The Great Pyramid of Giza has mystified historians, archaeologists, and engineers for centuries. From its precision alignment with astronomical bodies to its geometric perfection, every aspect seems meticulously engineered for purposes beyond mere burial or symbolic display. But what if the purpose was far more profound — and fundamentally quantum?
What is Control? here is a nice definition according to Wikipedia — Control engineering or control systems engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with control systems, applying control theory to design equipment and systems with desired behaviors in control environments. The discipline of controls overlaps and is usually taught along with electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at many institutions around the world. The practice uses sensors and detectors to measure the output performance of the process being controlled; these measurements are used to provide corrective feedback helping to achieve the desired performance. Systems designed to perform without requiring human input are called automatic control systems (such as cruise control for regulating the speed of a car).
Researchers at Columbia Engineering have for the first time used DNA to help create 3D electronically operational devices with nanometer-size features.
The large-scale renewable energy storage sphere is set to get a massive boost with the development of a 1 GWh molten salt storage system, which will be capable of powering approximately 100,000 homes for 10 hours with an efficiency of up to 90%.
This breakthrough is the result of a collaboration between Danish thermal energy storage developer Hyme Energy and Swiss fluid engineering specialist Sulzer.
Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Lehigh University have developed a nanostructured copper alloy that could redefine high-temperature materials for aerospace, defense, and industrial applications.
Their findings, published in the journal Science, introduce a Cu-Ta-Li (copper-tantalum-lithium) alloy with exceptional thermal stability and mechanical strength, making it one of the most resilient copper-based materials ever created.
“This is cutting-edge science, developing a new material that uniquely combines copper’s excellent conductivity with strength and durability on the scale of nickel-based superalloys,” said Martin Harmer, the Alcoa Foundation Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Lehigh University and a co-author of the study. “It provides industry and the military with the foundation to create new materials for hypersonics and high-performance turbine engines.”
Accurate and robust 3D imaging of specular, or mirror-like, surfaces is crucial in fields such as industrial inspection, medical imaging, virtual reality, and cultural heritage preservation. Yet anyone who has visited a house of mirrors at an amusement park knows how difficult it is to judge the shape and distance of reflective objects.
This challenge also persists in science and engineering, where the accurate 3D imaging of specular surfaces has long been a focus in both optical metrology and computer vision research. While specialized techniques exist, their inherent limitations often confine them to narrow, domain-specific applications, preventing broader interdisciplinary use.
In a study published in the journal Optica, University of Arizona researchers from the Computational 3D Imaging and Measurement (3DIM) Lab at the Wyant College of Optica l Sciences present a novel approach that significantly advances the 3D imaging of specular surfaces.
In a new paper, researchers at North Carolina State University show proof of concept for a system that—in a single cycle—actively removes microplastics from water.
The findings, described in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, hold the potential for advances in cleansing oceans and other bodies of water of tiny plastics that may harm human health and the environment.
“The idea behind this work is: Can we make the cleaning materials in the form of soft particles that self-disperse in water, capture microplastics as they sink, and then return to the surface with the captured microplastic contaminants?” said Orlin Velev, the S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State and corresponding author of the paper.
What happens when a quantum physicist is frustrated by the limitations of quantum mechanics when trying to study densely packed atoms? At EPFL, you get a metamaterial, an engineered material that exhibits exotic properties.
That frustrated physicist is Ph.D. student Mathieu Padlewski. In collaboration with Hervé Lissek and Romain Fleury at EPFL’s Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Padlewski has built a novel acoustic system for exploring condensed matter and their macroscopic properties, all the while circumventing the extremely sensitive nature that is inherent to quantum phenomena. Moreover, the acoustic system can be tweaked to study properties that go beyond solid-state physics. The results are published in Physical Review B.
“We’ve essentially built a playground inspired by quantum mechanics that can be adjusted to study various systems. Our metamaterial consists of highly tunable active elements, allowing us to synthesize phenomena that extend beyond the realm of nature,” says Padlewski. “Potential applications include manipulating waves and guiding energy for telecommunications, and the setup may one day provide clues for harvesting energy from waves for instance.”
Time travel has long fascinated scientists and theorists, prompting questions about whether the future can send visitors into its own past and whether individuals could move forward in time in ways that bypass the normal flows of daily life. The general idea of time as a fourth dimension, comparable to spatial dimensions, gained traction when Hermann Minkowski famously stated that “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows” (Minkowski, 1908, p. 75). This integrated view of spacetime underlies many physics-based theories of how a traveler might move along the temporal axis.
In relativity, closed timelike curves (CTCs) theoretically allow a path through spacetime that loops back to its origin in time. As Kip Thorne put it, “wormhole physics is at the very forefront of our understanding of the Universe” (Thorne, 1994, pp. 496–497). A wormhole with suitable geometry might permit travel from one point in time to another. However, such scenarios raise paradoxes. One common example is the “grandfather paradox,” which asks how a traveler could exist if they venture into the past and eliminate their own ancestor. David Deutsch offered one possible resolution by suggesting that “quantum mechanics may remove or soften the paradoxes conventionally associated with time travel” (Deutsch, 1991, p. 3198). His reasoning rests on the idea that quantum behavior might allow timelines to branch or otherwise circumvent contradictions.
The University of Osaka, Fujitsu Limited, Systems Engineering Consultants Co., LTD. (SEC), and TIS Inc. (TIS) today announced the launch of an open-source operating system (OS) for quantum computers on GitHub, in what is one of the largest open-source initiatives of its kind globally. The Open Quantum Toolchain for Operators and Users (OQTOPUS) OS can be customized to meet individual user needs and is expected to help make practical quantum computing a reality.
Until now, universities and companies seeking to make their quantum computers accessible via the cloud have had to independently develop extensive software to enable cloud-based operation. By offering this open-source OS—covering everything from setup to operation—the research partners have lowered the barrier to deploying quantum computers in the cloud.
Additionally, quantum computing cloud service offered by the University of Osaka has begun integrating OQTOPUS into its operations and Fujitsu Limited will make it available for research partners using its quantum computers in the second half of 2025.