NASA’s Perseverance rover, shown in this artistic rendering, will land at Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 and will start gathering soil samples soon after that. Scientists are now concerned about acidic fluids, once on Mars, may have ruined the evidence of life contained in the clays. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The palladium nanoparticles (green) are stabilised by a core of iridium (red). Hydrogen can accumulate on their surface like a kind of chocolate glaze – and can be released again by heating. Credit: DESY, Andreas Stierle
ByASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY (AURA)APRIL 11, 2021
Brown dwarfs are often called “failed stars.” They form like stars but are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium as stars do. More like giant planets, brown dwarfs can often have storms in their atmospheres, as depicted in this illustration. Astronomers have recently discovered three brown dwarfs that spin faster than any other ever discovered. Each one completes a single rotation in roughly an hour, about 10 times faster than normal. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
Vascular network (red) in healthy heart tissue (left) and in severe Covid-19 (right). Due to faulty reforming of the network as a result of Covid-19, numerous branches, splits and even loops develop in the capillaries, which can be analyzed mathematically. Credit: M. Reichardt, P. Møller Jensen, T. Salditt
Taken from the December 2021 issue of Physics World where it first appeared under the headline "Joining the dots". Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app.
John Gribbin must like counting. Following on from his books Six Impossible Things (2019) and Seven Pillars of Science (2020), the veteran science writer’s latest offering is Eight Improbable Possibilities: the Mystery of the Moon and Other Implausible Scientific Truths. As the title promises, this is a whirlwind tour of the most fantastical discoveries science has revealed – the facts that are almost impossible to believe, but are true according to the best available evidence. With chapters on topics from gravitational waves to the butterfly effect, Gribbin not only presents facts, but also deftly joins the dots to reveal a bigger picture that is even more awe-inspiring than the sum of its parts.
The Fundamental Patterns that Explain the Universe - with Brian Clegg
From the cosmic microwave background to Feynman diagrams - what are the underlying rules that work to create patterns of action, force and consequence that make up our universe?
Brian's new book "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" is available now: https://geni.us/clegg
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/RZB95znAGRE
Brian Clegg will explore the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviours that rule the way that matter and light interact, Brian will show how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.
Brian Clegg was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, UK, and attended the Manchester Grammar School, then read Natural Sciences (specialising in experimental physics) at Cambridge University. After graduating, he spent a year at Lancaster University where he gained a second MA in Operational Research, a discipline developed during the Second World War to apply mathematics and probability to warfare and since widely applied to business problem solving. Brian now concentrates on writing popular science books, with topics ranging from infinity to 'how to build a time machine.' He has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers, including Nature, BBC Focus, BBC History, Good Housekeeping, The Times, The Observer, Playboy, The Wall Street Journal and Physics World.
This talk was recorded on 28 September 2021.
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ICTS Foundation Day Lectures: The future of our universe by Ashoke Sen
The future of our universe
Speaker: ashoke sen (icts – tifr, bengaluru)
Date: 27 december 2021, 17:30 to 19:00
Venue: chandrasekhar auditorium, icts
Discovery of dark energy in the late 90's has changed our understanding of how the universe evolves. In this talk, I shall describe what it implies for our universe billions of years from now.
RBS 797 is a galaxy cluster located about 3.9 billion light years from Earth. Four enormous cavities, or bubbles, have been found at the center of the RBS 797 galaxy cluster using Chandra. Hot gas that envelopes the individual galaxies is invisible in optical light, but it is detected in X-rays by Chandra. Scientists have seen many pairs of X-ray cavities before in other galaxy clusters, but four in the same cluster is very rare. The researchers think the quartet of cavities represents the essentially simultaneous explosive activity of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of the galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA/STScl/M.Calzadilla
Four cavities in the hot gas of a single galaxy cluster have been found.
NASA has successfully launched its much anticipated $10bn James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The mission took off today aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Spaceport located near Kourou, French Guiana, at 12:20 GMT. It will now make its way to Lagrange point L2 – a place in space some 1.5 x 106 km away from the Earth in the exact opposite direction from the Sun.
ByCOLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IRVING MEDICAL CENTERDECEMBER 24, 2021
This transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2— the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. The spikes on the outer edge of the virus particles give coronaviruses their name, crown-like. Credit: NIAID RML
New Study Adds More Evidence for Omicron Immune Evasion
The ten-billion-dollar gamble: Why the JWST’s delays were a boon for exoplanet science
23 Dec 2021
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled to launch on 25 December. To mark the event, Physics World is publishing a series of blog posts on the telescope’s technological innovations and scientific missions. This post is the last in the series. Read the first here.
For most of the astronomy community, the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cannot get off the ground soon enough. For exoplanet scientists, though, its repeated postponements brought a substantial silver lining. During the JWST’s lengthy sojourn in development hell, NASA’s Kepler and TESS spacecraft, among others, got on with the business of discovering new planets outside our solar system. As a result, when the JWST finally launches on 25 December, it will have an entire catalogue of promising new worlds to explore.
Materials and nanotechnology have long attracted some of the best physicists in academia and industry. This year saw some fascinating research done in this field, and in particular work that focused on natural materials and the environment. Here is a selection of some of our favourite materials and nanotechnology research in 2021.
Quantum spin liquid magnets are materials that cannot arrange their magnetic moments, or spins, in a regular, stable pattern because the spins interact in competing ways that cannot be simultaneously minimized. As a result, these “frustrated” spins constantly change direction, behaving like a liquid even at temperatures close to absolute zero. Such behaviour is predicted to give rise to many interesting physical phenomena, but despite great efforts in both experimental and theoretical studies, there is no well-recognized, real-world example of a frustrated magnet hosting a quantum spin liquid state.
Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed a new way of controlling the strength of interactions between particles in two-dimensional semiconductors. Their technique, which relies on generating so-called “Feshbach molecules” and adjusting their interactions using an applied electric field, might well become a versatile “tuning knob” to study a broad range of 2D solid-state platforms in the laboratory.
Crystalline solids such as diamond have a hallmark property: their structure is periodic in space. For much of the past decade, physicists have wondered whether a similarly robust, repeating structure might also exist in time. By analogy with spatial crystals, this structure is known as a time crystal, and whereas diamonds may be forever, time crystals are both forever and forever changing.
ByROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYDECEMBER 22, 2021
How do scientists detect new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19? The answer is a process called DNA sequencing.
Researchers sequence DNA to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks, or nucleotides, that make it up: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The millions to billions of these building blocks paired up together collectively make up a genome that contains all the genetic information an organism needs to survive.
This artist’s impression shows an example of a rogue planet with the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex visible in the background. Rogue planets have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. Not many were known until now, but a team of astronomers, using data from several European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other facilities, have just discovered at least 70 new rogue planets in our galaxy. This is the largest group of rogue planets ever discovered, an important step towards understanding the origins and features of these mysterious galactic nomads.
Astronomers have used ESO telescopes to detect at least 70 rogue planets in our Milky Way, the largest group to date. Learn more about these elusive cosmic nomads in this video summarizing the discovery!
