Lifeboat Foundation

When two laser beams converge on a volume of gas, their interference creates a diffraction grating made of plasma that can divert and shape a third beam.

Once a laser pulse packs more than 10¹⁸ W/cm² or so of power, its electric field strips electrons from atoms and accelerates them to near light speed. This effect could lead to compact and highly efficient particle accelerators (see Viewpoint: Shooting Ahead with Wakefield Acceleration). But for various reasons to do with pulse generation, the main pulse is unavoidably preceded by weaker prepulses, which can muddle an experiment’s initial conditions and frustrate anticipated results. Now Matthew Edwards of Stanford University, working at Julia Mikhailova’s lab at Princeton University, and collaborators have demonstrated a setup that can delete meddlesome prepulses with unprecedented effectiveness [1].

A key component of the researchers’ setup was demonstrated in 2009 [2]. Two pulsed beams of the same wavelength converged on a volume of gas contained in a cell, ionizing the gas where the beams constructively interfered. The difference in refractive index between the plasma and the neutral gas created an instant and switchable diffraction grating.

Based on a new mathematical framework and large multi-year multi-mission data sets, we reconstruct electric currents and magnetic fields around the dayside magnetopause and their dependence on the incoming solar wind, IMF, and geodipole tilt. The model architecture builds on previously developed mathematical frameworks and includes two separate blocks: for the magnetosheath and for the adjacent outer magnetosphere. Accordingly, the model is developed in two stages: 1) reconstruction of a best-fit magnetopause and underlying dayside magnetosphere, based on a simple shielded configuration, and 2) derivation of the magnetosheath magnetic field, represented by a sum of toroidal and poloidal terms, each expanded into spherical harmonic series of angular coordinates and powers of normal distance from the boundary. The spacecraft database covers the period from 1995 through 2022 and is composed of data from Geotail, Cluster, Themis, and MMS, with the total number of 1-min averages about 3 M. The modeling reveals orderly patterns of the IMF draping around the magnetosphere and of the magnetopause currents, controlled by the IMF orientation, solar wind pressure, and the Earth’s dipole tilt. The obtained results are discussed in terms of the magnetosheath flux pile-up and the dayside magnetosphere erosion during periods of northward or southward IMF, respectively.

The dayside magnetosheath and magnetopause play a principal role in the magnetosphere response to the interplanetary plasma flow. They serve as a main gateway where the first contact occurs between the incoming magnetized solar wind and the geomagnetic field, eventually resulting in a complex chain of magnetospheric processes. Of primary importance here is the mutual orientation of the external IMF and the internal magnetospheric field, defining the reconnection pattern at the boundary. This subject has long been at the center of many studies and extensive debates in the literature, starting from the seminal ideas of Dungey (Dungey, 1961) and followed by a multitude of works, recently summarized in reviews (Trattner et al., 2021; Fuselier et al., 2024). The reconnection geometry has been traditionally addressed in the framework of two basic concepts: the component and antiparallel merging (e.g. (Fuselier et al., 2021), and refs. therein (Qudsi et al., 2023)).

Cybercriminals exploit CVE-2024–40711 in Veeam to deploy ransomware, targeting unpatched systems and compromised VPNs.

OilRig exploits a Windows kernel flaw in a cyber espionage campaign targeting UAE networks, leveraging backdoors and privilege escalation.

U.S. DoJ charges 18 in a $25M cryptocurrency fraud operation, uncovering market manipulation through an FBI-led sting.

“This makes the scam much harder to spot, as the information provided is personally relevant to the victims, arrives via the expected communication channel, and the linked, fake websites look as expected.”

What’s more, the diversification of the victimology footprint has been complemented by improvements to the toolkit that allow the scammer groups to speed up the scam process using automated phishing page generation, improve communication with targets via interactive chatbots, protecting phishing websites against disruption by competitors, and other goals.

Telekopye’s operations have not been without their fair share of hiccups. In December 2023, law enforcement officials from Czechia and Ukraine announced the arrest of several cybercriminals who are alleged to have used the malicious Telegram bot.

Colonized artificial reef structures could absorb the power of storms.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have for the first time observed a galaxy in the early universe growing from the inside out, a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang.

This galaxy, significantly smaller yet more mature than expected, demonstrates unique growth patterns with its dense core and rapidly forming star outskirts.

Astronomers have employed the NASA /ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the ‘inside-out’ growth of a galaxy in the early universe, a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang.

However, the effect of the PIC on firing outputs also depends on its location in the dendritic tree. To investigate the interaction between PIC neuromodulation and PIC location dependence, we used a two-compartment model that was biologically realistic in that it retains directional and frequency-dependent electrical coupling between the soma and the dendrites, as seen in multi-compartment models based on full anatomical reconstructions of motoneurons. Our two-compartment approach allowed us to systematically vary the coupling parameters between the soma and the dendrite to accurately reproduce the effect of location of the dendritic PIC on the generation of nonlinear (hysteretic) motoneuron firing patterns. Our results show that as a single parameter value for PIC activation was either increased or decreased by 20% from its default value, the solution space of the coupling parameter values for nonlinear firing outputs was drastically reduced by approximately 80%. As a result, the model tended to fire only in a linear mode at the majority of dendritic PIC sites. The same results were obtained when all parameters for the PIC activation simultaneously changed only by approximately ±10%. Our results suggest the democratization effect of neuromodulation: the neuromodulation by the brainstem systems may play a role in switching the motoneurons with PICs at different dendritic locations to a similar mode of firing by reducing the effect of the dendritic location of PICs on the firing behavior.

Spinal motoneurons have large, highly branched dendrites and voltage-gated ion channels that generate strong persistent inward currents (PICs) (Schwindt and Crill, 1980). Over the past 30 years, the impact of PICs on the firing output of the motoneurons has been extensively investigated in various species, including turtles (Hounsgaard and Kiehn, 1985, 1989), rats (Bennett et al., 2001; Li and Bennett, 2003), mice (Carlin et al., 2000; Meehan et al., 2010) and cats (Lee and Heckman, 1998, 1999). There has been a consensus in the motoneuron physiology community that in the presence of monoamines (i.e., norepinephrine and serotonin), the activation of the L-type Ca²⁺ PIC channels is facilitated, producing a long-lasting membrane depolarization (i.e., plateau potential) (reviewed in Powers and Binder, 2001; Heckman et al., 2008).