Researchers have documented a rare supernova, 2023ufx, the most metal-poor stellar explosion observed, located in a dwarf galaxy.
This finding is crucial as it mirrors the early universe’s conditions, aiding astronomers in understanding galaxy formation and evolution.
Discovery of a Unique Supernova.
The Extremely Large Telescope is currently under construction, with the most recent milestones including progress made with building the dome, central structure and the base for the primary mirror.
SACRAMENTO — A magnitude 5.5 earthquake that struck in a remote area of Nevada on Monday afternoon sent shaking throughout Central California, including the Sacramento area.
In Sacramento, one person saw ornaments on a Christmas tree sway, as did some blinds for less than a minute. Water sloshed in a swimming pool, another person said. In Davis, a computer swayed for just a few seconds and a desk chair was jolted, while a young man reported feeling his bed sway and an unnerved poodle sought comfort.
In Reno, about 50 miles northwest of the quake’s epicenter, someone at KTVN-TV captured a video of the star on the newsroom’s Christmas tree still quivering — barely — as staffers scrambled to cover the earthquake. One person could be heard saying they hadn’t felt anything.
Summary: New research reveals that the cognitive boost from moderate to vigorous exercise lasts up to the next day, enhancing memory performance in adults aged 50 to 83. The study also found that adequate sleep—particularly deep, slow-wave sleep—adds to these benefits.
Conversely, prolonged sedentary time was linked to poorer working memory the following day. These findings highlight the importance of daily physical activity and quality sleep for maintaining cognitive health, especially in older adults.
That ordinary smartphone in your pocket could be a powerful tool for investigating outer space. In a new study, researchers at Google and CU Boulder have transformed millions of Android phones across the globe into a fleet of nimble scientific instruments—generating one of the most detailed maps to date of the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
The group’s findings, published Nov. 13 in the journal Nature, might help to improve the accuracy of GPS technology worldwide several-fold. The research was led by Brian Williams of Google Research and included Jade Morton, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder.
“These phones can literally fit in your palm,” Morton said. “But through crowdsourcing, we can use them to change the way we understand the space environment.”
OpenAI’s video-generating AI tool is now available, and if you have the $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan, you can prompt it for 1080p videos up to 20 seconds long.
Wuhan University-led research is reporting the development of a revivable self-assembled supramolecular biomass fibrous framework (a novel foam filter) that efficiently removes microplastics from complex aquatic environments.
Plastic waste is a growing global concern due to significant levels of microplastic pollution circulating in soil and waterways and accumulating in the environment, food webs and human tissues. There are no conventional methods for removing microplastics, and developing strategies to handle diverse particle sizes and chemistries is an engineering challenge.
Researchers have been looking for affordable, sustainable materials capable of universal microplastic adsorption. Most existing approaches involve expensive or difficult-to-recover adsorbents, fail under certain environmental conditions, or only target a narrow range of microplastic types.
Professional athletic sports require elite athletes to function at the very limit of their abilities. After all, their competition consists entirely of other elite athletes trying to do just that. In this environment of fast-paced action and reaction, the difference between a hit or miss, catch or drop, goal or block, win or loss—milliseconds matter.
Researchers from institutions across Europe and the United States have demonstrated that light-based manipulation of visual processing can significantly enhance visual and visuomotor skills in professional soccer players. The six-week intervention focused on the effects of training under reduced light conditions using the Okkulo system, a novel technology designed to slow down visual processing speed.
Visual and visuomotor abilities are critical in sports, requiring rapid decision-making and accurate physical interactions in coordination with moving objects and other players. Previous research has shown athletes outperform non-athletes in these abilities.
We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, new Johns Hopkins University research finds.
Researchers showed people pictures of two knots and asked them to point to the strongest one. They couldn’t.
They showed people videos of each knot, where the knots spin slowly so they could get a good long look. They still failed.
Quantum error correction that suppresses errors below a critical threshold needed for achieving future practical quantum computing applications is demonstrated on the newest generation quantum chips from Google Quantum AI, reports a paper in Nature this week. The device performance, if scaled, could facilitate the operational requirements of large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Quantum computing has the potential to speed up computing and exceed the capabilities of classical computers at certain tasks. However, quantum computers are prone to errors, making current prototypes unable to run long enough to achieve practical outputs.
The strategy devised by quantum computing researchers to address this relies on quantum error correction, where information is spread over many qubits (units of quantum information, similar to classical computer bits) allowing the identification and compensation of errors without damaging the computation. The overhead in qubits required by quantum error correction potentially introduces more errors than it corrects.
