Tag: science

A BREAKTHROUGH IN THE CONTROL OF QUANTUM PHENOMENA AT ROOM TEMPERATURE HAS BEEN ACHIEVED, RESEARCHERS SAY

Quantum physics and mechanical engineering have been united in a breakthrough method allowing the control of quantum phenomena at room temperature, according to the findings of a pioneering new study.

In quantum mechanics, observing and controlling quantum phenomena has traditionally only occurred under conditions where temperatures approach absolute zero. Theoretically the coldest temperature attainable and roughly equivalent to around -459.67 Fahrenheit, absolute zero is the point at which matter becomes so cold that the motion of particles would cease.

Although allowing for easier detection of quantum effects, reaching such astoundingly cold temperatures is not easy, and has limited applications and studies involving quantum technologies.

“Reaching the regime of room temperature quantum optomechanics has been an open challenge since decades,” says Tobias J. Kippenberg, the co-author of a new study that, based on its findings, could finally present practical ways of overcoming such challenges.

According to Kippenberg, the new work has brought what physicists call Heisenberg’s microscope—once only realized as a theoretical model—into reality.

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Publisher Retracts Three Abortion Studies

Sage Journals retracted three abortion studies — including two cited by a federal judge in a case against the abortion pill mifepristoneopens in a new tab or window (Mifeprex) — after an investigation revealed methodological flaws and misleading conclusions.

In the retraction noticeopens in a new tab or window, Sage stated that an investigation following concerns raised by a reader about one article revealed that the way some data are presented “leads to an inaccurate conclusion” and that its study cohort “has problems that could affect the article’s conclusions.”

Subsequently, the journal conducted post-publication peer review of two more studies involving similar author groups that relied on the same dataset, and found “fundamental problems with the study design and methodology, unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data.”

All three retracted articles had been published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology and were led by James Studnicki, ScD, MPH, MBA, the vice president and director of data analytics at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the Arlington, Virginia-based research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

“Sage confirmed that all but one of the article’s authors had an affiliation with one or more of [the] Charlotte Lozier Institute, Elliot Institute, and American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists [AAPLOG], all pro-life advocacy organizations, despite having declared they had no conflicts of interest when they submitted the article for publication or in the article itself,” the retraction notice statedopens in a new tab or window. AAPLOG is one of the partnering organizations of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine,opens in a new tab or window which is the plaintiff in the case against the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.

In an emailed statement, Studnicki told MedPage Today that “all authors fully complied with Sage’s conflict disclosure requirements. They reported their organizational affiliations, as well as [Charlotte Lozier Institute] funding of the study, as part of the submission for publication.”

“In fact, the ER study includes 10 mentions of [the Charlotte Lozier Institute] and the authors’ professional status or relationship there. There is nothing that we were required to report that we did not report,” he said.

During the investigation, Sage also found that one of the people who peer reviewed the research prior to original publication was also associated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Thus, Sage determined that under Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) standards, the initial peer review was “unreliable.”

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Research Shows Gender-Reassignment Treatments Have No Mental Health Benefits, National Pediatricians Group Says

A review of more than 60 studies has concluded that “there is no long-term evidence that mental health concerns are decreased or alleviated after ‘gender-affirming therapy,’” according to a national group of physicians.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) on Wednesday issued its position statement opposing the use of so-called “gender-affirming” medications, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, social transition, and surgery for youth who have a gender identity not congruent with their sex.

“We urge medical professionals and parents to affirm the truth about childhood gender dysphoria in the presence of harmful thoughts and address the underlying mental illness, adverse events, and family dysfunction,” said Dr. Jane Anderson, lead author and vice president of ACPeds, in a statement.

The group found there is substantial evidence that transgender youth suffer from high rates of mental health problems.

“From this review of the literature, there is strong evidence that children and adolescents who identify as transgender have experienced significant psychological trauma leading to their gender dysphoria,” ACPeds concluded.

ACPeds position outlines the studies that have led a number of European countries, including Finland, Norway, and Sweden, to reverse their positions and reject gender-reassignment treatments in young people.

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Will people again be afraid of the creation of a black hole on Earth? CERN is promoting a new particle accelerator that will be seven times more powerful than the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It will remain so for a long time, but CERN is already moving forward with plans to create a much larger collider.

CERN initially unveiled plans for the new accelerator in 2019. Now the center says it wants its construction plans to be approved within five years, which would put the collider up and running in the 2040s.

More precisely, during this period the installation will work as part of the first stage, when scientists will collide electrons and positrons. The second phase will be implemented only in the 2070s – then protons will begin to collide at the accelerator.

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LUCID DREAMING BREAKTHROUGH ACHIEVED AS RESEARCHERS REPORT SUCCESSFUL CONTROL OF A VIRTUAL OBJECT WHILE SLEEPING

The first two-way control of a virtual object by study participants while lucid dreaming has been documented, according to the findings of a new research effort.

Researchers with REMspace, a California startup, report that five participants in the recent study were successfully able to control a virtual Cybertruck while lucid dreaming, and even avoid obstacles that appeared on a screen.

MULTITASKING WHILE DREAMING

Humans spend an incredible amount of time sleeping. The average time spent in restful sleep during a person’s life amounts to around 227,760 hours, which equals 26 years or about a third of the lifespan of the average person. Meanwhile, an additional 33 years of our lives, on average, are spent just trying to fall asleep.

While the human body requires sleep for a variety of reasons, which include resting our bodies and allowing our brains a crucial “system reset”, many people lament the amount of time spent on sleep that could be applied toward other activities.

Past research has shown that some people may be successful at solving problems while they sleep, or at least that sleeping may help reactivate memories in ways that may help an individual glean new insights into issues they are facing or problems they need to solve.

The researchers at REMspace decided to take these past findings further, and find out whether people could be connected to computers while sleeping to see if they could successfully solve tasks from within a dream state.

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Scientists Are Racing to Unearth the Secrets of an Ancient Underwater World

Around 8,000 to 6,000 BCE, the North and Baltic seas … weren’t seas at all. Instead, they were vast plains that were home to ancient human civilizations. But as the curtain drew to a close on the last Ice Age, water levels rose and inundated these low-lying areas, wiping away any trace of prospering civilizations. Well—almost any trace.

The University of Bradford’s Submerged Landscapes Research Centre in the U.K., TNO Geological Survey of the Netherlands, Flanders Marine Institute, and the University of York will soon explore these long-lost civilizations as part of a research collaboration known as SUBNORDICA. One of the ancient lands the project aims to explore is Doggerland, which is thought to have thrived in North Sea region some 8,200 years ago.

“Twenty-thousand years ago, the global sea level was 130 metres lower than at present. With progressive global warming and sea-level rise, unique landscapes, home to human societies for millennia, disappeared,” Vincent Gaffney, leader of the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, said in a press statement. “We know almost nothing about the people who lived on these great plains. As Europe and the world approaches net zero, development of the coastal shelves is now a strategic priority. SUBNORDICA will use the latest technologies to explore these lands and support sustainable development.”

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Strange Reflective ‘Anomalies’ on the Moon Are a Mystery, Scientists Say

Moon dust has fascinated scientists ever since Neil Armstrong scooped up a vial of the stuff back in 1969. The jagged and statically charged lunar dust provides clues about the moon’s early formation, and tells us about our own geologic history and that of the inner solar system.

Now, planetary scientists have discovered strange “anomalies” in sun-reflecting particles covering meter-wide moon rocks. This research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, could help scientists understand more about the processes that formed and changed the moon’s crust and created unexplained magnetic anomalies. But, for now at least, the odd rocks and dust particles remain an unsolved mystery.

Researchers came across these extraterrestrial dust bunnies while trawling a catalog of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. They used artificial intelligence to go through the more than a million images and narrow rocks of interest down to around 130,000.

“We keep finding unknown objects in this way, such as the anomalous rocks that we are investigating in this new study,” said study co-author Valentin Bickel, from the University of Bern, in a press statement. 

They saw that some rocks around the Reiner K crater—a smaller impact crater near the larger Reiner crater on the western side of the moon—had noticeable dark patches on them. “Normally, lunar dust is very porous and reflects a lot of light back in the direction of illumination,” explained Marcel Hess, an image analyst from the Technische Universität Dortmund. “However, when the dust is compacted, the overall brightness usually increases. This is not the case with the observed dust-covered rocks.”

The team described the rocks’ strange light-reflecting properties using a technique called photometric analysis, which measures how light reflects off objects. 

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MARS ROVER SPOTS MYSTERIOUS POLYGONS HIDDEN BENEATH THE RED PLANET’S SURFACE

Researchers operating China’s Zhurong rover say they have spotted a series of mysterious polygons hidden beneath the planet’s surface, similar to polygons NASA spotted on the surface of Mars in 2012. The newly discovered features, however, were detected more than 35 kilometers beneath the planet’s surface.

While researchers believe that these polygon structures could have formed due to extreme environmental shifts in Mars’ ancient past, their exact nature and formation remain a mystery.

The discovery was initially made during the rover’s one-year mission, which lasted from May 2021 to May 2022, in the Utopia Planitia region. Described by researchers from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the largest impact crater in the entire solar system, the researchers behind this mysterious find say that Utopia Planitia “has both experienced and recorded variations of the Martian palaeoclimate.”

By using the rover’s ground penetrating radar, researchers scoured a 1.2-kilometer-wide area for various geological features. As a result, 16 mysterious polygons were spotted below a depth of 35 meters, meaning they were likely formed billions of years in the planet’s past.

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SCIENTISTS SUCCEED IN PRODUCING A DURABLE “TIME CRYSTAL”

Researchers at Germany’s TU Dortmund University report that they have developed an ultra-robust time crystal. Their study, published in Nature Physics, offers new insights into the potential applications and the physics governing time crystals, and offers a new method for keeping them stable. 

Time crystals represent a new phase of matter, first theorized in 2012 by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. Unlike traditional crystals, which exhibit repeating patterns in space, time crystals display patterns that repeat in time. This means their atomic structures undergo periodic motion even without external energy, defying the traditional laws of thermodynamics that govern equilibrium in most systems.

The importance of the TU Dortmund team’s work lies in its demonstration of an ultra-robust time crystal within a semiconductor material. The time crystal they developed can maintain its periodic oscillations over extensive periods, roughly 40 minutes, which is millions of times longer than previous attempts. 

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Infrared Sensors Can Now Peer Around Corners 

Just because an object is around a corner doesn’t mean it has to be hidden. Non-line-of-sight imaging can peek around corners and spot those objects, but it has so far been limited to a narrow band of frequencies. Now a new sensor can help extend this technique from working with visible light to infrared. This advance could prove help make autonomous vehicles safer, among other potential applications.

Non-line-of-sight imaging relies on the faint signals of light beams that have reflected off of surfaces in order to reconstruct images. The ability to see around corners may prove useful for machine vision—for instance, helping autonomous vehicles foresee hidden dangers to better predict how to respond to them, says Xiaolong Hu, the senior author of the study and a professor at Tianjin University in Tianjin, China. It may also improve endoscopes that help doctors peer inside the body.

The light that non-line-of-sight imaging depends on is typically very dim, and until now, the detectors that were efficient and sensitive enough for non-line-of-sight imaging could only detect either visible or near-infrared light. Moving to longer wavelengths might have several advantages, such as dealing with less interference from sunshine, and the possibility of using lasers that are safe around eyes, Hu says.

Now Hu and his colleagues have for the first time performed non-line-of-sight imaging using 1,560- and 1,997-nanometer infrared wavelengths. “This extension in spectrum paves the way for more practical applications,” Hu says.

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