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Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question: Are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), have given us only tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres of other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies released a report detailing the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) mission, which they hope will help provide a definitive answer to that simple question.
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Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to catch an extraordinary glimpse of a massive galaxy taking shape in the early universe. They identified a compact group of at least six galaxies that are likely to merge into a single enormous system. At the heart of this cosmic construction site lies a growing supermassive black hole.
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Researchers have demonstrated a new way to make spatially separated lasers synchronize and act as a single coherent light source—without extreme conditions or complex materials.
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Researchers at the University of Twente and Utrecht University have packed rigid, rod-shaped particles into soft lipid containers the size of a living cell and watched the container and its contents reshape each other. The vesicle’s form determines how the rods line up; the tightly packed rods, in turn, bend the container into new shapes. This provides a minimal model for how physical coupling between a soft boundary and internal filaments can help cellular structures organize from within. The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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As we scour and scorch the Earth for deeper wells of energy, investors and government agencies are pouring billions into nuclear fusion research. The hope is that fusion may ultimately provide a virtually limitless source of clean energy.
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Physicists have long suspected that a peculiar quantum state lurks inside a class of materials known as kagome metals, but proving its existence has been elusive. Now, a team led by Yeongkwan Kim at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has performed experiments on a kagome metal that provide the strongest evidence yet for this exotic state.
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The Supreme Court declined to review a decision by an appeals court, which ruled a jury could decide whether Toni McBride’s final two shots constituted an excessive use of force
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Dr. Richard Flotron was charged with two counts of forgery and terminated from his position as Southeast Missouri State University Campus Police chief
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Two LAPD officers responded to the scene after reports of screaming; a large Saint Bernard doodle exited the home and ran toward an officer, who then fired shots
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Researchers are constantly sifting through new spectral data gathered by powerful telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Most of the time, when they identify spectral features—specific absorption or emission lines from different types of light gathered from a planet, moon or star—these features are known to be caused by certain atoms or molecules. For example, the emission line at 426.7 nanometers is known to come from singly ionized carbon, representing a specific atomic transition between energy states of a carbon ion.
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An interstellar comet that blazed past the sun last year could be nearly three times older than our solar system and is unlike anything ever seen before in our cosmic backyard, astronomers said Monday.
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Astronomers have discovered a “remarkable” bow-and-arrow-shaped radio galaxy with an enormous arc-like structure extending nearly 1.8 million light-years across. The newly identified system, detailed in a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, has a “highly unusual” and asymmetric structure unlike those seen in standard radio galaxies.
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Microorganisms from our planet could survive on celestial bodies where water is present, such as Mars. That is the conclusion of Ph.D. candidate Tommaso Zaccaria after experiments with simulated space conditions. Our immune system reacts less effectively to pathogens that have undergone such a simulated space journey. According to his supervisors, his dissertation provides extraterrestrial insights that are also useful on Earth.
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Ask a child to draw some poo, and the shape will invariably be the same: a coil, broad at the base and pointy at the top, similar to a spiral swirl of soft-serve ice cream. In fact, the often-used poo emoji has this exact shape, as do most actual mounds of feces found in nature. Exceptions occur, though, particularly in the feces of some worms that extrude their excrement “upside down” from the ground. As it turns out, there is remarkable physics behind these differences in poo shapes.
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