In this image we see in fine detail the patchy spiral arms of this galaxy, followed by clumps of dark, obscuring dust. Blossoms of glowing pink are rich reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, illuminating the clouds around them and causing the gas to emit this tell-tale red light. The Hubble program which collected this data is focused on stellar activity just like this, tracking new stars, clouds of hydrogen and star clusters to learn how the galaxy has evolved through time.

Hubble, with its ability to capture visible, ultraviolet and some infrared light, is not the only observatory focused on NGC 7456. ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite has imaged X-rays from the galaxy on multiple occasions, discovering a number of so-called ultraluminous X-ray sources. These small, compact objects emit terrifically powerful X-rays, much more than would be expected for their size. Astronomers are still trying to pin down what powers these extreme objects, and NGC 7456 contributes a few more examples.

On top of that, the region around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole is spectacularly bright and energetic, making NGC 7456 an active galaxy. Whether looking at its core or its outskirts, at visible light or X-rays, this galaxy has something interesting to show!

The Penn team’s tiny “Q-chip” coordinates quantum and classical data and, crucially, speaks the same language as the modern web. That approach could pave the way for a future “quantum internet,” which scientists believe may one day be as transformative as the dawn of the online era.

Quantum signals rely on pairs of “entangled” particles, so closely linked that changing one instantly affects the other. Harnessing that property could allow quantum computers to link up and pool their processing power, enabling advances like faster, more energy-efficient AI or designing new drugs and materials beyond the reach of today’s supercomputers.

Penn’s work shows, for the first time on live commercial fiber, that a chip can not only send quantum signals but also automatically correct for noise, bundle quantum and classical data into standard internet-style packets, and route them using the same addressing system and management tools that connect everyday devices online.

“By showing an integrated chip can manage quantum signals on a live commercial network like Verizon’s, and do so using the same protocols that run the classical internet, we’ve taken a key step toward larger-scale experiments and a practical quantum internet,” says Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and the Science paper’s senior author.

The Challenges of Scaling the Quantum Internet

Erwin Schrodinger, who coined the term “quantum entanglement,” famously related the concept to a cat hidden in a box. If the lid is closed, and the box also contains radioactive material, the cat could be alive or dead. One way to interpret the situation is that the cat is both alive and dead. Only opening the box confirms the cat’s state.

That paradox is roughly analogous to the unique nature of quantum particles. Once measured, they lose their unusual properties, which makes scaling a quantum network extremely difficult.

“Normal networks measure data to guide it towards the ultimate destination,” says Robert Broberg, a doctoral student in ESE and coauthor of the paper. “With purely quantum networks, you can’t do that, because measuring the particles destroys the quantum state.”

Coordinating Classical and Quantum Signals

To get around this obstacle, the team developed the “Q-Chip” (short for “Quantum-Classical Hybrid Internet by Photonics”) to coordinate “classical” signals, made of regular streams of light, and quantum particles. “The classical signal travels just ahead of the quantum signal,” says Yichi Zhang, a doctoral student in MSE and the paper’s first author. “That allows us to measure the classical signal for routing, while leaving the quantum signal intact.”

In essence, the new system works like a railway, pairing regular light locomotives with quantum cargo. “The classical ‘header’ acts like the train’s engine, while the quantum information rides behind in sealed containers,” says Zhang. “You can’t open the containers without destroying what’s inside, but the engine ensures the whole train gets where it needs to go.”

Because the classical header can be measured, the entire system can follow the same “IP” or “Internet Protocol” that governs today’s internet traffic. “By embedding quantum information in the familiar IP framework, we showed that a quantum internet could literally speak the same language as the classical one,” says Zhang. “That compatibility is key to scaling using existing infrastructure.”

Adapting Quantum Technology to the Real World

One of the greatest challenges to transmitting quantum particles on commercial infrastructure is the variability of real-world transmission lines. Unlike laboratory environments, which can maintain ideal conditions, commercial networks frequently encounter changes in temperature, thanks to weather, as well as vibrations from human activities like construction and transportation, not to mention seismic activity.

To counteract this, the researchers developed an error-correction method that takes advantage of the fact that interference to the classical header will affect the quantum signal in a similar fashion. “Because we can measure the classical signal without damaging the quantum one,” says Feng, “we can infer what corrections need to be made to the quantum signal without ever measuring it, preserving the quantum state.”

In testing, the system maintained transmission fidelities above 97%, showing that it could overcome the noise and instability that usually destroy quantum signals outside the lab. And because the chip is made of silicon and fabricated using established techniques, it could be mass produced, making the new approach easy to scale.

“Our network has just one server and one node, connecting two buildings, with about a kilometer of fiber-optic cable installed by Verizon between them,” says Feng. “But all you need to do to expand the network is fabricate more chips and connect them to Philadelphia’s existing fiber-optic cables.”

The Future of the Quantum Internet

The main barrier to scaling quantum networks beyond a metro area is that quantum signals cannot yet be amplified without destroying their entanglement.

While some teams have shown that “quantum keys,” special codes for ultra-secure communication, can travel long distances over ordinary fiber, those systems use weak coherent light to generate random numbers that cannot be copied, a technique that is highly effective for security applications but not sufficient to link actual quantum processors.

Overcoming this challenge will require new devices, but the Penn study provides an important early step: showing how a chip can run quantum signals over existing commercial fiber using internet-style packet routing, dynamic switching and on-chip error mitigation that work with the same protocols that manage today’s networks.

“This feels like the early days of the classical internet in the 1990s, when universities first connected their networks,” says Broberg. “That opened the door to transformations no one could have predicted. A quantum internet has the same potential.”

This study was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science and was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF12960 and DOI 10.37807), Office of Naval Research (N00014-23-1-2882), National Science Foundation (DMR-2323468), Olga and Alberico Pompa endowed professorship, and PSC-CUNY award (ENHC-54-93).

Additional co-authors include Alan Zhu, Gushi Li and Jonathan Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, and Li Ge of the City University of New York.

In a study published recently in Light, Science and Application, researchers from the school of Physics and Astronomy created a new optoelectronic device from the combined use of Holographic Metasurfaces (HMs) and Organic Light Emmitting Diodes (OLEDs).

Until now, holograms have are created using lasers, however researchers have found  that using OLEDs and HMs gives a simpler and more compact approach that is potentially cheaper and easier to apply, overcoming the main barriers to hologram technology being used more widely.

Organic light-emitting diodes are thin film devices widely used to make the colored pixels in mobile phone displays and some TVs. As a flat and surface-emitting light source, OLEDs are also used in emerging applications such as optical wireless communications, biophotonics and sensing, where the ability to integrate with other technologies makes them good candidates to realize miniaturized light-based platforms.

A holographic metasurface is a thin, flat array of tiny structures called meta-atoms – the size of roughly a thousand of the width of a strand of hair – they are designed to manipulate light’s properties. They can make holograms and their uses span diverse fields, such as data storage, anti-counterfeiting, optical displays, high numerical aperture lenses – for example optical microscopy, and sensing.

This, however, is the first time both have been used together to produce the basic building block of a holographic display.

Researchers found that when each meta- atom is carefully shaped to control the properties of the beam of light that goes through it, it behaves as a pixel of the HM. When light goes through the HM, at each pixel, the properties of the light are slightly modified.

Thanks to these modifications, it is possible to create a pre-designed image on the other side, exploiting the principle of light interference, whereby light waves create complicated patterns when they interact with each other.

Professor Ifor Samuel, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “We are excited to demonstrate this new direction for OLEDs.  By combining OLEDs with metasurfaces, we also open a new way of generating holograms and shaping light.”

Andrea Di Falco, professor in nano-photonics at the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “Holographic metasurfaces are one of the most versatile material platforms to control light. With this work, we have removed one of the technological barriers that prevent the adoption of metamaterials in everyday applications. This breakthrough will enable a step change in the architecture of holographic displays for emerging applications, for example, in virtual and augmented reality.”

Professor Graham Turnbull, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “OLED displays normally need thousands of pixels to create a simple picture. This new approach allows a complete image to be projected from a single OLED pixel!”

Until now, researchers could only make very simple shapes with OLEDs, which limited their usability in some applications. However, this breakthrough provides a path toward a miniaturized and highly integrated metasurface display.

The research findings, published in Immunity, show that excess fat in the brain’s resident immune cells, called microglia, impairs their ability to combat disease. This insight opens a path to lipid biology-based neuroimmune therapies that could treat diseases like Alzheimer’s by enhancing microglial function and neuronal health. This work was led by Gaurav Chopra, the James Tarpo Jr. and Margaret Tarpo Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) of Computer Science at Purdue.

While most Alzheimer’s drug development targets the primary pathologies of the disease — plaques of a misfolded protein called amyloid beta and tangles of the protein tau — Chopra is focused on the abnormally fat-rich cells surrounding diseased regions of the brain. In earlier work published in Nature, Chopra and collaborators showed that, in the presence of disease, astrocytes — another type of cells that support neurons — release a fatty acid that is toxic to brain cells. Another collaborative work with the University of Pennsylvania, published last year in Nature, also linked mitochondrial dysfunction in neurons with fat deposits in glial cells during aging — a major risk factor for neurodegeneration.

“In our view, directly targeting plaques or tangles will not solve the problem; we need to restore function of immune cells in the brain,” Chopra said. “We’re finding that reducing accumulation of fat in the diseased brain is the key, as accumulated fat makes it harder for the immune system to do its job and maintain balance. By targeting these pathways, we can restore the ability of immune cells like microglia to fight disease and keep the brain in balance, which is what they’re meant to do.”

Chopra’s team worked in collaboration with researchers at Cleveland Clinic led by Dimitrios Davalos, assistant professor of molecular medicine. Chopra is also the director of Merck-Purdue Center and a member of the Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience; the Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery; the Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease; and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.

Chopra’s work is part of Purdue’s presidential One Health initiative, which brings together research on human, animal and plant health. His research supports the initiative’s focus on advanced chemistry, where Purdue faculty study complex chemical systems and develop new techniques and applications.

More than 100 years ago, Alois Alzheimer identified abnormalities in the brain of a woman with the disease that now bears his name, including plaques, tangles and cells filled with droplets of fatty compounds called lipids. Until recently, these lipid droplets were dismissed as by-products of disease.

But the links that Chopra and his team have found between neurodegenerative disease and fats in microglia and astrocytes — both types of glial cells that support neurons in the brain — strongly suggest otherwise. Chopra says this research lays the foundation for a “new lipid model of neurodegeneration.” He likes to call these fat accumulations “lipid plaques,” as they don’t resemble spherical droplets.

“It is not the lipid droplets that are pathogenic, but the accumulation of these droplets is bad. We think the composition of lipid molecules that accumulate within brain cells is one of the major drivers of neuroinflammation, leading to different pathologies, such as aging, Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions related to inflammatory insults in the brain. The specific composition of these lipid plaques may define particular brain diseases,” Chopra said.

The Immunity paper focuses on microglia, the “bona fide immune cells of the brain,” which clear out debris, such as misfolded proteins like amyloid beta and tau, by absorbing and breaking them down through a process called phagocytosis. Chopra’s team examined microglia in the presence of amyloid beta and asked a simple question: What happens to microglia when they come into contact with amyloid beta?

Images of brain tissue from people with Alzheimer’s disease showed amyloid beta plaques surrounded by microglia. Microglia located within 10 micrometers of these plaques contained twice as many lipid droplets as those farther away. These lipid droplet-laden microglia closest to the plaques cleared 40% less amyloid beta than ordinary microglia from brains without disease.

In their investigation into why microglia were impaired in Alzheimer’s brains, the team used specialized techniques and found that microglia in contact with plaques and disease-related inflammation produced an excess of free fatty acids. While microglia normally use free fatty acids as an energy source — and some production of these fatty acids is even beneficial — Chopra and his team discovered the microglia closest to amyloid beta plaques convert these free fatty acids to triacylglycerol, a stored form of fat, in such large quantities that they become overloaded and immobilized by their own accumulation. The formation of these lipid droplets depends on age and disease progression, becoming more prominent as Alzheimer’s disease advances.

By tracing the complex series of steps microglia use to convert free fatty acids to triacylglycerol, the research team zeroed in on the final step of this pathway. They found abnormally high levels of an enzyme called DGAT2 catalyzes the final step of converting free fatty acids to triacylglycerol. They expected to see equally high levels of the DGAT2 gene — since the gene must be copied to produce the protein — but that was not the case. The enzyme accumulates because it is not degrading as quickly as it normally would, rather than being overproduced. This accumulation of DGAT2 causes microglia to divert fatty acids into long-term storage and fat accumulation instead of using them for energy or repair.

“We showed that amyloid beta is directly responsible for the fat that forms inside microglia,” Chopra said. “Because of these fatty deposits, microglial cells become dysfunctional — they stop clearing amyloid beta and stop doing their job.”

Chopra said the researchers don’t yet know what causes the DGAT2 enzyme to persist. However, in their search for a remedy, the team tested two molecules: one that inhibits DGAT2’s function and another that promotes its degradation. The degradation of the DGAT2 enzyme was ultimately beneficial to reduce fat in the brains, improve function of microglia and their ability to eat amyloid-beta plaques, and improve markers of neuronal health in Alzheimer’s disease animal models.

“What we’ve seen is that when we target the fat-making enzyme and either remove or degrade it, we restore the microglia’s ability to fight disease and maintain balance in the brain — which is what they’re meant to do,” Chopra said.

“This is an exciting finding that reveals how a toxic protein plaque directly influences how lipids are formed and metabolized by microglial cells in Alzheimer’s brains,” said Priya Prakash, a first co-author of the study. “While most recent work in this area has focused on the genetic basis of the disease, our research paves the way for understanding how lipids and their pathways within the brain’s immune cells can be targeted to restore their function and combat the disease.”

“It’s incredibly exciting to connect fat metabolism to immune dysfunction in Alzheimer’s,” said Palak Manchanda, the other first co-author. “By pinpointing this lipid burden and the DGAT2 switch that drives it, we reveal a completely new therapeutic angle: Restore microglial metabolism and you may restore the brain’s own defense against disease.”

At Purdue, Chopra was joined in the research by Prakash, Manchanda, Kanchan Bisht, Kaushik Sharma, Prageeth R. Wijewardhane, Caitlin Randolph, Matthew Clark, Jonathan Fine, Elizabeth Thayer and Chi Zhang. Their research was produced with support from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

Orforglipron is a small-molecule, oral glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist. In this phase 3, multinational, randomised, double-blind trial, the authors examined the safety and efficacy of once-daily orforglipron at doses of 6 mg, 12 mg, or 36 mg, as compared with placebo (assigned in a 3:3:3:4 ratio) as an adjunct to healthy diet and physical activity for 72 weeks. All the patients had obesity but not diabetes. The primary end point was the percent change in body weight from baseline to week 72.

A total of 3127 patients in 9 countries / jurisdictions (USA, China, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Slovakia and Taiwan) underwent randomisation. The mean relative change in body weight from baseline to week 72 was −7.5% with 6 mg of orforglipron, −8.4% with 12 mg of orforglipron, and −11.2% with 36 mg of orforglipron, as compared with −2.1% with placebo.

Among the patients in the orforglipron 36 mg group, 54.6% had reduction of 10% or more of body weight, 36.0% had a reduction of 15% or more, and 18.4% had a reduction of 20% or more, as compared with 12.9%, 5.9%, and 2.8% of the patients, respectively, in the placebo group.

Other outcomes such as waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and non-HDL cholesterol levels significantly improved with orforglipron treatment (see table 3 full paper). Adverse events (see table 4) resulted in treatment discontinuation in 5.3% to 10.3% of the patients in the orforglipron groups and in 2.7% of those in the placebo group. The most common adverse events with orforglipron were gastrointestinal effects, which were mostly mild to moderate, consistent with the GLP-1 class of medications.

The authors note that the use of medications such as GLP-1 receptor agonists (such as semaglutide) are reported to result in mean weight reductions of approximately 15% to above 20% and have shown additional health benefits, including decreased cardiovascular risk. However, most available GLP-1 based medications are administered as a subcutaneous injection, which may limit treatment initiation and adherence.

The authors say: “After 72 weeks of treatment, all the patients in the three orforglipron groups had a significant and clinically meaningful dose-dependent reduction in body weight. The patients who received the highest dose of orforglipron had an average 11.2% weight reduction; more than one third had a reduction of at least 15%, and nearly one fifth had a reduction of at least 20%. All measured cardiometabolic levels improved with orforglipron treatment as compared with placebo… A weight reduction of 10% or more is a recognised therapeutic threshold, one that has been linked to meaningful cardiometabolic benefits. In our current trial, patients who received orforglipron had a mean weight reduction of as much as 11.2%, and such reductions were associated with improvements in levels of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, as well as blood fats, blood sugar profiles, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein – a marker of systemic inflammation.”

The authors note the trial’s limitations include the lack of comparison with currently approved obesity-management medications, the use of cutoffs for BMI inclusion criteria that have been developed in White populations and that exclude patients with lower BMI values who may also have adiposity-related risks, and the increasing availability of obesity-management medications, which could have an effect on treatment adherence and efficacy results. The strengths of the trial include a highly diverse, large population from nine countries and jurisdictions on four continents – including more than 35% enrolment of men.

They conclude: “In patients with obesity, the use of orforglipron resulted in statistically and clinically significant weight reductions and an adverse-event profile that was consistent with findings regarding other GLP-1 receptor agonists.”

Dr Wharton adds: “This could mean an expansion of obesity interventions to groups who are currently excluded due to the cost of and lack of access to injectable medications.”

Orforglipron is not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or other similar agencies worldwide.