Amazing Science

As mysterious as the Italian scientist for which it is named, the Majorana particle is one of the most compelling quests in physics. Its fame stems from its strange properties—it is the only particle that is its own antiparticle—and from its potential to be harnessed for future quantum computing.

In recent years, a handful of groups including a team at Princeton have reported finding the Majorana in various materials, but the challenge is how to manipulate it for quantum computation.

In a new study published this week, the Princeton team reports a way to control Majorana quasiparticles in a setting that also makes them more robust. The setting—which combines a superconductor and an exotic material called a topological insulator—makes Majoranas especially resilient against destruction by heat or vibrations from the outside environment.

What is more, the team demonstrated a way to turn on or off the Majorana using small magnets integrated into the device. The report appeared in the journal Science.

"With this new study we now have a new way to engineer Majorana quasiparticles in materials," said Ali Yazdani, Class of 1909 Professor of Physics and senior author on the study. "We can verify their existence by imaging them and we can characterize their predicted properties."

The Majorana is named for physicist Ettore Majorana, who predicted the existence of the particle in 1937 just a year before mysteriously disappearing during a ferry trip off the Italian coast. Building on the same logic with which physicist Paul Dirac predicted in 1928 that the electron must have an antiparticle, later identified as the positron, Majorana theorized the existence of a particle that is its own antiparticle.

Typically when matter and antimatter come together, they annihilate each other in a violent release of energy, but the Majoranas, when they appear as pairs each at either end of specially designed wires, can be relatively stable and interact weakly with their environment. The pairs enable the storing of quantum information at two distinct locations, making them relatively robust against disturbance because to change the quantum state requires operations at both ends of the wire at the same time. 

The health of the gut microbiome has been linked with numerous diseases from depression to multiple sclerosis and even cancer and response to cancer drugs including immunotherapies. Earlier this year, an ambitious $25 million project was launched to determine the role of the microbiome in colorectal cancer, but perhaps more surprisingly, a new study in mice has linked the health of the gut microbiome to the spread of breast cancer.

The work published today in Cancer Research used mouse models of hormone receptor positive (HR+) breast cancer, the most common type in people, representing two-thirds of all cases. The mice were treated with antibiotics to disrupt the microbiome before testing for the spread of the mouse breast cancer cells as well as inflammation.

"When we disrupted the microbiome equilibrium in mice by chronically treating them antibiotics, it resulted in inflammation systemically and within the mammary tissue," said Melanie Rutkowski, PhD from the University of Virginia's Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology and lead author of the paper. "In this inflamed environment, tumor cells were much more able to disseminate from the tissue into the blood and to the lungs, which is a major site for hormone receptor-positive breast cancer to metastasize," she said.

In addition to the antibiotics, the researchers also performed fecal transplants from mice with disrupted microbiomes, finding a similar effect on the spread of the breast cancer cells in the mice that received the transplants.

Several chemotherapy agents are well-known to cause disruption of the normal gut bacteria and as many people who have had breast cancer will know, gastrointestinal symptoms are not uncommon. A main question which comes from this research appears to be whether dysbiosis (an imbalance of the microbiome) and hence the proposed increased risk of cancer spreading is present before the cancer diagnosis or  is a result of the cancer and treatments.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA's Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.

The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii's largest volcano and the seventh consecutive year of steep global increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to data published today by NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The 2019 peak value was 3.5 ppm higher than the 411.2 ppm peak in May 2018 and marks the second-highest annual jump on record. Monthly CO2 values at Mauna Loa first breached the 400 ppm threshold in 2014.

"It's critically important to have these accurate, long-term measurements of CO2 in order to understand how quickly fossil fuel pollution is changing our climate," said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Division. "These are measurements of the real atmosphere. They do not depend on any models, but they help us verify climate model projections, which if anything, have underestimated the rapid pace of climate change being observed."

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases every year, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The early years at Mauna Loa saw annual increases averaging about 0.7 ppm per year, increasing to about 1.6 ppm per year in the 1980s and 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s. The growth rate rose to 2.2 ppm per year during the last decade. There is abundant and conclusive evidence that the acceleration is caused by increased emissions, Tans said.

The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are collected by NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and produce a foundational research dataset for international climate science.

A new method of discovering materials using data analytics and electron microscopy has found a new class of extremely hard alloys. Such materials could potentially withstand severe impact from projectiles, thereby providing better protection of soldiers in combat. Researchers from Lehigh University describe the method and findings in an article, "Materials Informatics For the Screening of Multi-Principal Elements and High-Entropy Alloys," that appears today in Nature Communications.

"We used materials informatics—the application of the methods of data science to materials problems—to predict a class of materials that have superior mechanical properties," said primary author Jeffrey M. Rickman, professor of materials science and engineering and physics and Class of '61 Professor at Lehigh University.

Researchers also used experimental tools, such as electron microscopy, to gain insight into the physical mechanisms that led to the observed behavior in the class of materials known as high-entropy alloys (HEAs). High-entropy alloys contain many different elements that, when combined, may result in systems having beneficial and sometimes unexpected thermal and mechanical properties. For that reason, they are currently the subject of intense research.

"We thought that the techniques that we have developed would be useful in identifying promising HEAs," Rickman said. "However, we found alloys that had hardness values that exceeded our initial expectations. Their hardness values are about a factor of 2 better than other, more typical high-entropy alloys and other relatively hard binary alloys."

Scientists think they have achieved the first gene editing inside the body, altering DNA in adults to try to treat a disease, although it's too soon to know if this will help. Preliminary results suggest that two men with a rare disorder now have a corrective gene at very low levels, which may not be enough to make the therapy a success. Still, it's a scientific milestone toward one day doctoring DNA to treat many diseases caused by faulty genes. "This is a first step," said Dr. Joseph Muenzer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who helped test the treatment. "It's just not potent enough."

He gave the results Thursday at a conference in Orlando, Florida, and has consulted for the therapy’s maker, California-based Sangamo Therapeutics. Researchers are working on a stronger version of the treatment. Gene editing is intended as a more precise way to do gene therapy, to disable a bad gene or supply a good one that’s missing. Trying it in adults to treat diseases is not controversial and the DNA changes do not pass to future generations, unlike the recent case of a Chinese scientist who claims to have edited twin girls’ genes when they were embryos.

Sangamo’s studies involve men with Hunter or Hurler syndrome, diseases caused by a missing gene that makes an enzyme to break down certain sugar compounds. Without it, sugars build up and damage organs, often killing people in their teens.

In 2017, Brian Madeux of Arizona became the first person to try it. Through an IV, he received many copies of a corrective gene and an editing tool called zinc finger nucleases to insert it into his DNA.

Results on him and seven other Hunter patients, plus three with Hurler syndrome, suggest the treatment is safe, which was the main goal of these early experiments. Three problems — bronchitis, an irregular heartbeat and a hernia — were deemed due to the diseases, not the treatment.

Tissue samples showed evidence of gene editing at very low levels in two Hunter patients who were given a middle dose but not in one given a low dose. Tests are expected later this year on patients who received the highest dose and on Hurler patients.

Scientists once thought that neurons, or possibly heart cells, were the oldest cells in the body. Now, Salk Institute researchers have discovered that the mouse brain, liver and pancreas contain populations of cells and proteins with extremely long lifespans -- some as old as neurons. The findings, demonstrating "age mosaicism," were published in Cell Metabolismon June 6, 2019.

The team's methods could be applied to nearly any tissue in the body to provide valuable information about lifelong function of non-dividing cells and how cells lose control over the quality and integrity of proteins and important cell structures during aging.

"We were quite surprised to find cellular structures that are essentially as old as the organism they reside in," says Salk Vice President, Chief Science Officer Martin Hetzer, senior author and professor. "This suggests even greater cellular complexity than we previously imagined and has intriguing implications for how we think about the aging of organs, such as the brain, heart and pancreas."

Among the great scientific puzzles of our time is how life emerged from inorganic matter. Scientists have probed it since the 1920s, when biochemists Alexsandr Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane (separately) investigated the properties of droplets rich in organic molecules that existed in a ‘prebiotic soup’ on the primitive Earth (see T. Hyman and C. Brangwynne Nature 491, 524–525; 2012). Each hypothesized that organic compounds underwent reactions leading to more complex molecules, and eventually to the first life forms.

What was missing then, as is now, is a concrete theory for the physics of what life is, testable against experiment — which is likely to be more universal than the chemistry of life on Earth. Decades after Oparin and Haldane, Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? (see P. Ball Nature 560, 548–550; 2018) attempted to lay conceptual foundations for such a theory. Yet, more than 70 years and two generations of physicists later, researchers still ponder whether the answers lie in unknown physics. No one has led the charge on these questions quite like Stuart Kauffman.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Kauffman — a complex-systems researcher — developed a highly influential theory for life’s origins, based on molecules that reproduce only collectively, called autocatalytic sets. He posited that if a chemical soup of polymers was sufficiently diverse, these sets would emerge spontaneously as a phase transition — that is, a significant change in state or function, akin to the shift from solid to liquid. The sets function holistically, mutually catalyzing the formation of all their molecular members. (His inspiration was advances in the mathematics of networks by Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi, who had demonstrated how phase transitions occur in random networks as connectivity is increased.)

Now, in A World Beyond Physics, Kauffman elaborates. His key insight is motivated by what he calls “the nonergodic world” — that of objects more complex than atoms. Most atoms are simple, so all their possible states can exist over a reasonable period of time. Once they start interacting to form molecules, the number of possible states becomes mind-bogglingly massive. Only a tiny number of proteins that are modestly complex — say, 200 amino acids long — have emerged over the entire history of the Universe. Generating all 20200 of the possibilities would take aeons. Given such limitations, how does what does exist ever come into being?

A Russian biologist has told a journalist at Nature that he wants to create more gene-edited babies and will do it if he can win approval.

Who’s involved: Denis Rebrikov of the Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University in Moscow says he wants to repeat last year’s widely condemned experiment in China to create humans resistant to HIV. He believes he can do a better job.

Is this serious? Rebrikov isn’t known for his work with gene editing. A search of his publications mostly turns up reports on biomarkers of gum disease. However, last October he did author a report in which the gene-editing tool CRISPR was applied to human IVF embryos, one of just a dozen or so such experiments ever described. What’s more, his coauthors included the director of a large Russian maternity clinic, the Kulakov National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Perinatology in Moscow. Rebikov believes Russian rules on creating gene-modified babies are unclear and says that he plans to seek approval to carry out the procedure.

Expert response: Experts say it wouldn’t be responsible to make more CRISPR babies at this time. One reason is that it is hard to know what unexpected effects altering a baby’s genes will have. The gene the Russians want to delete from embryos, CCR5, doesn’t just protect against HIV. It appears to have potential effects on cognition and life span, too. Yet some scientists will remain driven to genetically modify children, no matter what. “I think I’m crazy enough to do it,” Rebikov told Nature.

A team of researchers with the Royal Botanic Gardens in the U.K. and Stockholm University has found that plant extinctions over the past two and a half centuries have been more extensive than previous estimates suggested. In their paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the group describes their exhaustive study of plants and which have gone extinct, and what it might mean for future plant life.

In recent years, botanists have estimated that fewer than 150 plant species have gone extinct in modern times—most due to human activities. In this new effort, the researchers have found that the real number is closer to quadruple such estimates—they found 571 plants that have gone extinct since 1753. That was the year that famed botanist Carl Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum—a collection of all known plant species at that time.

The researchers also claimed that approximately three species of plants have gone extinct on average each year since 1900—a rate that they note is approximately 500 times the natural rate of plant extinction. The group came to these conclusions using information from a database started back in 1988 by workers at the Royal Botanic Gardens who have had the goal of adding every known plant on the planet. Since that time, over 330,000 plant species have been added.

The scientists also created a map showing where the extinctions have occurred, noting that most are in the tropics and on islands. The map also highlights some interesting hotspots as well, such as South Africa, Australia, India and Hawaii. They add that the main culprit is habitat destruction, though some have also suffered from being too popular with humans—the Chile sandalwood tree, for example, was harvested for its exotic aroma.

New planets found in distant corners of the galaxy. Climate models that improve our understanding of sea level rise. The emergence of new highly effective drugs. These scientific advances and discoveries have been in the news in recent months. While representing wildly divergent disciplines, from astronomy to biotechnology, they all have one thing in common: Artificial intelligence (AI) played a key role in their scientific discovery.

One of the more recent and famous examples came out of NASA at the end of 2017. The US space agency had announced an eighth planet discovered in the Kepler-90 system. Scientists had trained a neural network—a computer with a “brain” modeled on the human mind—to re-examine data from Kepler, a space-borne telescope with a four-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations hidden in the vastness of space. Or, more precisely, to find habitable planets where life might just exist.

The researchers trained the artificial neural network on a set of 15,000 previously vetted signals until it could identify true planets and false positives 96 percent of the time. It then went to work on weaker signals from nearly 700 star systems with known planets.

The AI detected Kepler 90i—a hot, rocky planet that orbits its sun about every two Earth weeks—through a nearly imperceptible change in brightness captured when a planet passes a star. It also found a sixth Earth-sized planet in the Kepler-80 system.

What AI brings to science is being driven by three great advances in technology, according to Ross King from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester, leader of a team that developed an artificially intelligent “scientist” called Eve. Those three advances include much faster computers, big datasets, and improved AI algorithms, King explained. “These advances increasingly give AI superhuman reasoning abilities.“ 

“AI systems can flawlessly remember vast numbers of facts and extract information effortlessly from millions of scientific papers, not to mention exhibit flawless logical reasoning and near-optimal probabilistic reasoning,“ King said.

AI systems also beat humans when it comes to dealing with huge, diverse amounts of data. That’s partly what attracted a team of glaciologists to turn to machine learning to untangle the factors involved in how heat from Earth’s interior might influence the ice sheet that blankets Greenland.

Algorithms juggling 22 geologic variables—such as bedrock topography, crustal thickness, magnetic anomalies, rock types, and proximity to features like trenches, ridges, young rifts, and volcanoes—are used to predict geothermal heat flux under the ice sheet throughout Greenland. The machine learning model, for example, predicts elevated heat flux upstream of Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest-moving glacier in the world.

“The major advantage is that we can incorporate so many different types of data,” explains Leigh Stearns, associate professor of geology at Kansas University, whose research takes her to the polar regions to understand how and why Earth’s great ice sheets are changing, questions directly related to future sea level rise.

Scientists at The University of Queensland have upended biologists' century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals. Using new technology to investigate how multi-celled animals developed, their findings revealed a surprising truth.

 An approved drug normally used to treat fungal infections could also do the job of a protein channel that is missing or defective in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, operating as a prosthesis on the molecular scale, says new research from the University of Illinois and the University of Iowa.

Cystic fibrosis is a lifelong disease that makes patients vulnerable to lung infections. There are treatments for some but not all patients, and there is no cure. The drug restored infection-fighting properties in lung tissue donated by human patients as well as in pigs with cystic fibrosis. It has potential to become the first treatment to address all types of cystic fibrosis, regardless of the genetic mutation that causes the protein deficiency.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

“Instead of trying do gene therapy – which is not yet effective in the lung – or to correct the protein, our approach is different. We use a small molecule surrogate that can perform the channel function of the missing protein, which we call a molecular prosthetic,” said Dr. Martin D. Burke, the leader of the study. Burke is a professor of chemistry at Illinois and the associate dean for research at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

See a video of Burke explaining the findings.

New study shows that frogs make cognitive maps.

A cognitive map is a mental representation of the external world, and our place in it, allowing us to plot the most efficient route to any destination. Humans, other mammals and many bird species use them – and now for the first time, amphibians have been shown to do so, too

Poison arrow frogs, members of the Dendrobatidae family and native to South and Central America, have a parenting style that requires sophisticated navigation and spatial recall in their complex rainforest habitat.

After their eggs hatch in damp leaf litter on the forest floor, the adults transport the tadpoles, one or two at a time, to tiny ephemeral pools of water in tree holes and epiphytes such as bromeliads. The parents spend considerable time locating and monitoring the pools to ensure their tadpoles remain in water. 

Field based studies on the frogs have suggested that parents most probably use a cognitive map to locate their tadpoles, but laboratory experiments are necessary to conclusively establish its existence.

A team of US researchers, led by Sabrina Burmeister from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, trained five adult green-and-black poison dart frogs (Dendrobates auratus) to use a modified version of the Morris water maze, which they dubbed the moat maze.

The Morris water maze has been used with some success with rats in cognitive map research, with trained animals learning visual cues to locate a hidden platform under opaque water, and thus be able to stop swimming.

The sea sloshing beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa just might be the best incubator for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. And yet it is concealed by the moon’s frozen outer shell—presenting a challenge for astrobiologists who would love nothing more than to peer inside. Luckily they can catch a partial glimpse by analyzing the flavor of the surface. And the results are salty.  

A new study published this week in Science Advances suggests that sodium chloride—the stuff of table salt—exists on Europa’s surface. Because the exterior is essentially formed from frozen seawater, the finding suggests that Europa’s hidden sea is drenched in table salt—a crucial fact for constraining the possibilities for life on the alien world.

Not that scientists have tasted a slice of the distant moon. To analyze Europa’s composition, astronomers study the light emanating from its surface, splitting it into a rainbow-like spectrum to search for any telltale absorption or emission lines that reveal the world’s chemistry.

There is just one problem: Ordinary table salt is white and thus gives off a featureless spectrum. But harsh radiation—which exists at Europa’s surface in abundance—just might add a dash of color. That much was realized in 2015 when two NASA planetary scientists Kevin Hand and Robert Carlson published a study suggesting the yellowish-brown gunk on Europa might be table salt baked by radiation. To reach that conclusion, Hand and Carlson re-created the conditions on Europa within vacuum chambers—or as Hand calls them, “stainless steel shiny objects that are humming and whizzing.” Next, they placed table salt into those chambers, lowered the pressures and temperatures to simulate Europa’s surface, and blasted the samples with an electron gun to simulate the intense radiation.

Many of the electrons were then captured in empty spaces within the salt’s crystalline structure, transforming the salt’s color into a yellowish brown that bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the mysterious material filling the fissures and fractures crisscrossing Europa’s surface. The parallel caused Hand and Carlson to speculate that the gunk just might be irradiated table salt. But a match in color is not proof. Instead, proof could arrive in the form of very distinct spectroscopic features—particularly an absorption line at 450 nanometers within the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. “One of the upshots of this irradiation is that it can help make the previously invisible, visible,” Hand says.

Five big extinctions, also called “the big five” by earth scientists, have challenged life on earth in the past 500 million years. It turns out we are now in the middle of the 6th extinction, according to a recent UN report. Up to one million species are now on the brink of extinction. For three years hundreds of scientists have contributed to the project and describe the latest knowledge on biodiversity in the ‘2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’.

The full six-chapter report will be published later this year by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The study  follows the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), which analysed the consequences of ecosystem change, involving the work of more than 1,000 experts. The present study goes further, investigating species worldwide but also interactions between biodiversity, climate and human well-being.

Human footprint

The 6th of May, the summary for policymakers has already been published, reaching the media in the whole world. Being constantly bombarded by catastrophic news on climate change, the bad news on the state of global biodiversity is now added. “The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said Robert Watson, the chair of IPBES. Main offenders are industrial agriculture and fisheries. So to feed almost 8 billion people (while I am writing this the precise figure is 7,7 billion, growing by more than 1% yearly), we are destroying our planet.

The report shows that the human footprint has become too large for our planet. Farm fields cover 75% of the usable land, or is covered by concrete or otherwise severely altered. Fish farms have transformed the marine environment and energy production will add to that in the future, when we continue to build the necessary wind farms.  Crop and livestock consume large quantities of freshwater. Nature, which is necessary for our own survival and quality of life, is pushed into a little corner.

Natural causes in the past

What’s so different between “the big five” and the current extinction? The big five happened in the geological past, a long time ago, and the amount of species that became extinct then, was much bigger than today. During the biggest of them all, the Permian crisis – also referred to as ‘The Big Dying’ – more than 96% of life was wiped out. This happened around 251 million years ago; most mammal-like reptiles passed away.

Another big difference between past and present extinctions lays in the pace and its recovery rate. A ‘normal’ background rate of extinction is 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years. So we could say that humankind breaks every record in this respect (see figure at the end of the article). Moreover, it takes Mother Earth quite a while to recover from a mass extinction.

Palaeontologists figured out that omnivores that are not “picky” are the first to recover, followed by specialist mammals in the long run. But also here, the trend is not on a human timescale. What all five extinctions have in common, is their natural cause. Meteorites, volcanism, acidification or a combination of various causes. The cause for the present “Anthropogenic extinction” is in its name: Homo sapiens is the cause.

As if they were bubbles expanding in a just-opened bottle of champagne, tiny circular regions of magnetism can be rapidly enlarged to provide a precise method of measuring the magnetic properties of nanoparticles. The technique, uncorked by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators, provides a deeper understanding of the magnetic behavior of nanoparticles. Because the method is fast, economical and does not require special conditions—measurements can occur at room temperature and under atmospheric pressure, or even in liquids—it provides manufacturers with a practical way to measure and improve their control of the properties of magnetic nanoparticles for a host of medical and environmental applications.

Magnetic nanoparticles can serve as tiny actuators, magnetically pushing and pulling other small objects. Relying on this property, scientists have employed the nanoparticles to clean up chemical spills and assemble and operate nanorobotic systems. Magnetic nanoparticles even have the potential to treat cancer—rapidly reversing the magnetic field of nanoparticles injected into a tumor generates enough heat to kill cancer cells.

Individual magnetic nanoparticles generate magnetic fields like the north and south poles of familiar bar magnets. These fields create magnetic bubbles—flat circles with initial diameters less than 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter)—on the surface of a magnetically sensitive film developed at NIST. The bubbles surround the nanoparticle pole that points opposite to the direction of the magnetic field of the film. Although they encode information about the magnetic orientation of the nanoparticles, the tiny bubbles are not easily detected with an optical microscope. However, like bubbles in champagne, the magnetic bubbles can be expanded to hundreds of times their initial diameter. By applying a small external magnetic field, the team enlarged the diameter of the bubbles to tens of micrometers (millionths of a meter)—big enough to see with an optical microscope. The brighter signal of the enlarged bubbles rapidly revealed the magnetic orientation of individual nanoparticles.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a completely new way of capturing, amplifying and linking light to matter at the nano level. Using a tiny box, built from stacked atomically thin material, they have succeeded in creating a type of feedback loop in which light and matter become one. The discovery, which was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, opens up new possibilities in the world of nanophotonics.

Photonics is concerned with various means of using light. Fibre-optic communication is an example of photonics, as is the technology behind photodetectors and solar cells. When the photonic components are so small that they are measured in nanometres, this is called nanophotonics. In order to push the boundaries of what is possible in this tiny format, progress in fundamental research is crucial. The innovative "light box" of the Chalmers researchers makes the alternations between light and mattertake place so rapidly that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the two states. Light and matter become one.

"We have created a hybrid consisting of equal parts of light and matter. The concept opens completely new doors in both fundamental research and applied nanophotonics and there is a great deal of scientific interest in this," says Ruggero Verre, a researcher in the Department of Physics at Chalmers and one of the authors of the scientific article.