A little Big Bang: Bowling-pin-shaped nuclei shed new light on the universe’s first moments

What happened in the first moments of the universe—before the building blocks of life and the world we know today came into existence? Physicists at the CERN research facility in Switzerland are trying to answer this question by recreating some of the extreme conditions that prevailed in the universe during its earliest history. Now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration, have come one step closer to understanding those conditions.

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Man opens fire at Va. officers during pursuit over ALPR camera vandalism

The suspect fired a rifle at pursuing officers, striking a cruiser multiple times before calling 911 and offering to surrender, the Page County Sheriff’s Office said

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BWC: Knife-wielding man charges at Calif. officers before fatal OIS

Over the course of two hours, Santa Clara Sheriff’s deputies tried to coax the man out of his vehicle; they deployed less lethal launchers before the man ran at them

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Illuminating the limits of the international unit of light, the candela

The candela, the international unit of light in use for almost a century, forms the basis of photometry. According to a new study, measurements derived from it systematically misjudge the brightness of colored light sources and depart markedly from human perception.

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Interstellar travel IV: Solar, magnetic, & directed-energy sails

Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how fusion power has also been considered a means of propelling spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). In both cases, these proposals paralleled Cold War developments in rocketry and nuclear armaments, as they did for most space age advancements.

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Global sand dunes map reveals clues to distant worlds, including Mars

A new study from Monash University has delivered the most complete and accurate digital map of Earth’s windblown sand dunes to date. The research, published in Nature Communications, answers long-standing questions about why dunes form where they do, unlocking key insights into climate conditions on Earth and other planets.

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ALMA uncovers sulfur for the first time around a rare class of supergiant star

Astronomers have discovered a chemically rich collection of sulfur-bearing molecules surrounding the rare massive star HD 87643. The observations include the first detection of sulfur monoxide and sulfur dioxide around a B[e] supergiant. The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 1.

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Pilot killed in collision with Pa. State Police helicopter; troopers survive

A Cessna 150 collided with a Pennsylvania State Police Bell 407 near a Carlisle airport runway, killing the plane’s pilot and trapping two troopers in the helicopter

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Dark energy and quantum gravity may be deeply intertwined

For close to a century, physicists have pursued a way to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. Known as quantum gravity, this goal has remained frustratingly out of reach so far. Similarly elusive is the force of dark energy, which is believed to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

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Rescue mission is called off for NASA’s aging Swift space telescope

The mission to save NASA’s sinking Swift Observatory was called off Wednesday, dooming the telescope to a fiery reentry later this year.

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What beats seeing eclipses from space? Try the northern and southern lights

Eclipses may be wondrous, but nothing beats seeing the northern and southern lights from space.

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Racing to build a radio telescope on the moon

Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high-energy radio signature occurred in 1977, when Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it happened today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heavens for signals like the still-unexplained one received in 1977. What’s more, the ionosphere partially blocks lower-frequency radio signals, making them even harder to detect from the ground.

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3D-printed ceramic waveguide lasers could surpass the power of glass fiber lasers by 10 times

At the bottom of the ocean, optical fibers transmit telecommunications and internet data around the world. Waveguides make that feat possible by channeling and amplifying the light—and therefore the data within—over enormous distances.

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Aug 19, 2026 – Why Are Metallic Spheres Most Common UFO Shapes Reported?

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Dark Stars may have left gravitational-wave echoes across the universe

A mysterious background of extremely low-frequency gravitational waves detected by networks of pulsars may carry information about events that began more than 13 billion years ago—including the formation of some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe.

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