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A microscope that harnesses quantum entanglement can image biological structures with unprecedented sharpness. The technique ‘squeezes’ light to produce correlations between photons in one of the lasers used by an optical imaging method called stimulated Raman scattering gain microscopy. The squeezed light suppresses noise in the microscope’s signal, improving the sensitivity. “In order to achieve this kind of measurement without quantum correlations, you’d have to turn the intensity up,” says physicist Warwick Bowen. “But if you turned up the intensity enough to match these results, you’d destroy the sample, so we’re able to examine things that previously would have been impossible to see.”
Go deeper with optical imaging researcher Eric Potma in the Nature News & Views article
Features & opinion
Research collaborations are the lifeblood of science. But if trust breaks down or respect is lost, partnerships can be difficult to resuscitate. To keep cooperation alive, team members should identify potential pressure points in advance and promote open discussions to ensure that everyone is still on board. For example, each of the thousands of researchers involved in the Human Cell Atlas project must explain how they will approach well-defined policies and principles on data sharing and publishing.
Flint, Michigan, is infamous for its water crisis — but it should be known for more than this public-health tragedy, write public-health researchers E. Yvonne Lewis and Richard Sadler. “Flint is a working example of how community members and academics can collaborate on problems — such as how to collect data or develop robust models of health risks and injustices — and on finding solutions,” they write.
The global antiracism movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic also spurred Wellcome, one of the world’s largest biomedical-research funders. “It was like the door I had been pushing had fallen open,” says Kalaiyashni Puvanendran, who is a diversity and inclusion project manager at the charity. “Suddenly, I was allowed — encouraged! — to progress anti-racism work that I’d wanted to do for years.” She lays out the five principles that Wellcome is using to help turn intentions into actions.
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