How studying astronauts could help tackle aging on Earth

Astronauts who undergo long-duration spaceflight aboard the International Space Station often return with health problems that resemble some age-related conditions in people on Earth.

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A new game demonstrates quantum advantage with provable classical limits

For decades, physicists have worked to prove the strange predictions of quantum mechanics with real experiments. As quantum computers have grown more powerful, researchers have devised increasingly sophisticated ways to test whether these machines are truly harnessing quantum effects—but every method so far has run into limits.

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Superfluid qubit could help scale up quantum computers

Superfluid helium could offer a new way to tackle one of the biggest challenges in scaling up quantum computers, say researchers from the University of Surrey. The research team has introduced a conceptual design for a new type of qubit that could be much less vulnerable to errors.

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Miss. deputy fatally shot while dispersing crowd, suspect at large

Claiborne County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Terrian Bailey was fatally wounded and a woman was shot in the incident

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Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory

The most comprehensive catalog of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. Researchers at The University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics have led a global effort to compile a dataset containing information on 2,884 Type Ia supernovae used to […]

A photon that challenges Einstein: According to current physics, it should never have reached Earth

How did a photon survive a journey of more than 2 billion light-years when, according to known physics, it should have been absorbed long before reaching Earth? This is the question at the heart of a new study by Giorgio Galanti (INAF) and Marco Roncadelli (INFN), accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

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JWST finds extreme star-forming galaxies masquerading as faint quasars

A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 […]

Early Earth’s auroral belts may have formed a natural ion-beam reactor for prebiotic chemistry

We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth’s magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the planetary structure that produces auroras also have organized chemical reactions on early Earth?

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Reversible electric control unlocks persistent chiral phonon states

Atoms in a material are rarely still. They jiggle back and forth in collective lattice vibrations known as phonons. Their motion can also carry a rotational element: In 2023, scientists at PSI experimentally proved the existence of chiral phonons, which exhibit handedness depending on which way they rotate.

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Entangled particles revive a 35-year-old test of the Standard Model

Physicists at the BESIII Collaboration have breathed new life into a decades-old test of one of the Standard Model’s most important ideas, using a technique that had gone almost untouched by experimenters for 35 years.

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Galileo, Copernicus, Cleansky, IRIS² must work together to secure Europe’s place in the space race

“Seeing the Earth from above is a powerful reminder of our interdependence,” said Thomas Pesquet. The words of France’s 10th astronaut to head into space are a reminder of how we are “in this together,” something the world’s aerospace industry players should take heed of as they gather in Paris for the first International Space […]

Dark plasma regions reveal overlooked source of reactive atomic oxygen

Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a way to make plasma more effective for its wide-ranging uses, from antimicrobial applications to surface conditioning in the semiconductor industry. They mapped the production of atomic oxygen, a key ingredient of oxygen plasma, while a high voltage was applied across oxygen gas.

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The DESI legacy imaging survey releases the largest 2D map of the universe

In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained optical images of tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, including through NOIRLab’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt […]

Pair of white dwarfs locked in 6-minute orbit might one day be observed by gravitational waves

Current gravitational-wave observatories aren’t sensitive enough to capture the gravitational waves of binary stars. They can only see the gravitational chirps of black holes just as they are merging. But that will change as more sensitive instruments are developed. Recently, a team of astronomers discovered a binary white dwarf system that could be a good […]

New model measures economic risks solar storms pose to US power grid

In 1967, a solar storm nearly triggered World War III by jamming early-warning radar systems in the United States, causing U.S. leaders to think the Soviet Union was responsible. Though society averted catastrophe thanks to timely information from solar forecasters, the threat from space weather remains real.

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