable," he said. Past studies suggest that similar figures hold on a global scale.
In the new study, the researchers used the Global Cancer Observatory's GLOBOCAN database, which combines data from various cancer registries to estimate that about 20 million new cancer cases were diagnosed in 2024. The team combined that information with other published data examining the prevalence of different infections in people with specific cancers. This enabled them to estimate how many cases were attributable to each infection.
Their analysis focused on 12 pathogens tied to cancer, including human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis B and C, HIV and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), the virus behind mononucleosis. The resulting breakdown revealed that just four pathogens accounted for roughly 92% of the cancer cases caused by infections.
A bacterium called Helicobacter pylori, which infects the gastrointestinal tract, accounted for 760,000 cases, primarily gastric cancers. The other three leading cancer triggers were viruses. HPV accounted for 750,000 cases, including cervical, penile, throat and mouth cancers. The liver-attacking hepatitis B virus was responsible for 360,000 cases and EBV drove 260,000 cases. (EBV is known to increase the risk of throat cancers, as well as certain lymphomas and stomach cancers.)
The scale of the burden contrasts with gaps in prevention. In 2024, just 31% of eligible adolescent girls worldwide received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine, well below the 90% target, the World Health Organization reports. The degree of protection provided by the vaccine is striking in countries that have achieved higher coverage.
"We have now achieved the critically important milestone of cervical cancer starting to disappear in countries that quickly achieved vaccination rates of over 80 percent," said Dr. Rebecca Perkins, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Tufts University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "Research from Australia, England, and Finland have shown zero cases of HPV-related cancers or deaths in young adults who received vaccination by age 13," Perkins told Live Science in an email.
But these successes are concentrated in wealthy nations. The Lancet study found that low- and middle-income countries bear 77% of the global infection-driven cancer burden. For example, about 81% of HPV-linked cancers occurred in these countries.
Perkins pointed out that shifting from the standard two-dose HPV vaccine series to a single-dose regimen using the same vaccines could make mass campaigns easier worldwide by lowering costs and eliminating the need to track patients for follow-ups. The single-dose approach has been backed by recent trials.
As with HPV, there is a highly effective vaccine for hepatitis B that can help prevent both the infection and related cancers. (Image credit: BSIP via Getty Images)In the U.S., progress has been uneven across states with some boasting high vaccination rates and others lagging behind. One barrier is that some children's caregivers feel the shots are unnecessary or that their kids are too young to receive it. "The biggest misconception from families is that the HPV vaccine is not needed or that it can wait," Perkins noted. "The reality is that you can't vaccinate too early, only too late."
There is also a highly effective vaccine for hepatitis B, and health officials recommend giving children their first dose as soon as possible after birth. (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently made the decision to stop recommending universal vaccination at birth, which experts say could raise the country's rates of hepatitis B infections and related cancers.)
While the challenge with HPV and hepatitis B is getting their vaccines into widespread use, there isn't an approved vaccine for EBV yet.
"The biggest hurdle has been the complexity of the virus," said Claire Shannon-Lowe, a tumor virologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. who was not involved in the study. "Unlike many other viruses that use just one or two virus proteins to enter cells, EBV uses multiple proteins ... and it hides inside cells for our entire lifetime."
Epstein-Barr infections are also incredibly common, with up to 95% of people infected by adulthood; most people infected with the virus don't develop a related cancer, but it's still a major contributor to the global cancer burden. The germ has also been tied to several autoimmune diseases, which may help spur the development of a vaccine, Shannon-Lowe suggested.
"With the increased impetus following EBV's association with multiple sclerosis and lupus, we may finally have a potential vaccine in sight that could not only prevent virus infection but could help treat EBV-associated cancers," she said.
For H. pylori, meanwhile, researchers are pursuing population-wide testing for and treatment of the infection to help prevent gastric cancer, while vaccine development remains an area in need of further investment.
The true scale of the infection-related cancer burden may be even larger than the study suggested. Some of the registries used in the new research cover only about 19% of the global population, and only 2% of Africa's population. More high-quality data is needed to fill in these gaps.
For Mathur, though, the bottom line is that cancer prevention makes economic sense.
"Studies have clearly demonstrated that the return on investment of prevention on cancers is much higher than on its treatment in the long run," he said. "Preventive aspects must be strengthened for long-term gains."
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
'> 1 in 8 cancer cases are caused by infections, underscoring the importance of vaccines, experts say