Ga. city aims to hire 70 officers ahead of 2027 police department launch

Mableton is now working to identify a location where it will house its police department headquarters as the city looks to hire officers

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Small molecular twists may strengthen nature’s magnetic compass

A collaborative research team led by Yasuhiro Kobori at Kobe University, together with researchers from Toho University, Saitama University, Nagoya Institute of Technology and the University of Freiburg, has identified a potential molecular mechanism that could enhance magnetic compass responses in cryptochrome, a blue-light-sensitive protein implicated in magnetoreception.

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Space station experiment to probe plant disease risks for future moon and Mars missions

As NASA and its partners prepare for longer human missions beyond Earth, University of Florida researchers are investigating a challenge that could affect astronauts’ ability to grow fresh food in space: plant disease.

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New X-ray method isolates faint signals from water at material surfaces

A research team from Toyohashi University of Technology, the Institute for Molecular Science and the Institute of Science Tokyo, led by Yu Kinjo and professor Ryugo Tero of Toyohashi University of Technology, has developed a new method to investigate the state of water near material surfaces using X-rays. By combining X-ray absorption spectroscopy with data analysis, the researchers separated the weak signals of interfacial water from those of the much larger amount of surrounding water.

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NASA’s new UV space telescope will launch in 2031

Most of us could spend our entire lives looking at the night sky and see very few changes. The moon becomes more or less illuminated, the planets drift placidly through the sky, satellites and the ISS intrude for a few moments at a time, and the bright, momentary streak of a meteor punctuates the occasional evening of stargazing.

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Rare 4.1-billion-year-old Martian meteorite reveals clues to planet’s ancient past

Scientists at the University of New Mexico have played a key role in identifying a rare, 4.1-billion-year-old Martian meteorite that provides new evidence that the red planet may have once had a wetter, Earth-like environment.

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Electrical guardrails for charge carriers: A new approach to harness graphene for solar cells

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in which electrons can move with high mobility, making it promising for high-speed electronic components. Yet it is not very efficient at converting light into electricity. While light absorbed by graphene does excite electrons, leaving behind positively charged carriers called ‘holes,’ the absorbed light energy cannot be harnessed effectively unless electrons and holes are separated and directed to different contacts.

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Asteroids venturing near white dwarfs don’t break directly into dust, study reveals

When asteroids travel too close to white dwarfs, the dense remnants of stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel, powerful gravitational forces can tear them apart. However, new research from Planetary Science Institute (PSI) suggests that these asteroids don’t immediately break into dust. Instead, most of the mass initially remains in larger fragments, revealing a previously overlooked step in how debris forms around dying stars.

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How the quantum vacuum perturbs atoms, could shrink black holes and may have helped form galaxies

The word “vacuum” may conjure the image of empty space. Maybe you think of a region far outside the solar system without planets, debris, gas clouds or light. According to quantum theory, however, a vacuum is never truly empty. Quantum mechanics extends the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—which states that we cannot measure the position and the velocity of an object exactly at the same time—to a vacuum. The result is that a vacuum can never be still.

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Terahertz light distinguishes two groups of particles trapped inside superconducting vortices

Scientists at Rutgers and in Estonia have used invisible light to look into tiny magnetic whirlpools, called vortices, inside a superconductor, revealing details that could help researchers develop better materials for carrying electricity.

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Ghostly Cat’s Head Nebula lurks within sight of NASA’s Hubble, Webb

NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes have captured a hauntingly dynamic star-forming scene, like a spectral form rising out of a cold mist. It lies within the vast Carina Nebula, a diffuse star-forming region located about 7,500 light-years away from Earth. The small, select area both telescopes observed is nicknamed the Cat’s Head Nebula because of its resemblance to a cat sitting with its back toward the viewer. The “head” of the cat is turned to the right, revealing a glowing eye.

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Machine learning helps track semiconductor defects under more realistic temperature conditions

All materials contain inherent defects. These are not always harmful, since they can be used to engineer and introduce certain properties into a material. However, it is crucial to understand how they function and how they affect the material’s properties.

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Planetary collisions may help young worlds hold on to their atmospheres

A new study lets some of the air out of a long-held theory that growing, rocky planets will lose their atmosphere if they smash into a large object in space.

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Electrical signals reveal hidden magnetic information in altermagnets for first time

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to obtain from an altermagnet a spin current that can transport magnetic information. This result is supported by the theoretical model of electron transport developed by the CFM group. Altermagnets are a new class of materials that, despite not exhibiting the net magnetization characteristic of conventional magnets, can generate this type of current.

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Built to take the blast: Students test prototype landing pad to make moon landings safer

As NASA works toward a sustained human presence on the moon, researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, are helping solve one of the most pressing challenges facing future lunar missions: how to land spacecraft safely without damaging the landing vehicle or nearby infrastructure.

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