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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has ended an exploratory effort to add smaller, lower-cost navigation satellites to bolster the Global Positioning System, shelving a program that had been identified as a priority. The effort, known as Resilient GPS, or R-GPS, began in 2024 and funded three industry teams to develop designs and early prototypes […]
The CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva has received $1bn from private donors towards the construction of the Future Circular Collider (FCC). The cash marks the first time in the lab’s 72-year history that individuals and philanthropic foundations have agreed to support a major CERN project. If built, the FCC would be the successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs boson was discovered.
CERN originally released a four-volume conceptual design report for the FCC in early 2019, with more detail included in a three-volume feasibility study that came out last year. It calls for a giant tunnel some 90.7 km in circumference – roughly three times as long as the LHC – that would be built about 200m underground on average.
The FCC has been recommended as the preferred option for the next flagship collider at CERN in the ongoing process to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics, which will be passed over to the CERN Council in May 2026.If the plans are given the green light by CERN Council in 2028, construction on the FCC electron-positron machine, dubbed FCC-ee, would begin in 2030. It would start operations in 2047, a few years after the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) closes down, and run for about 15 years until the early 2060s.
The FCC-ee would focus on creating a million Higgs particles in total to allow physicists to study its properties with an accuracy an order of magnitude better that possible with the LHC. The FCC feasibility study then calls for a hadron machine, dubbed FCC-hh, to replace the FCC-ee in the existing 91 km tunnel. It would be a “discovery machine”, smashing together protons at high energy – about 85 TeV – with the aim of creating new particles. If built, the FCC-hh will begin operation in 2073 and run to the end of the century.
The funding model for the FCC-ee, which is expected to have a price tag of about $18bn, is still a work in progress. But it is estimated that at least two-thirds of the construction costs will come from CERN’s 24 member states with the rest needing to be found elsewhere. One option to plug that gap is private donations and in late December CERN received a significant boost from several organizations including the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and the entrepreneurs John Elkann and Xavier Niel. Together, they pledged a total of $1bn towards the FCC-ee.
Costas Fountas, president of the CERN Council says CERN is “extremely grateful” for the interest. “This once again demonstrates CERN’s relevance and positive impact on society, and the strong interest in CERN’s future that exists well beyond our own particle physics community,” he notes.
Eric Schmidt, who founded Google, claims that he and Wendy Schmidt were “inspired by the ambition of this project and by what it could mean for the future of humanity”. The FCC, he believes, is an instrument that “could push the boundaries of human knowledge and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of the Universe” and could lead to technologies that could benefit society “in profound ways” from medicine to computing to sustainable energy.
The cash promised has been welcomed by outgoing CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti. “It’s the first time in history that private donors wish to partner with CERN to build an extraordinary research instrument that will allow humanity to take major steps forward in our understanding of fundamental physics and the universe,” she said. “I am profoundly grateful to them for their generosity, vision, and unwavering commitment to knowledge and exploration.”
Further boost
The cash comes a few months after the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC) – a rival collider to the FCC-ee that also involves building a huge 100 km tunnel to study the Higgs in unprecedented detail – was not considered for inclusion in China’s next five-year plan, which runs from 2026–2030. There has been much discussion in China whether the CEPC is the right project for the country, with the collider facing criticism from particle physicist and Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Yang, before he died last year.
Wang Yifang of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing says they will submit the CEPC for consideration again in 2030 unless FCC is officially approved before then. But for particle theorist John Ellis from Kings College London, China’s decision to effectively put the CEPC on the back burner “certainly simplifies the FCC discussion”. “However, an opportunity for growing the world particle physics community has been lost, or at least deferred [by the decision],” Ellis told Physics World.
Ellis adds, however, that he would welcome China’s participation in the FCC. “Their accelerator and detector [technical design reviews] show that they could bring a lot to the table, if the political obstacles can be overcome,” he says.
However, if the FCC-ee goes ahead China could perhaps make significant “in-kind” contributions rather like those that occur with the ITER experimental fusion reactor, which is currently being built in France. In this case, instead of cash payments, the countries provide components, equipment and other materials.
Those considerations and more will now fall to the British physicist Mark Thomson, who took over from Gianotti as CERN director-general on 1 January for a five-year term. As well as working on funding requirements for the FCC-ee, top of his in-tray will actually be shutting down the LHC in June to make way for further work on the HL-LHC, which involves installing powerful new superconducting magnets and improving the detection.
About 90% of the 27 km LHC accelerator will be affected by the upgrade with a major part being to replace the magnets in the final focus systems of the two large experiments, ATLAS and CMS. These magnets will take the incoming beams and then focus them down to less than 10 microns in cross section. The upgrade includes the installation of brand new state-of-the-art niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconducting focusing magnets.
The HL-LHC will probably not turn on until 2030, which is when Thomson’s term will nearly be over but that doesn’t deter him from leading the world’s foremost particle-physics lab. “It’s an incredibly exciting project,” Thomson told the Guardian. “It’s more interesting than just sitting here with the machine hammering away.”
Imaging tissue fibrosis (a) Mid-infrared dichroism-sensitive photoacoustic microscopy (MIR-DS-PAM) images of cell-induced fibrosis (CIF) and normal control (NC) tissue; (c) MIR-DS-PAM images of drug-induced fibrosis (DIF) and NC tissue; (b) and (d) show the corresponding confocal fluorescence microscopy (CFM) images. Scale bars: 500 µm. (Courtesy: CC-BY 4.0/Light Sci. Appl. 10.1038/s41377-025-02117-0)
Many of the tissues in the human body rely upon highly organized microstructures to function effectively. If the collagen fibres in heart muscle become disordered, for instance, this can lead to or reflect disorders such as fibrosis and cancer. To image and analyse such structural changes, researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in Korea have developed a new label-free microscopy technique and demonstrated its use in engineered heart tissue.
The ability to assess the alignment of microstructures such as protein fibres within tissue’s extracellular matrix provides a valuable tool for diagnosing disease, monitoring therapy response and evaluating tissue engineering models. Currently, however, this is achieved using histological imaging methods based on immunofluorescent staining, which can be labour-intensive and sensitive to the imaging conditions and antibodies used.
Instead, a team headed up by Chulhong Kim and Jinah Jang is investigating photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), a label-free imaging modality that relies on light absorption by endogenous tissue chromophores to reveal structural and functional information. In particular, PAM with mid-infrared (MIR) incident light provides bond-selective, high-contrast imaging of proteins, lipids and carbohydrates. The researchers also incorporated dichroism-sensitive (DS) functionality, resulting in a technique referred to as MIR-DS-PAM.
“Dichroism-sensitivity enables the quantitative assessment of fibre alignment by detecting the polarization-dependent absorption of anisotropic materials like collagen,” explains first author Eunwoo Park. “This adds a new contrast mechanism to conventional photoacoustic imaging, allowing simultaneous visualization of molecular content and microstructural organization without any labelling.”
Park and colleagues constructed a MIR-DS-PAM system using a pulsed quantum cascade laser as the light source. They tuned the laser to a centre wavelength of 6.0 µm to correspond with an absorption peak from the C=O stretching vibration in proteins. The laser beam was linearly polarized, modulated by a half-wave plate and used to illuminate the target tissue.
Tissue analysis
To validate the functionality of their MIR-DS-PAM technique, the researchers used it to image a formalin-fixed section of engineered heart tissue (EHT). They obtained images at four incident angles and used the acquired photoacoustic data to calculate the photoacoustic amplitude, which visualizes the protein content, as well as the degree of linear dichroism (DoLD) and the orientation angle of linear dichroism (AoLD), which reveal the extracellular matrix alignment.
“Cardiac tissue features highly aligned extracellular matrix with complex fibre orientation and layered architecture, which are critical to its mechanical and electrical function,” Park explains. “These properties make it an ideal model for demonstrating the ability of MIR-DS-PAM to detect physiologically relevant histostructural and fibrosis-related changes.”
The researchers also used MIR-DS-PAM to quantify the structural integrity of EHT during development, using specimens cultured for one to five days before fixing. Analysis of the label-free images revealed that as the tissue matured, the DoLD gradually increased, while the standard deviation of the AoLD decreased – indicating increased protein accumulation with more uniform fibre alignment over time. They note that these results agree with those from immunofluorescence-stained confocal fluorescence microscopy.
Next, they examined diseased EHT with two types of fibrosis: cell-induced fibrosis (CIF) and drug-induced fibrosis (DIF). In the CIF sample, the average photoacoustic amplitude and AoLD uniformity were both lower than found in normal EHT, indicating reduced protein density and disrupted fibre alignment. DIF exhibited a higher photoacoustic amplitude and lower AoLD uniformity than normal EHT, suggesting extensive extracellular matrix accumulation with disorganized orientation.
Both CIF and DIF showed a slight reduction in DoLD, again signifying a disorganized tissue structure, a common hallmark of fibrosis. The two fibrosis types, however, exhibited diverse biochemical profiles and different levels of mechanical dysfunction. The findings demonstrate the ability of MIR-DS-PAM to distinguish diseased from healthy tissue and identify different types of fibrosis. The researchers also imaged a tissue assembly containing both normal and fibrotic EHT to show that MIR-DS-PAM can capture features in a composite sample.
They conclude that MIR-DS-PAM enables label-free monitoring of both tissue development and fibrotic remodelling. As such, the technique shows potential for use within tissue engineering research, as well as providing a diagnostic tool for assessing tissue fibrosis or remodelling in biopsied samples. “Its ability to visualize both biochemical composition and structural alignment could aid in identifying pathological changes in cardiological, musculoskeletal or ocular tissues,” says Park.
“We are currently expanding the application of MIR-DS-PAM to disease contexts where extracellular matrix remodelling plays a central role,” he adds. “Our goal is to identify label-free histological biomarkers that capture both molecular and structural signatures of fibrosis and degeneration, enabling multiparametric analysis in pathological conditions.”
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