Early warning system for environmental changes. How can a vulture in a Berlin Zoo help its conspecifics and their habitats in Namibia? As a model and patron for a new generation of animal tags: The prototype of an innovative animal tag system developed by the Leibniz-IZW and the Fraunhofer IIS completed its maiden flight on a vulture at Tierpark Berlin today. The tags will be equipped with sensor-based artificial intelligence (AI), a camera, energy-efficient electronics and satellite-based communication technology. This…

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) – the stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Greifswald – has been significantly improved and will resume scientific experiments in autumn 2022. Featuring 6.8 kilometres of cooling pipes, doubly powerful heaters and 40 new diagnostics, the fusion facility, within a few years, should enable plasma operations lasting for up to 30 minutes. In the last three years, engineers and technicians controlled the operations while learning how to use W7-X. Their aim was to…

Researchers find the spiral may be feeding star formation in a nearby stellar nursery. Nature likes spirals – from the whirlpool of a hurricane, to pinwheel-shaped protoplanetary disks around newborn stars, to the vast realms of spiral galaxies across our universe. Now astronomers are bemused to find young stars that are spiraling into the center of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer arm of the spiral in this…

Strange diamonds from an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system may have formed shortly after the dwarf planet collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, according to scientists. The research team says they have confirmed the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal form of diamond, in ureilite meteorites from the mantle of the dwarf planet. Lonsdaleite is named after the famous British pioneering female crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, who was the first woman elected as a…

A thin device triggers one of quantum mechanics’ strangest and most useful phenomena. An ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, according to new research recently published in the journal Science. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have reported on a device that could replace a roomful of equipment to link…

A machine learning model can evaluate the effectiveness of different management strategies. Wildfires are a growing threat in a world shaped by climate change. Now, researchers at Aalto University have developed a neural network model that can accurately predict the occurrence of fires in peatlands. They used the new model to assess the effect of different strategies for managing fire risk and identified a suite of interventions that would reduce fire incidence by 50-76%. The study focused on the Central…

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams has demonstrated an innovative liquid-lithium charge stripper to accelerate unprecedentedly high-power heavy-ion beams. The Science The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) accelerates heavy-ion beams at beam power up to 400 kilowatts into a target to create rare isotopes for scientific research. A charge stripper plays an essential role in this process. It strips additional electrons from the charged-particle beam to accelerate it more efficiently. FRIB’s beam is too powerful for a conventional charge stripper made…

Jupiter’s orbit shape plays key, overlooked role on Earth. Of all known planets, Earth is as friendly to life as any planet could possibly be — or is it? If Jupiter’s orbit changes, a new study shows Earth could be more hospitable than it is today. When a planet has a perfectly circular orbit around its star, the distance between the star and the planet never changes. Most planets, however, have “eccentric” orbits around their stars, meaning the orbit is…

An international team of scientists, led by Laetitia Delrez, astrophysicist at the University of Liège (Belgium), has just announced the discovery of two ‘super-Earth’ type planets orbiting LP 890-9.  Also known as TOI-4306 or SPECULOOS-2, this small, cool star located about 100 light-years from our Earth is the second coolest star around which planets have been detected, after the famous TRAPPIST-1. This important discovery is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. A first planet, LP 890-9b (or TOI-4306b), the…

All magnets—from the simple souvenirs hanging on your refrigerator to the discs that give your computer memory to the powerful versions used in research labs— contain spinning quasiparticles called magnons. The direction one magnon spins can influence that of its neighbor, which affects the spin of its neighbor, and so on, yielding what are known as spin waves. Information can potentially be transmitted via spin waves more efficiently than with electricity, and magnons can serve as “quantum interconnects” that “glue”…

Device opens the door to applications in optical communications, sensing, and the search for exoplanets. On-chip laser frequency combs — lasers that emit multiple frequencies or colors of light simultaneously separated like the tooth on a comb — are a promising technology for a range of applications including environmental monitoring, optical computing, astronomy, and metrology. However, on-chip frequency combs are still limited by one serious problem — they are not always efficient. There are several ways to mitigate the efficiency…

A team of researchers, including UvA physicists and astronomers, has studied gamma rays caused by the Sagittarius Dwarf, a small neighbouring galaxy of our Milky Way. They showed that all the observed gamma radiation can be explained by millisecond pulsars, and can therefore not be interpreted as a smoking gun signature for the presence of dark matter. The results were published in Nature Astronomy this week. The center of our galaxy is blowing a pair of colossal bubbles of gamma…

In a recent publication in the scientific journal “Advanced Materials”, a team of physicists and chemists from TU Dresden presents an organic thin-film sensor that describes a completely new way of identifying the wavelength of light and achieves a spectral resolution below one nanometer. As integrated components, the thin-film sensors could eliminate the need for external spectrometers in the future. A patent application has already been filed for the novel technology. Spectroscopy comprises a group of experimental methods that decompose…

Interdisciplinary team around Jena astrophysicist utilized observations from antiquity to prove, that Betelgeuse – the bright red giant star in the upper left of the constellation Orion – was yellow-orange some 2,000 years ago. With progressing nuclear fusion in the center of a star, brightness, size, and color also change. Astrophysicists can derive from such properties important information on age and mass of a star. Those stars with significantly more mass than our Sun are blue-white or red – the…

For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets….

Research team uses laser flashes to simulate the interior of ice planets – and spurs a new process for producing miniscule diamonds. What goes on inside planets like Neptune and Uranus? To find out, an international team headed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique conducted a novel experiment. They fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. One result was that the…