Circa 2014
The confusion of battle gets amplified in tight urban environments, where one street or building blends into another and the group firing just around the corner could be friend or foe. But a new helmet-worn device could help cut through the fog.
Continue reading “New device would give soldiers a ‘heads up’ on battlefield threats” »
Circa 2018
Laser and particle system produces three-dimensional moving images that appear to float in thin air.
Circa 2015
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and the Russian Academy of Sciences have successfully demonstrated pattern recognition using a magnonic holographic memory device, a development that could greatly improve speech and image recognition hardware.
Pattern recognition focuses on finding patterns and regularities in data. The uniqueness of the demonstrated work is that the input patterns are encoded into the phases of the input spin waves.
Two decades ago, an experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory pinpointed a mysterious mismatch between established particle physics theory and actual lab measurements. When researchers gauged the behavior of a subatomic particle called the muon, the results did not agree with theoretical calculations, posing a potential challenge to the Standard Model—our current understanding of how the universe works.
Ever since then, scientists around the world have been trying to verify this discrepancy and determine its significance. The answer could either uphold the Standard Model, which defines all of the known subatomic particles and how they interact, or introduce the possibility of an entirely undiscovered physics. A multi-institutional research team (including Brookhaven, Columbia University, and the universities of Connecticut, Nagoya and Regensburg, RIKEN) have used Argonne National Laboratory’s Mira supercomputer to help narrow down the possible explanations for the discrepancy, delivering a newly precise theoretical calculation that refines one piece of this very complex puzzle. The work, funded in part by the DOE’s Office of Science through its Office of High Energy Physics and Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs, has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
A muon is a heavier version of the electron and has the same electric charge. The measurement in question is of the muon’s magnetic moment, which defines how the particle wobbles when it interacts with an external magnetic field. The earlier Brookhaven experiment, known as Muon g-2, examined muons as they interacted with an electromagnet storage ring 50 feet in diameter. The experimental results diverged from the value predicted by theory by an extremely small amount measured in parts per million, but in the realm of the Standard Model, such a difference is big enough to be notable.
Circa 2016
Researchers say the new ‘impossible’ drive could carry passengers and their equipment to the moon in as little as four hours.
Recent sleep surveys show that Singaporeans are among the world’s most sleep-deprived people. Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) and the University of Tokyo provide new evidence, which supports the presence of a key mechanism that regulates our biological clock. In the study published in PNAS, the team used preclinical models to validate that mutations in PER2 protein can alter the balance of the circadian period, which can lead to sleep disorders.
Biological clocks are an organism’s innate timing device. It is composed of specific proteins called clock proteins, which interact in cells throughout the body. Biological clocks produce and regulate circadian rhythms —the physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. Understanding the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock provides a huge potential to identify therapeutic interventions to mitigate circadian disruption, and its long-term consequences such as diabetes, obesity and cancer among shift workers, who undergo frequent circadian disruption and are more prone to these diseases.
The Duke-NUS scientists had previously discovered that mutations in a specific protein (called casein kinase 1) alters the core clock protein (called PERIOD or PER), and this changes the timing of the biological clock. In this study, preclinical models were used to investigate the role of PER2 (a type of PER protein) in clock regulation to further understand and strengthen the model.
On May 4th, China launched a pivotal new rocket called the Long March 5B, carrying a prototype deep-space spacecraft into orbit around Earth. The successful launch is meant to test out the country’s plans for sending humans to deep space, and it paves the way for the country’s ambitious space projects in the year ahead.
Rice University researchers have discovered a hidden symmetry in the chemical kinetic equations scientists have long used to model and study many of the chemical processes essential for life.
The find has implications for drug design, genetics and biomedical research and is described in a study published on April 21, 2020, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To illustrate the biological ramifications, study co-authors Oleg Igoshin, Anatoly Kolomeisky and Joel Mallory of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) used three wide-ranging examples: protein folding, enzyme catalysis and motor protein efficiency.
Igoshin said the symmetry “wasn’t that hard to prove, but no one noticed it before.”
A new sunshade, or visor, designed to reduce the brightness of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband Internet satellites will debut on the company’s next launch, a measure intended to alleviate astronomers’ concerns about impacts on observations through ground-based telescopes, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said.
Beginning with the next launch of Starlink satellites — scheduled for 18 May from Cape Canaveral — SpaceX will try out a new light-blocking panel to make the spacecraft less visible to skywatchers and astronomers.
“We have a radio-transparent foam that will deploy nearly upon the satellite being released (from the rocket),” Musk said on 27 April at a virtual meeting of the National Academies’ Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 panel, a committee charged with setting the top priorities for US astronomy for the next decade.
