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Astronomers have made a series of landmark observations of one of the universe’s most violent events. Using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) radio telescope, which is operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), the team detected polarized light from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow for the first time at radio wavelengths.
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Researchers at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have developed the world’s first achromatic lens for neutron imaging. The lens overcomes a longstanding obstacle in the field: focusing neutrons of different wavelengths well enough to form a sharp, magnified image. With the lens, researchers can now image thick samples and follow processes inside bulky equipment such as furnaces, cryostats or pressure cells.
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There are parts of the universe that are extremely hard to see, even for our most advanced telescopes. Gas and dust don’t emit light and are visible only by the light they block from stars and galaxies. Magnetic fields are even harder to detect because ordinary light typically passes right through them. However, according to a new paper available on the arXiv preprint server by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney and their co-authors, a potentially game-changing new tool being commissioned could use a particularly violent astronomical phenomenon to provide new insight into these hard-to-see places.
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A technique for judging whether a common mineral formed through biological activity could aid the search for ancient life on Earth and Mars. Apatite is a ubiquitous phosphate mineral found in terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. It is a major component of teeth and bones, but it also occurs in igneous rocks and sedimentary phosphorites.
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Astronomers are closer to solving the mystery of how supermassive black holes feed themselves thanks to new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. The images provide the clearest view ever seen of gaseous filaments connecting a galaxy’s hot atmosphere to the rotating disk of gas that feeds its central supermassive black hole.
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Researchers at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau have achieved a key experimental breakthrough: For the first time, the spontaneous macroscopic coherence of magnons—the quantized excitations of magnetic materials—has been directly observed. These experiments confirm a central prediction of the theory of magnon Bose-Einstein condensates. Eventually, these findings could open new avenues for signal processing, sensing technologies and information processing. The study has been published in Nature Physics.
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House Bill 251 requires police to obtain a warrant for a drone search when a warrant would otherwise be required for an in-person search, with several exceptions
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Future quantum computing will require correlations between distant modules—a feature known as distributed entanglement. Traditionally, such entanglement has relied on active control and repeated measurements. Now, physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have realized a fully autonomous method for distributed entanglement using a “quantum bath” of correlated light particles. Published in Physical Review X, their work experimentally confirms a 20-year-old prediction and could provide a new platform for applied quantum technologies.
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When neutron stars merge, they create a powerful explosion called a kilonova that flings out neutron-rich material, some of which decays into heavy elements through a process called the r-process. Recent observations of kilonovae revealed unexpected signatures that could not be explained by existing models.
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This summer, Subaru Telescope will welcome a new near-infrared spectrograph, NINJA, for its first on-sky engineering observations. NINJA is a new spectrograph designed for time-critical observations of rapidly evolving cosmic events, such as the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave sources.
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The properties of ultrathin magnets can be specifically altered by a slight twist between two atomic monolayers. This is the conclusion reached by an international research team led by TU Darmstadt in a study published in Nature Communications. The findings open new prospects for future memory devices.
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Researchers at City College of New York physicist Vinod M. Menon’s Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) have outlined an emerging frontier in quantum materials: atomically thin systems in which light, magnetism and electric charge are strongly intertwined. This rapidly evolving field could enable next-generation optoelectronic and quantum technologies leveraging the coupled dynamics of light, charge and spin.
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The expense of launching cargo into space will plummet over the next few years, with the cost of reaching orbit forecast to more than halve between now and the end of the decade, and fall by around 93% by 2040, according to new Cambridge-led research.
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More than a century after Albert Einstein first transformed our understanding of gravity, his general theory of relativity continues to withstand ever more demanding experimental tests. Now, an international team led by Ignazio Ciufolini at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has carried out the most precise measurement yet of one of the theory’s most subtle predictions: the dragging of spacetime caused by Earth’s rotation.
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After decades of analyzing reams of lunar rocks back here on Earth, the canonical view of the moon was that it was anhydrous; that it had extraordinarily little water. That all began to change in 2009 with new data from NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) and the much-ballyhooed evidence of water ice in the moon’s permanently shaded polar regions (PSRs).
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