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Artemis astronauts pass behind moon, expected communications cut starts

The four Artemis astronauts on a lunar flyby are now unreachable by NASA scientists on Earth, an expected communications blackout anticipated to last some 40 minutes as their spacecraft passes behind the moon.

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If life exists in Venus’s atmosphere, it could have come from Earth

The theory of panspermia holds that life is spread through the cosmos via asteroids, comets, and other objects. When the building blocks of life emerge on one planet, impacts can eject surface material into space, which then carries these seeds to other worlds. For decades, scientists have debated whether this could have occurred between Earth and Mars (in both directions). However, the recent controversy over the possible existence of microbial life in Venus’s dense clouds has sparked discussions of interplanetary transfers between Venus, Earth, and Mars.

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Water-repelling surfaces reveal surprising charging effects

Materials that repel water are used in countless applications, including industrial separation processes, routine laboratory pipetting, and medical devices. When water touches these surfaces, the interface where they meet tends to acquire a small electrical charge—an effect that is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood. KAUST researchers have now studied this in detail and their findings could have broad implications. The findings are published in the journal Langmuir.

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Experiments refute dark matter claim

The doctoral thesis of Sophia Hollick, Ph.D. ’25, a recent graduate of Yale’s Wright Lab in professor Reina Maruyama’s group, has significantly contributed to answering a decades-long question in her field about whether or not a signal observed in an experiment that has taken data since 1997 was indicative of a direct detection of dark matter. The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters in the article “Combined Annual Modulation Dark Matter Search with COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112.”

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BWC: Suspect in stolen beer truck plows into Ind. cruiser during pursuit

The Vanderburgh County deputy was standing outside his cruiser and working to deploy spike strips when the truck hit the vehicle at high speed

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Mechanical inputs boost diamond quantum sensor states as Q factor tops one million

Most people think of diamonds as high-end adornments. Not Ania Bleszynski Jayich. The UC Santa Barbara physicist sees diamonds, which she grows in the UC Quantum Foundry, as a potentially powerful foundation for quantum sensors. Sensors are currently much farther along in their development than other potential quantum applications. Diamond sensors are particularly promising because diamonds require relatively few quantum bits (qubits) to operate, whereas a quantum computer, for instance, requires more than 100,000, perhaps as many as a million, qubits to handle error correction, one of the main hurdles for quantum computing.

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Mass. PD to add body cameras after Kelsey Fitzsimmons’s acquittal

Ex-North Andover officer Kelsey Fitzsimmons was acquitted of pointing a gun at Officer Patrick Noonan after a judge ruled that the prosecution had not met the burden of proof

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Artemis II crew breaks Apollo 13 record, reaching 252,760 miles from Earth

The four astronauts embarking on NASA’s lunar flyby became on Monday the humans to travel farthest from our planet, as they get set to view areas of the moon never before seen by the naked eye.

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BWC: Ky. officers shoot woman in crisis after she threatened to kill them, advanced with broken porcelain

The woman, who had cut herself and drank cleaning supplies after locking herself in a bathroom, said that she would “kill anyone who tried to help” her

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Quantum ground state of rotation achieved for the first time in two dimensions

Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state—in two orientational degrees of freedom.

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Astronomers thought the early universe was full of hydrogen: Now they’ve found it

The Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures.

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Giant step for humankind: Artemis crew to set space distance record

Four Artemis II astronauts are taking a giant step for humankind Monday when they shoot deeper into space than anyone before and glimpse parts of the moon never seen by the naked eye.

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‘Hot Jupiter’ orbiting a metal-poor star discovered

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new “hot Jupiter” exoplanet. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-7169 b, orbits a metal-poor star, which is rare among exoplanets. The finding was detailed in a paper published March 26 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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Electrons in moiré crystals explore higher-dimensional quantum worlds

The electrons that power our society flow left and right through the circuitry in our electronics, back and forth along the transmission lines that make up our power grid, and up and down to light up every floor of every building. But the electrons in newly discovered “moiré crystals” move in much stranger ways. They can move left and right, back and forth, or up and down in our three-dimensional world, but these electrons also act as if they can teleport in and out of a mysterious fourth dimension of space that is perpendicular to our perceivable reality.

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Looking up? How to photograph the moon with your phone

Eyes are on the sky this week as four astronauts get the closest humans have been to the moon for more than 50 years on NASA’s Artemis II mission. Join the millions of people looking up while it’s on its way and we’ll show you how to get the best photo of the moon using your phone.

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