Everything you ever wanted to know about parallel universes, time, entropy, free will and more, explained by physicist Sean Carroll.
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Taming rays of light and bending them to your will is tricky business. Light travels fast and getting a good chunk of it to stay in one place for a long time requires a lot of skillful coaxing. But the benefits of learning how to hold a moonbeam (or, more likely, a laser beam) in your hand, or on a convenient chip, are enormous. Trapping and controlling light on a chip can enable better lasers, sensors that help self-driving cars “see,” the creation of quantum-entangled pairs of photons that can be used for secure communication, and fundamental studies of the basic interactions between light and atoms—just to name a few.
Of all the moonbeam-holding chip technologies out there, two stand the tallest: the evocatively named whispering gallery mode microrings, which are easy to manufacture and can trap light of many colors very efficiently, and photonic crystals, which are much trickier to make and inject light into but are unrivaled in their ability to confine light of a particular color into a tiny space—resulting in a very large intensity of light for each confined photon.
Recently, a team of researchers at JQI struck upon a clever way to combine whispering gallery modes and photonic crystals in one easily manufacturable device. This hybrid device, which they call a microgear photonic crystal ring, can trap many colors of light while also capturing particular colors in tightly confined, high-intensity bundles. This unique combination of features opens a route to new applications, as well as exciting possibilities for manipulating light in novel ways for basic research.
Record-breaking floods in Australia’s northwest have resulted in many communities getting isolated, Australia’s weather forecaster said on Sunday (January 8). Severe weather system Ellie has created an emergency situation in Kimberly, an area in the state of Western Australia which is about the size of California.
The town of Fitzroy Crossing, a community of around 1,300 people, has been among the worst hit, with supplies having to be airlifted in due to flooded roads.
The Bureau of Meteorology said on Sunday that rain had eased as the ex-cyclone shifted eastwards to the Northern Territory, but warned that “record breaking major flooding” continued in the Kimberley.
Point-of-care diagnoses occur when a doctor can quickly diagnose a patient during an examination without sending biological samples to a laboratory or consulting with other specialists. The stress and anxiety that can come with waiting for the results of medical testing, and the cost associated with in-depth laboratory testing, make point-of-care testing a gold standard. However, point-of-care diagnostics remain rare in oncology.
Research shows that women suspected of endometrial cancer experience stress and anxiety while waiting for a confirmed diagnosis. While the procedures and waiting time associated with endometrial cancer diagnoses vary, endometrial biopsies can take weeks to return results. Of added concern, since most endometrial cancers require surgical intervention, usually a hysterectomy, delays in diagnosis lead to delays in treatment. Indeed, these surgical delays can negatively impact survival. Thus, rapid endometrial cancer diagnostic strategies would significantly improve patient care.
A team of researchers has implanted human brains in mice in an experiment to measure the test subjects’ responses to sight, smell, and touch.
A study of intracluster light (ICL) in ten high-redshift galaxy clusters finds evidence that gradual stripping may not be the dominant mechanism of ICL formation, but may occur alongside the formation and growth of the brightest cluster galaxies, and/or accretion of preprocessed stars.
On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it claims is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It’s a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game.
Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go’s rules are typically simplified for computer AI).
The transport of mercury ions across intestinal epithelial cells can be studied for toxicology assessments by using animal models and static cell cultures. However, the concepts do not reliably replicate conditions of the human gut microenvironment to monitor in situ cell physiology. As a result, the mechanism of mercury transport in the human intestine is still unknown.
In a new report now published in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering, Li Wang and a research team in mechanical engineering and regenerative medicine in China developed a gut-on-a-chip instrument integrated with transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) sensors and electrochemical sensors.
They proposed to explore the dynamic concept to simulate the physical intestinal barrier and mirror biological transport and adsorption mechanisms of mercury ions. The scientists recreated the cellular microenvironment by applying fluid shear stress and cyclic mechanical strain.
Taming rays of light and bending them to your will is tricky business. Light travels fast and getting a good chunk of it to stay in one place for a long time requires a lot of skillful coaxing. But the benefits of learning how to hold a moonbeam (or, more likely, a laser beam) in your hand, or on a convenient chip, are enormous. Trapping and controlling light on a chip can enable better lasers, sensors that help self-driving cars “see,” the creation of quantum-entangled pairs of photons that can be used for secure communication, and fundamental studies of the basic interactions between light and atoms—just to name a few.
