China has sent several small spacecraft into specialized lunar and cislunar orbits to test communications, navigation and orbital dynamics for planned Earth-moon infrastructure.
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A sensitive new portable device can detect gas molecules associated with certain diseases by condensing dilute airborne biomarkers into concentrated liquid droplets. According to its developers at the University of Chicago in the US, the device could be used to detect airborne viruses or bacteria in hospitals and other public places, improve neonatal care, and even allow diabetic patients to read glucose levels in their breath, to list just three examples.
Many disease biomarkers are only found in breath or ambient air at levels of a few parts per trillion. This makes them very difficult to detect compared with biomarkers in biofluids such as blood, saliva or mucus, where they are much more concentrated. Traditionally, reaching a high enough sensitivity required bulky and expensive equipment such as mass spectrometers, which are impractical for everyday environments.
Researchers led by biophysicist and materials chemist Bozhi Tian have now developed a highly portable alternative. Their new Airborne Biomarker Localization Engine (ABLE) can detect both non-volatile and volatile molecules in air in around 15 minutes.
This handheld device comprises a cooled condenser surface, an air pump and microfluidic enrichment modules, and it works in the following way. First, air that (potentially) contains biomarkers flows into a cooled chamber. Within this chamber, Tian explains, the supersaturated moisture condenses onto nanostructured superhydrophobic surfaces and forms droplets. Any particles in the air thus become suspended inside the droplets, which means they can be analysed using conventional liquid-phase biosensors such as colorimeteric test strips or electrochemical probes. This allows them to be identified rapidly with high sensitivity.
Tian says the inspiration for this study, which is detailed in Nature Chemical Engineering, came from a visit he made to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in 2021. “Here, I observed the vulnerability and fragility of preterm infants and realized how important non-invasive monitoring is for them,” Tian explains.
“My colleagues and I envisioned a contact-free system capable of detecting disease-related molecules in air. Our biggest challenge was sensitivity and initial trials failed to detect key chemicals,” he remembers. “We overcame this problem by developing a new enrichment strategy using nanostructured condensation and molecular sieves while also exploiting evaporation physics to stabilize and concentrate the captured biomarkers.”
The technology opens new avenues for non-contact, point-of-care diagnostics, he tells Physics World. Possible near-term applications include the early detection of ailments such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which can lead to markers of inflammation appearing in patients’ breath. Respiratory disorders and neurodevelopment conditions in babies could be detected in a similar way. Tian suggests the device could even be used for mental health monitoring via volatile stress biomarkers (again found in breath) and for monitoring air quality in public spaces such as schools and hospitals.
“Thanks to its high sensitivity and low cost (of around $200), ABLE could democratize biomarker sensing, moving diagnostics beyond the laboratory and into homes, clinics and underserved areas, allowing for a new paradigm in preventative and personalized medicine,” he says.
The University of Chicago scientists’ next goal is to further miniaturize and optimize the ABLE device. They are especially interested in enhancing its sensitivity and energy efficiency, as well as exploring the possibility of real-time feedback through closed-loop integration with wearable sensors. “We also plan to extend its applications to infectious disease surveillance and food spoilage detection,” Tian reveals.
The researchers are currently collaborating with health professionals to test ABLE in real-world settings such as NICUs and outpatient clinics. In the future, though, they also hope to explore novel physical processes that might improve the efficiency at which devices like these can capture hydrophobic or nonpolar airborne molecules.
According to Tian, the work has unveiled “unexpected evaporation physics” in dilute droplets with multiple components. Notably, they have seen evidence that such droplets defy the limit set by Henry’s law, which states that at constant temperature, the amount of a gas that dissolves in a liquid of a given type and volume is directly proportional to the partial pressure of the gas in equilibrium with the liquid. “This opens a new physical framework for such condensation-driven sensing and lays the foundation for widespread applications in the non-contact diagnostics, environmental monitoring and public health applications mentioned,” Tian says.
The post Handheld device captures airborne signs of disease appeared first on Physics World.
Astroscale, the space junk removal venture, announced a British government contract June 16 worth about $7 million to deploy a pair of cubesats in 2027 to monitor space weather while tracking other objects in low Earth orbit.
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How can heritage in space — the very objects and events that tell the story of humanity becoming a spacefaring civilization, such as Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s bootprints, India’s […]
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The new wide-area imaging satellite is slated for launch in 2027 and will complement BlackSky’s existing fleet
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Imagine a world where Earth observation (EO) is not restricted by complex systems, high costs, or remote institutions. Instead, EO is modular, secure, and sovereign, and is designed to facilitate […]
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The White House’s FY 2026 budget request for NASA proposes a radical shift in the agency’s direction, proposing extinction-level cuts to space science, severe cuts in other program areas and […]
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Members of the House and Senate called in the White House to promptly offer a new candidate for NASA administrator after the surprise withdrawal of Jared Isaacman’s nomination.
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When I’m sitting in my armchair, eating chocolate and finding it hard to motivate myself to exercise, a little voice in my head starts singing “You’ve got to move it, move it” to the tune of will.i.am’s “I like to move it”. The positive reinforcement and joy of this song as it plays on a loop in my mind propels me out of my seat and onto the tennis court.
Songs like this are earworms – catchy pieces of music that play on repeat in your head long after you’ve heard them. Some tunes are more likely to become earworms than others, and there are a few reasons for this.
To truly hook you in, the music must be repetitive so that the brain can easily finish it. Generally, it is also simple, and has a rising and falling pitch shape. While you need to hear a song several times for it to stick, once it’s wormed its way into your head, some lyrics become impossible to escape – “I just can’t get you out of my head”, as Kylie would say.
In his book Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes these internal music loops as “the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only on their own time”. They can fade away, but they tend to lie in wait, dormant until an association sets them off again – like when I need to exercise. But for me as a physics teacher for 16–18 year olds, this fact is more than just of passing interest: I use it in the classroom.
There are some common mistakes students make in physics, so I play songs in class that are linked (sometimes tenuously) to the syllabus to remind them to check their work. Before I continue, I should add that I’m not advocating rote learning without understanding – the explanation of the concept must always come first. But I have found the right earworm can be a great memory aid.
I’ve been a physics teacher for a while, and I’ll admit to a slight bias towards the music of the 1980s and 1990s. I play David Bowie’s “Changes” (which the students associate with the movie Shrek) when I ask the class to draw a graph, to remind them to check if they need to process – or change – the data before plotting. The catchy “Ch…ch…ch…changes” is now the irritating tune they hear when I look over their shoulders to check if they have found, for example, the sine values for Snell’s law, or the square root of tension if looking at the frequency of a stretched wire.
When describing how to verify the law of conservation of momentum, students frequently leave out the mechanism that makes the two trollies stick together after the collision. Naturally, this is an opportunity for me to play Roxy Music’s “Let’s stick together”.
Meanwhile, “Ice ice baby” by Vanilla Ice is obviously the perfect earworm for calculating the specific latent heat of fusion of ice, which is when students often drop parts of the equations because they forget that the ice both melts and changes temperature.
In the experiment where you charge a gold leaf electroscope by induction, pupils often fail to do the four steps in the correct order. I therefore play Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” to remind pupils to earth the disc with their finger. Meanwhile, Spandau Ballet’s bold and dramatic “Gold” is reserved for Rutherford’s gold leaf experiment.
“Pump up the volume” by M|A|R|R|S or Ireland’s 1990 football song “Put ‘em under pressure” are obvious candidates for investigating Boyle’s law. I use “Jump around” by House of Pain when causing a current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field to experience a force.
Some people may think that linking musical lyrics and physics in this way is a waste of time. However, it also introduces some light-hearted humour into the classroom – and I find teenagers learn better with laughter. The students enjoy mocking my taste in music and coming up with suitable (more modern) songs, and we laugh together about the tenuous links I’ve made between lyrics and physics.
More importantly, this is how my memory works. I link phrases or lyrics to the important things I need to remember. Auditory information functions as a strong mnemonic. I am not saying that this works for everyone, but I have heard my students sing the lyrics to each other while studying in pairs or groups. I smile to myself as I circulate the room when I hear them saying phrases like, “No you forgot mass × specific latent heat – remember it’s ‘Ice, ice baby!’ ”.
On their last day of school – after two years of playing these tunes in class – I hold a quiz where I play a song and the students have to link it to the physics. It turns into a bit of a sing-along, with chocolate for prizes, and there are usually a few surprises in there too. Have a go yourself with the quiz below.
Can you match the following eight physics laws or experiments with the right song? If you can’t remember the songs, we’ve provided links – but beware, they are earworms!
Answers will be revealed next month – just come back to this article to find out whether you got them all right.
The post ‘Can’t get you out of my head’: using earworms to teach physics appeared first on Physics World.
Private firm Cangyu Space Technology is planning a commercial data relay constellation using a novel mix of orbits, signaling continued expansion of China’s commercial ecosystem.
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Ursa Major will deliver an upgraded variant of its Hadley engine for use in Stratolaunch’s reusable hypersonic vehicle called Talon-A.
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The European Space Agency is moving ahead with plans for the first phase of an Earth observation satellite system that will have both civil and military uses.
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NASA says a private astronaut mission could launch to the ISS as soon as June 19 as it works to understand an air leak on the station's Russian segment.
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China launched a second collaborative seismo-electromagnetic satellite early Saturday, aimed at detecting electromagnetic precursors to natural disasters such as earthquakes.
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The European Space Agency is weighing options for programs affected by proposed major budget cuts at NASA as it also seeks to expand cooperation with other nations.
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The Helgoland 2025 meeting, marking 100 years of quantum mechanics, has featured a lot of mind-bending fundamental physics, quite a bit of which has left me scratching my head.
So it was great to hear a brilliant talk by David Moore of Yale University about some amazing practical experiments using levitated, trapped microspheres as quantum sensors to detect what he calls the “invisible” universe.
If the work sounds familar to you, that’s because Moore’s team won a Physics World Top 10 Breakthrough of the Year award in 2024 for using their technique to detect the alpha decay of individual lead-212 atoms.
Speaking in the Nordseehalle on the island of Helgoland, Moore explained the next stage of the experiment, which could see it detect neutrinos “in a couple of months” at the earliest – and “at least within a year” at the latest.
Of course, physicists have already detected neutrinos, but it’s a complicated business, generally involving huge devices in deep underground locations where background signals are minimized. Yale’s set up is much cheaper, smaller and more convenient, involving no more than a couple of lab benches.
As Moore explained, he and his colleagues first trap silica spheres at low pressure, before removing excess electrons to electrically neutralize them. They then stabilize the spheres’ rotation before cooling them to microkelvin temperatures.
In the work that won the Physics World award last year, the team used samples of radon-220, which decays first into polonium-216 and then lead-212. These nuclei embed theselves in the silica spheres, which recoil when the lead-212 decays by releasing an alpha particle (Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 023602).
Moore’s team is able to measure the tiny recoil by watching how light scatters off the spheres. “We can see the force imparted by a subatomic particle on a heavier object,” he told the audience at Helgoland. “We can see single nuclear decays.”
Now the plan is to extend the experiment to detect neutrinos. These won’t (at least initially) be the neutrinos that stream through the Earth from the Sun or even those from a nuclear reactor.
Instead, the idea will be to embed the spheres with nuclei that undergo beta decay, releasing a much lighter neutrino in the process. Moore says the team will do this within a year and, one day, potentially even use to it spot dark matter.
“We are reaching the quantum measurement regime,” he said. It’s a simple concept, even if the name – “Search for new Interactions in a Microsphere Precision Levitation Experiment” (SIMPLE) – isn’t.
This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.
Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.
Find out more on our quantum channel.
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Strategic Investment to Support Critical U.S. and Allied Solid Rocket Motor and Space Launch Programs Cedar City, Utah – June 11, 2025 American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC), a leading supplier of […]
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AST SpaceMobile has reached a deal enabling bankrupt satellite operator Ligado Networks to pay the more than $500 million it owes Viasat, in exchange for L-band spectrum to boost its planned direct-to-smartphone services.
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NGSO solutions positioned to capture 97% market share by 2034, driven by Starlink growth
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There is huge promise in AI to transform spacecraft design. From near real-time performance calculations that enable broader design space exploration, to generative algorithms using mission requirements as inputs to […]
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China’s CAS Space completed a hot fire test of its Kinetica-2 rocket’s first stage, targeting a maiden orbital launch later this year.
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The animal world – including some of its ickiest parts – never ceases to amaze. According to researchers in Canada and Singapore, velvet worm slime contains an ingredient that could revolutionize the design of high-performance polymers, making them far more sustainable than current versions.
“We have been investigating velvet worm slime as a model system for inspiring new adhesives and recyclable plastics because of its ability to reversibly form strong fibres,” explains Matthew Harrington, the McGill University chemist who co-led the research with Ali Miserez of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “We needed to understand the mechanism that drives this reversible fibre formation, and we discovered a hitherto unknown feature of the proteins in the slime that might provide a very important clue in this context.”
The velvet worm (phylum Onychophora) is a small, caterpillar-like creature that lives in humid forests. Although several organisms, including spiders and mussels, produce protein-based slimy material outside their bodies, the slime of the velvet worm is unique. Produced from specialized papillae on each side of the worm’s head, and squirted out in jets whenever the worm needs to capture prey or defend itself, it quickly transforms from a sticky, viscoelastic gel into stiff, glassy fibres as strong as nylon.
When dissolved in water, these stiff fibres return to their biomolecular precursors. Remarkably, new fibres can then be drawn from the solution – implyimg that the instructions for fibre self-assembly are “encoded” within the precursors themselves, Harrington says.
Previously, the molecular mechanisms behind this reversibility were little understood. In the present study, however, the researchers used protein sequencing and the AI-guided protein structure prediction algorithm AlphaFold to identify a specific high-molecular-weight protein in the slime. Known as a leucine-rich repeat, this protein has a structure similar to that of a cell surface receptor protein called a Toll-like receptor (TLR).
In biology, Miserez explains, this type of receptor is involved in immune system response. It also plays a role in embryonic or neural development. In the worm slime, however, that’s not the case.
“We have now unveiled a very different role for TLR proteins,” says Miserez, who works in NTU’s materials science and engineering department. “They play a structural, mechanical role and can be seen as a kind of ‘glue protein’ at the molecular level that brings together many other slime proteins to form the macroscopic fibres.”
Miserez adds that the team found this same protein in different species of velvet worms that diverged from a common ancestor nearly 400 million years ago. “This means that this different biological function is very ancient from an evolutionary perspective,” he explains.
“It was very unusual to find such a protein in the context of a biological material,” Harrington adds. “By predicting the protein’s structure and its ability to bind to other slime proteins, we were able to hypothesize its important role in the reversible fibre formation behaviour of the slime.”
The team’s hypothesis is that the reversibility of fibre formation is based on receptor-ligand interactions between several slime proteins. While Harrington acknowledges that much work remains to be done to verify this, he notes that such binding is a well-described principle in many groups of organisms, including bacteria, plants and animals. It is also crucial for cell adhesion, development and innate immunity. “If we can confirm this, it could provide inspiration for making high-performance non-toxic (bio)polymeric materials that are also recyclable,” he tells Physics World.
The study, which is detailed in PNAS, was mainly based on computational modelling and protein structure prediction. The next step, say the McGill researchers, is to purify or recombinantly express the proteins of interest and test their interactions in vitro.
The post Worm slime could inspire recyclable polymer design appeared first on Physics World.
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