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Private mission to rescue NASA’s aging telescope runs into its own trouble

The spacecraft rushing to the rescue of an aging and sinking NASA telescope has run into its own problem.

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New twist on the Einstein problem reveals unexpected physics

A shape that captured worldwide attention for solving a decades-old mathematical puzzle has returned to the spotlight. While the shape’s properties allowed it to solve previous puzzles, little is known about its other associated properties, creating opportunities for further discovery. These unexplored properties may also help solve new physics mysteries, such as how to twist light into striking chiral patterns.

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Repeating distance patterns let optical systems tackle large optimization problems

From planning transportation networks to organizing massive datasets, many of society’s most important challenges boil down to an optimization problem: finding the best solution among an enormous number of possibilities. As these problems increase in size and scope, however, the computational resources required to solve them can increase dramatically.

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Calif. police wrangle runaway pony

San Jose officers located and returned the pony after it spent the day trotting around the suburbs

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No charges for N.J. officer in OIS of knife-wielding burglary suspect captured on bodycam

Video from the 2024 incident shows Haddon Township officers confronting the man in a stairwell; he approached them with a knife, prompting the shooting

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Scientists demonstrate transition between strong and weak coupling regimes in a polariton microcavity

Researchers from Skoltech, together with colleagues from the N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry and Westlake University, have experimentally demonstrated how the operating regime of a polariton laser changes with a gradual increase in cavity thickness.

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Conn. officer wins reinstatement appeal after being fired in transport incident that left arrestee paralyzed

New Haven Officer Luis Rivera has returned to his job after his criminal charges were dismissed in the incident that left Randy Cox partially paralyzed

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The future of the UK’s renowned Lovell radio telescope is in question after a funding cut

Scientists have reacted with alarm to news that the British government will cut funding to the world-famous radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwest England that has been helping explore the cosmos for almost 70 years.

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Ultracold neutrons don’t disappear into the mirror world

For decades, a theory in physics has postulated the existence of a mirror world whose interaction with our own reality is extremely feeble. The particles in this mirror universe are also thought to be candidates for dark matter. Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have now examined some 25 billion neutrons—thereby ruling out, with a very high degree of certainty, their disappearance into the mirror world. The research is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Video: Interagency team nabs suspected kidnappers, rescues abducted 13-year-old

FBI and GBI investigators tracked the girl after she was taken from Georgia and transported more than 130 miles; the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office SWAT team aided in the arrest

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Evidence of giant rings in Venus’s atmosphere uncovered in archived observations

In 2010, scientists waiting to use the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands captured a brief 36 minutes of images of Venus. They were waiting for the sun to set so they could look at distant stars and dust disks around young stars. Consequently, little attention was paid to the data, which was filed away in the archives.

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New research shows how ‘hot electrons’ can reshape metals in billionths of a second

Researchers at The University of Manchester have revealed how intense electronic excitation can trigger rapid structural changes in metals—without heating the atomic lattice—offering new insight into ultrafast materials behavior.

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A way to read quantum bits faster and with less hardware

Quantum computers process information in a fundamentally different way from conventional computers, using quantum bits, or qubits, that can exist in multiple states at once. This could allow them to tackle problems beyond the reach of today’s machines, from simulating new materials to optimizing complex systems.

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N.Y. sheriff pledges to continue working with ICE despite warnings from state A.G.

“This is going to affect me very little,” Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood. “I’m still going to work with ICE. They can’t prevent us from working with them”

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Tabby’s star may be orbited by a planetary-mass companion

By analyzing data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and conducting new radial velocity measurements, U.K. and French astronomers have found evidence that the mysterious Tabby’s star may be orbited by an object about nine times more massive than Jupiter. The new findings are published on the preprint server arXiv.

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