When a team of physicists in Paris fabricated the world’s first temporal photonic crystal, they added a new dimension to humanity’s quest to control light: time. From lighting our homes to advanced fiber optics and lasers, humans have long worked to control light, and now researchers say that can be achieved in a fourth dimension.

Yannis Laplace led the team at the Laboratory of Irradiated Solids (LSI) in demonstrating the temporal photonic crystal, with the help of other European institutions, which was revealed in a recent paper published in Nature.

As light hits the crystal, a terahertz electromagnetic wave rapidly modulates its optical properties, producing a device that controls light over time without expending energy.

Crystal Power

Controlling the properties of light for applications in telecommunications, sensors, and light sources is an active research field and is often reliant on crystals. In technical terms, a crystal is simply a regularly and periodically organized system. While we primarily think of translucent, shining crystals, they can be constructed of other forms of matter, such as gas or liquids, so long as their atoms arrange into regular, well-defined intervals.

How atoms arrange to form crystals grants their electrons and the photons they emit unique properties, including color and energy. Targeting photons specifically became an interest of scientists in the 1980s, with the development of photonic crystals, whose alternating materials each had unique effects on photons. These photonics gave rise to modern lasers, optical fibers, and photodetectors, technologies that have advanced considerably in recent decades.

Into the Time Dimension

In the last decade, researchers have experimented with a new kind of crystal: the time crystal. They are comprised of a unique form of matter in which particles repeat a continuous sequence—not just in the three physical dimensions, but also in time, without expending any energy.

The LSI team sought to combine photonic crystals with time crystals to develop a temporal photonic crystal that would control a light-matter interaction by alternating over time. Their work represents the first time such an idea has moved from the theoretical realm into the physical.

The device the researchers constructed operates in the high terahertz range, pushing light to oscillate 1000 billion times a second. It consists of micrometer-scale gold structures, shaped like battlements, leaving open cavities separated from an indium-antimony semiconductor by an insulating layer. The cavities between the gold structures trap light photons.

Testing a Temporal Photonic Crystal

To demonstrate their device in the real world, the LSI team bombarded it with terahertz laser pulses and recorded the material’s optical properties, modulating light over time. The effect was incredibly powerful, creating a strong modulation that alternated one billionth of a billionth of a second.

At the semiconductor layer, the researchers observed electrons forming from the light waves in what are called “surface plasmons,” oscillating with their effective mass. The greater their speed, the heavier these electrons become, producing the device’s optical modulations.

Beyond this observed phenomenon, the researchers suspect other interesting conditions may be occurring within the crystal. Some indirect evidence suggests that photons trapped inside the structure are amplified, although presently no direct observations have confirmed this. The team is continuing with experiments in hopes of eventually capturing this photon trapping phenomenon.

Laplace and his colleagues see these unique time crystals as eventually being a pathway toward the creation of terahertz-scale light sources and detectors, which would fit between those of electronics and visible light frequencies.

The paper, “Plasmonic Metamaterial Time Crystal,” appeared in Nature on July 29, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.

As new observations reveal the outer edges of IC 1101 for the first time, scientists have confirmed it is the largest known galaxy. The galaxy’s statistics are staggering, containing an estimated 3.4 trillion solar masses of stars and spanning roughly 1.7 million light-years, eclipsing every other known galaxy.

IC 1101 belongs to a class known as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), which form as massive galaxies spend billions of years absorbing smaller neighboring galaxies.

The new images are the deepest ever taken of the galaxy, and were revealed in a recent paper accepted for publication in a future issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics, but available now in preprint form on the arXiv server.

Blending into the Cosmic Background

Despite their enormous sizes, BCGs are notoriously difficult for astronomers to study. Because they are built through the gradual merger of many smaller galaxies, their outer regions are extremely faint, containing diffuse stellar halos and tidal tails left behind by ancient collisions. These wispy edges often blend into the free-floating gas and stars that fill galaxy clusters, making it difficult to determine precisely where the galaxy ends and the surrounding cluster begins.

Carlos Marrero-de la Rosa of the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands led the new study, focusing on IC 1101, the dominant galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster.

The research relied on ultra-deep images captured with the Wide Field Camera at the Isaac Newton Telescope, allowing astronomers to resolve the galaxy’s diffuse outer boundary in unprecedented detail.

Battling Light Pollution

With the number of satellites orbiting Earth increasing dramatically in recent years, astronomers have raised concerns about artificial light pollution. In this case, however, the researchers faced interference from a far more distant source: foreground stars within our own galaxy.

These stars, located between Earth and IC 1101, scatter light across telescope images, washing out the extremely faint structures astronomers are attempting to detect. Since the galaxy’s outermost regions are already difficult to distinguish, any additional scattered light significantly reduces image contrast.

To overcome this problem, the researchers constructed a detailed model of how the telescope spreads light using dozens of calibration stars. The model allowed the team to accurately subtract scattered light from more than 250 foreground stars, bringing IC 1101’s faintest structures into much sharper contrast and enabling a more precise measurement of its true extent.

The Largest Known Galaxy

IC 1101’s immense scale becomes even more striking when compared with our own Milky Way. The astronomers measured IC 1101 at roughly 520 kiloparsecs across—about 17 times wider than the Milky Way’s approximately 30-kiloparsec diameter. Even after accounting for all forms of mass, including elusive dark matter, scientists estimate that the Milky Way contains only about 1 to 1.5 trillion solar masses of material, compared with the 3.4 trillion solar masses contained in the stars of IC 1101 alone.

Researchers also found evidence that the giant galaxy continues to grow. They identified eight structures beyond its main edge, two of which align with previously observed X-ray disturbances that suggest ongoing accretion. According to the team, IC 1101 likely collided with another galaxy group between two and three billion years ago, producing a merger that continues to shape the galaxy today.

The paper, “How Large Can Galaxies Be? Ultra-Deep Imaging of IC 1101, the Most Extended Known Galaxy,” is available on arXiv, ahead of later publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.

A teleoperated centaur robot dubbed “Threehalves” could represent the future of manual work in some of our planet’s most dangerous environments, according to Satyress Robotics, the California startup behind the project. In disasters such as mudslides, wildfires, and rubble searches, the company says its robot can keep workers safe from on-site hazards.

The other side of the story is the robot’s creepy, almost demonic appearance, as conveyed on the provocative Satyress Robotics website, the imagery for which is so unusual that it almost gives the impression of being a parody—particularly in an age of breathless reporting on corporate claims, and sudden appearances of “viral” news stories.

Therefore, The Debrief decided to take a deeper look at this mechanical oddity that more closely resembles something out of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey than a project in development in a California robotics lab.

An Unsettling Robot

Threehalves isn’t exactly news; all of the available information on the robot was posted on the company website over a year ago, around the time of their only post on X. Yet it’s recently been discovered by internet outlets noting the creepy design of this robot that the company claims is here to help.

“It’s obviously quite over the top, but ultimately, this is at the extreme end of humanoid robotics in size and capability,” a company representative told The Debrief.

“People may be familiar with humanoid robots from TV/movies or product videos, but likely don’t understand just how powerful and heavy they are (especially ours, which is coming in at just under 7ft tall and 240 lbs currently),” the rep added. “Our thought is someone who didn’t know what it is should definitely stay away from it, and those that do know or are operating the machine should be reminded it’s quite dangerous.” 

“If you look at something like a lathe or mill, they generally look intimidating, for good reason, even though they could be dressed up to look friendly and soft,” the rep concluded. “We’ll point out, though, that the ‘evil’ look is mostly from it being pitch black; with different colors or a wrap on it, it does not put off that vibe.”

Robot “Superpowers”

Part of Threehalves’ sales pitch is that it won’t replace jobs, but instead will merely transfer them to robotic operators using a joystick to guide Threehalves through manual work in dangerous environments. The website claims that this amounts to granting workers “superpowers,” allowing them to focus on honing their craft in new extreme situations. However, while the operator won’t have to directly get their hands dirty, Satyress Robotics told The Debrief that Threehalves is designed for line-of-sight, close-proximity operation.

“We don’t have any plans to develop much autonomy above what’s needed to keep the robot from damaging itself,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “Our goal is to have experienced trade experts in control of the bots at all times. Forestry, for instance, is the deadliest job in the US – our goal is to save lives first and foremost, and we believe that is also enough economically to justify the cost of the bot without any autonomous productivity gain.”

Two of the robots can fit in a standard truck bed, allowing them to be easily transported to remote locations. Lacking hands, the robot can be fitted with a variety of unique attachments to hold various tools from chainsaws to drills. Of note, the robot is shown holding a gas-powered chainsaw. Exactly how it would manage to get the chainsaw started without an obvious way to pull the ripcord is unclear.

Safety First

With fears of a demonic Terminator immediately conjured up by Threehalves’ appearance, the company informs us that although “this robot is more dangerous than it looks,” the same is true of any humanoid robot, and this one comes equipped with a variety of safety features.

Ironically, one of these is the robot’s menacing horns, which significantly slow the robot down in moving through standard-size door frames, and can even be replaced with larger horns that make traversing such portals impossible.

“It’s another way to make it clear this isn’t a toy, [a] security guard, etc,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “It’s built for one reason, for a teleoperator to do dangerous work or heavy lifting from a safe, in line of sight distance.”

“We are not looking at any use cases in commercial buildings, and certainly not residential,” they added.

A Violent Stop

Additionally, air reservoirs in the chest cavity and on the robot’s back are designed to activate pin locks on all its joints, rendering the robot immobile if air pressure is lost. Imagery on the website suggests this can seemingly be accomplished by stabbing Threehalves with a knife or shooting it with a gun. Fortunately, a more pacifist option to halt the robot also exists: simply by hitting an e-stop button located on its stomach.

When pressed on why the company would design their robot to be susceptible to gunfire specifically, the representative didn’t seem to find this the least bit unusual.

“Nothing software wise/control wise, whether autonomous or teleoperated, can be guaranteed to never have any kind of control issue,” the Satyress Robotics representative said. “This gives a means to lock the brakes remotely without necessarily damaging the robot beyond repair.”

Robot Reality or Hoax?

With the unsettling design and suggestion that the robot may eventually have to be shot to stop it from injuring a human, one of this reporter’s main questions became: “Is this a joke?” The outlandish nature of the project reminds one of prankster Joey Skaggs’ tricks on the media, such as the time he convinced WNBC-TV in New York and United Press International that he had recently developed a cure-all derived from roach hormones, which he was injecting into his followers.

However, the Satyress Robotics representative confirmed that the company’s new quadrupedal working robot is no joke.

“It’s not a prank. Also, we’re building it with the goal of keeping workers safe, so we just want to make it clear we’re thinking of every edge case and looking for ways to solve them outside of software,” the representative explained. “We are quite a ways away from showing the robot in any kind of elegant motion, thus the static renders/photos.”

Given that the company hasn’t posted on social media in over a year and has no LinkedIn presence, it was unclear who was behind the operation and if it was still underway. According to the company, they will shortly be making a video to introduce themselves.

While one picture on the website appears to show a live test with a joystick, there are no videos of Threehalves in motion on the website, and our email conversation confirmed it is not yet a functional robot.

For now, the company tells The Debrief that they are currently working on component-level testing and any commercial version of the Threehalves is more than two years away.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Chinese researchers are using laser technology to vastly extend the flight time of drones, marking a significant shift in UAV capabilities.

The achievement was reported by researchers from China’s Civil Aviation University, who reported their findings in laser-based drone charging technology in a recent article published in Matter & Light.

The new drone concept utilizes a lightweight receiver, repurposing solar cell technology to absorb laser light and convert it into electricity to power a device.

Endless Drones

“Imagine a future where drones inspecting forests, monitoring disasters, or delivering packages no longer need to land frequently to replace batteries,” said senior author Jianhua Han of Civil Aviation University of China. “As drones take on longer missions, battery life has become one of the biggest barriers.”

At the core of the breakthrough is perovskite, a class of synthetic compounds with a crystalline structure highly conducive to solar power applications. The team developed a perovskite laser cell-thermoelectric (PLC-TE) tandem device that optimizes a solar cell to accept laser energy.

The cell’s perovskite converts laser energy into electricity, which can be a messy process, as some of the power is lost as heat. The thermoelectric layer addresses this problem by capturing heat and converting it into electricity via the temperature differential between its warmer, laser-facing side and its cooler side. However, that contrast requirement can be an issue when the laser uniformly heats the entire drone, reducing the efficiency of that heat-to-energy conversion.

Managing Overheating

“When we tested the device under a high-power laser, the thermal camera showed temperatures of 80 to 90 degrees Celsius,” Han said. “That was much higher than we expected and made us realize that heat buildup was a far more serious problem than we had imagined.”

To mitigate overheating concerns, the receiver was mounted on the drone’s wings, kept separate from other components, and paired with heat-blocking technology to enable laser-to-electric energy conversion without overheating sensitive electronics.

This heat-blocking technology included nanocrystals embedded in the PLC-TE tandem device, which acted as a thermal barrier due to their poor thermal conductivity. With the nanocrystals in place, the researchers tested the conversion device on its own and observed a significant slowdown in heat flow during prolonged laser exposure, which would cool the drone overall.

This PLC-TE device was bombarded with a green laser in a laboratory experiment and converted 38.49% of the beam’s energy into electricity, a high percentage compared to other wireless charging systems in similar scenarios.

Drone Tests

Next, the team integrated the energy conversion system onto a stationary lab drone and also added airflow channels to the wings. In subsequent laboratory tests, laser bombardment supplied sufficient energy to power the drone’s propeller, while the airflow channels effectively cooled the thermoelectric layer’s cold side, maximizing heat-to-electricity conversion.

“Previous studies largely focused on the materials or the device itself,” Han explained. “We wanted to think beyond the laboratory, to how the system could actually be integrated into an aircraft, cooled during operation, and made compatible with flight. It isn’t just a materials science problem; it’s an engineering one.”

Work continues on this wireless drone charging system, with outdoor flight tests on a lightweight frame scheduled. These will be paying particular attention to the system’s reliability under real-world outdoor conditions. However, the team notes that energy conversion efficiency will not be their sole research area, as the accuracy of laser tracking will be essential to the system’s safe operation.

“Our work demonstrates the possibility of ‘refueling aircraft with light,’” Han concluded. “Going from 1 to 100 will require solving many engineering challenges, but we hope this provides a starting point for future development.”

The paper, “Sb2Se3 Nanocrystals Enable Efficient Perovskite-Thermoelectric Tandem Devices for Laser-Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” appeared in Matter & Light on July 29, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.

The cosmic violence of a black hole tearing apart a star produced a brilliant burst of radio light, which has been observed by astronomers thanks to a new international collaboration.

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (NSF VLA) captured an off-axis afterglow that the researchers believe was left behind by a powerful jet produced by the star’s destruction. The black hole event was dubbed AT2019ijn by the Chinese research team that made the observation using U.S. equipment, and was described in a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Intriguingly, this explosive cosmic event provides astronomers with important new clues in the search for some of the universe’s rarest types of black holes.

A Bright Blue Flash

Various optical surveys of the cosmos detected the bright blue flash of AT2019ijn. For a few days, it continued to grow in brilliance before oddly fading at a rate far slower than is typical of similar transients.

Yet the optical spectrum did not tell the full story. As researchers combed through radio observations, they unexpectedly discovered that the radio emission did not peak within mere days but continued growing for two years before decaying over the next four. Also notable was the intensity of the emission, which was far more luminous than is typically seen during these phases of a stellar explosion.

Its 3-gigahertz luminosity was more than 100 times greater than signals typically observed from supernovae or fast blue optical transients.

Understanding the event required researchers to combine optical data with radio observations from the NSF VLA, India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, and Australia’s ASKAP. By expanding their radio view with these various facilities, the researchers were able to observe how the event changed over time, allowing them to develop and test various models.

A Black Hole Explanation

The Chinese astronomers identified a black hole as the most likely cause of these strange observations. Their focus was on a tidal disruption event, which occurs when a star wanders too close to a black hole and is torn apart by the incredibly powerful gravitational forces it encounters. Intriguingly, the researchers found that an event matching the observed optical brightness would require an extremely rare class of black hole.

Black holes are among the most extreme objects in the universe and tend to occupy opposite ends of a mass spectrum. The smaller variety is known as a “stellar-mass” black hole, since these objects form from the collapse of stars. At the other end are supermassive black holes, which anchor entire galaxies. However, intermediate-mass black holes have largely eluded astronomers, partly because their presence can be difficult to detect.

Detecting Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

Crucially, AT2019ijn allowed researchers to identify a new avenue for detecting these rare black holes.

Perspective is important in these detections. When an intermediate-mass black hole’s jet is not aimed directly toward Earth, the event may appear far less intense at optical wavelengths than expected. However, continued observation at radio wavelengths can reveal a much more intense afterglow as the jet evolves. This delayed brightening could therefore provide an important new clue for identifying potential intermediate-mass black holes.

Looking more broadly, the astronomers contend that many extreme black hole events may be missed because observations cease after the initial optical flash, leaving potentially intense radio peaks unobserved. As even more advanced observational platforms come online, such as the upcoming Next Generation Very Large Array, future radio surveys may reveal more such events, potentially illuminating a previously unrecognized class of transients similar to AT2019ijn.

The paper, “AT2019ijn: A Fast-rising, Slow-decaying Blue Optical Transient with Exceptionally Bright Radio Emission,” appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 6, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

An unexpected transmissible cancer has been detected in North American waterways, prompting new concerns about how the disease developed.

Beginning with discoveries in Lake Memphremagog, a glacial lake spanning both Quebec and Vermont, researchers have found strange black cancerous lesions on fish in the waterways of New England and Canada, revealing an environmental mystery.

University of Vermont researchers announced the startling cancer discovery in a recent paper published in Nature, describing how the cells act similarly to a parasite, transmitting between hosts.

This discovery marks the first time a freshwater species has been identified as afflicted with a transmissible cancer, whose long-term population effects are a major concern.

Fish Cancer

Many questions swirl around this discovery, which go far beyond the specific locations and even species affected—such as how cancer operates and how this transmissible form could have originated.

The first indications that something was amiss came from anglers and biologists who both noticed more brown bullhead catfish with raised black patches coming out of Lake Memphremagog. From their first identifications in 2012 to 2014, the prevalence of the disease increased to one in three of these fish.

These particular catfish are often used as a barometer for environmental health, leading the University of Vermont team to consider a pollution-related pathogen after they had ruled out a viral one. Yet under close examination, they discerned the lesions were something even less expected: a type of skin cancer called melanoma, typically caused by sunlight, and therefore, exceedingly rare in bottom-dwelling fish.

Genetic Research

The melanoma finding set the team on a research course looking to identify whether a genetic mutation had left this catfish population particularly susceptible to skin cancer. What they found was surprising: these cancer cells were more closely related to one another than to their host fish’s healthy cells, suggesting transmission.

These transmissible cancers are extremely unusual, with only three types having been discovered previously. None have been found in freshwater or fish species before this; they have been relegated to Tasmanian devils, dogs, and mollusks.

So far, researchers have only identified the malady in larger, spawning-age fish, leading the team to suspect that transmission occurs during spawning behavior. These events do appear to be a likely candidate, as the fish cluster tightly together in shallow water, providing ample opportunity for physical contact among many fish. Furthermore, due to their lack of scales and bottom-dwelling nature, they are more susceptible to the sediment, which could harbor free-floating cancer cells.

In other species, these transmissible cancers may or may not have devastating population-scale effects. Currently, how the Lake Memphremagog catfish population will fare is unknown, although some fish appear to survive years after the infection is first noted.

The University of Vermont team says that the cancer cannot affect humans, and the lake’s drinking water is safe, but they would caution against eating the cancerous fish.

The Root of Cancer

While the Coventry Landfill is in close proximity to the lake, the cancer is spread evenly along the 32-mile-long lake, instead of concentrating near the landfill. Additionally, water tests show that contamination levels are no higher than those of similar North American waterbodies such as Lake Champlain.

Instead, more concerning than a single source of pollution, the team says they have now discovered this cancer in fish located in other ponds and lakes in this region, none of which were close to pollution sources and had pristine water quality.

The one correlation identified so far is that the cancer cells have high arsenic levels, an element naturally found in the region’s soil in high concentrations. Along with this possible link to a natural cause, the researchers are beginning to suspect that the cancer has existed for quite some time, but has simply gone unrecognized. A potential line of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, who noted a catfish with a similar condition back in the summer of 1852. He even noted that he had come across the fish disease previously, and again wrote of it in 1858.

“By studying how cancers survive and spread outside their original host, we can learn a great deal about what keeps cancers contained—and what happens when those boundaries break down,” co-author Julie Dragon concluded. “These fish provide an opportunity to look at the evolution of cancer.”

The paper, “Brown Bullhead Catfish Melanoma Represents a Novel Transmissible Cancer,” appeared in Nature on July 22, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.