Best of last week: A new property of light, nucleation captured in 4-D, and drugs that increase dementia risk

It was a good week for physics research, as a pair of researchers, one with Kyoto University, the other the Instituto Balseiro, Centro Atómico de Bariloche found an optimal quantum computation linked to gravity. Paweł Caputa and Javier Magan showed that there are groups of quantum systems in which the complexity of certain tasks can be estimated using classical gravity.

And a team with members from several institutions in the U.S. and Spain discovered a new property of light: self-torque.

A team with members from the University of California and MIT developed a new material with high potential for quantum computing. They made the discovery as part of their efforts to prove the existence of the Majorana fermion.

It was also a big week for astrophysics, as a team with members from Johns Hopkins University and Swarthmore College created a model that suggested how early dark energy could resolve the Hubble tension.

And another team at Western University deciphered the history of supermassive black holes in the early universe, and found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not emerge from a star's collapse.

An international team of researchers suggested that the cosmic waves discovery could unlock mysteries of intergalactic space and determined the precise source of a powerful, one-off burst of cosmic radio waves for the first time.

And a team at Cornell University developed an algorithm to map a multifaceted set of probabilities that they believe could lead to a data visualization that reveals the nature of the universe.

In other news, a team at UCLA announced that they had captured atomic motion in 4-D for the first time—a never-before-seen view of nucleation.

And a team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine made headlines when they announced that they had found that Parkinson's disease has origins in the gut.

And finally, if you are one of the millions of people around the world who have been prescribed muscle relaxants as a means of treating COPD (or other ailments), you might want to note the results of a study done by a team at the University of Nottingham, which found that the commonly prescribed drugs could increase the risk of dementia.

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