The fastest levitated spinning magnet ever made might help physicists search for dark matter

Tiny levitated magnets are able to avoid contact friction, making them useful for detecting extremely weak forces and magnetic fields and acting as ultralow-noise quantum sensors and precision measurement tools. Combining levitation with extreme cold further reduces unwanted motion that can make faint signals hard to detect.

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Wis. trooper detained by ICE at airport, released under supervision

The 21-year-old trooper has a work permit valid through 2030; DHS says his family, originally from South Africa, overstayed their visas

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Undercover Calif. officers serving narcotics warrant mistaken for ICE, drawing crowd of nearly 100

The crowd vandalized multiple police vehicles, including slashing tires, while Fontana PD officers identified themselves and said operation had nothing to do with immigration enforcement

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Chirality of ‘trions’ illuminates new paths for quantum optics

Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that charged states made of two electrons and a positively charged hole (or vice versa) on atomically thin rolls of carbon atoms have a structure-derived “handedness” in how they interact with light. While electron-hole pairs, or “excitons,” were known to keep the chirality of the underlying nanotube, the team showed that adding a charge to create “trions” does not change this property.

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Fla. officer suffers traumatic brain injury after being struck by fleeing suspect’s car

Bradenton Police Department officers were responding to a report of a man with a gun at a Wawa were two were hit by a car as the 35-year-old driver fled

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Optical experiment demonstrates the strong Mpemba effect in a single qubit

Typically, after a physical system is disturbed, it can gradually return toward a state of thermal equilibrium by exchanging heat with its surroundings. Thermal equilibrium is a state in which there is no net transfer of heat between the system and its surroundings.

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JWST tracks more than 100 magnified stellar events in the Dragon galaxy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers identified 104 magnified stellar events in a galaxy known as the Dragon, located around 6.5 billion light-years away. This discovery more than doubles the previous record of 44 such detections in the same galaxy. Because these kinds of events reveal some of the most luminous stars and likely the presence of dark matter, this study offers a rare look at the galaxy’s stellar population along with a possible hint at the nature of dark matter.

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How space weather powers auroras in the sky and threatens power grids on the ground

An aurora is one of nature’s most spectacular light shows: It looks like green or red curtains rippling across the night sky. When viewed from the ground, this colorful display might seem far away and disconnected from anything happening on Earth’s surface.

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Game theory helps SETI search for alien civilizations

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is mostly concerned with where to look for technosignatures from another civilization. Between 2012 and 2015, SETI’s Project Phoenix targeted about 1,000 sun-like stars for signs of intelligent life. But where to look might not be as important as when to look, according to scientists at SETI.

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‘Stupendously large’ primordial black holes ruled out as a dark matter source

Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects that could have formed directly from dense clumps of matter in the very early universe. If they exist, their dramatic origins would set them apart from the black holes we see today, which form when massive stars collapse. Some theories suggest that “stupendously large” primordial black holes could account for a significant share of the universe’s elusive dark matter.

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Man who fired on Calif. officers during 2022 pursuit convicted, faces up to 192 years

Prosecutors say Jose Borrego fired 16 times at Sacramento PD officers, striking a patrol vehicle multiple times before leading police on a manhunt that ended in Folsom

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Ohio PD staffing hits ‘catastrophic low,’ chief warns

Chief John Majoy said the Newburgh Heights Police Department will drop to 5 patrol officers, its lowest staffing level in his 13 years as chief, with overtime rising

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Want to fly to the moon? NASA is looking for new astronauts to help grow its Artemis program

Want to fly to the moon and help build a permanent lunar base? NASA is accepting applications for a new astronaut class that will help grow the Artemis program.

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Earth’s gravity may have kept the early moon’s volcanic heart beating

We typically think of the moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics—the moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around 2 billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin.

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Two paths, one flux: Trapped ions simulate Aharonov–Bohm interference in a lattice gauge theory

In a new Nature Physics study, researchers demonstrated the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory using a hybrid trapped-ion quantum computer.

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