Radio astronomers have detected jets of hot gas blasted out by a black hole in the galaxy at the heart of the Phoenix Galaxy Cluster, located 5.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Phoenix. This is an important result for understanding the coevolution of galaxies, gas, and black holes in galaxy clusters. Galaxies are not distributed randomly in space. Through mutual gravitational attraction, galaxies gather together to form collections known as clusters. The space between galaxies is not entirely empty….

Prof. DONG Zhenchao and Prof. HOU Jianguo from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) improved the spatial resolution from 8 nm to ~8 Å of photoluminescence imaging. It realized sub-molecular resolution with single molecule photofluorescence imaging for the first time. This study was published in Nature Photonics on August 10. To reach atomic resolution with light has always been one of the ultimate goals in nano-optics. The advent of scanning near-field optical…

Carnegie Mellon system uses social media posts to assess building damage It wasn’t long after Hurricane Laura hit the Gulf Coast Thursday that people began flying drones to record the damage and posting videos on social media. Those videos are a precious resource, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who are working on ways to use them for rapid damage assessment. By using artificial intelligence, the researchers are developing a system that can automatically identify buildings and make an initial…

Project “KItatta” launched In Germany, more than 9,000 corneal transplantations are performed annually. Despite strict quality criteria, about 4-5% of the transplants show postoperative wart-like changes that impair the cornea’s functionality. So far, it cannot be excluded with certainty whether and to what extent the so-called guttae are present. This can lead to the transplantation of pathologically changed corneas. In a joint project, the Saarland University Clinic for Ophthalmology and DFKI want to develop a method to better assess the…

Until now, these flows of material had been detected only in other wavelength ranges, such as X-rays or the visible, depending on the phase in which the black hole is consuming its surrounding material. This study provides the first evidence that the winds are present throughout the evolution of the eruption, independently of the phase, and this is a step forward in our understanding of the mysterious processes of accretion onto stellar mass black holes. The article has just been…

An international research team from Germany, Italy, and the UK has developed a key photonics component for the intriguing terahertz spectral range. By mixing electronic resonances in semiconductor nanostructures with the photon field of microresonators, they designed a stained mirror that bleaches more easily than ever and could make terahertz lasers ultrafast. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Communications. Terahertz radiation – often dubbed T-rays – marks one of the last frontiers in photonics. Located in…

Researchers create portable lab-on-a-chip that could detect many contaminants. Rutgers researchers have created a miniature device for measuring trace levels of toxic lead in sediments at the bottom of harbors, rivers and other waterways within minutes – far faster than currently available laboratory-based tests, which take days. The affordable lab-on-a-chip device could also allow municipalities, water companies, universities, K-12 schools, daycares and homeowners to easily and swiftly test their water supplies. The research is published in the IEEE Sensors Journal….

The very heart of our Milky Way harbours a large bar-like structure of stars whose size and rotational speed have been strongly contested in the last years. A new study has found an elegant solution to the discrepancies found in different observational studies, using the fact that the bar and spiral arms move at different rotational velocities, encountering each other about every 80 Million years. As the faster-rotating bar approaches a spiral arm, it appears to be much longer and…

Researchers at Mainz University were able to show that information can be stored in antiferromagnetic materials and to measure the efficiency of the writing operation We all store more and more information, while the end devices are supposed to get smaller and smaller. However, due to continuous technological improvement, conventional electronics based on silicon is rapidly reaching its limits – for example limits of physical nature such as the bit size or the number of electrons required to store information….

Scientists led by Kiel University (Germany), in collaboration with the ESRF, University of Victoria (Canada), University of Barcelona (Spain) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), have now found out why and how platinum degrades. Degradation of platinum, used as a key electrode material in the hydrogen economy, severely shortens the lifetime of electrochemical energy conversion devices, such as fuel cells. For the first time, scientists elucidated the movements of the platinum atoms that lead to catalyst surface degradation. Their results are published…

University of Sussex quantum physicists have developed an algorithm which helps early quantum computers to perform calculations most efficiently The team used their model to calculate the expected computational power of early quantum computers Their research highlights a fundamental advantage of the ‘trapped ion’ approach over other methods   Quantum physicists at the University of Sussex have created an algorithm that speeds up the rate of calculations in the early quantum computers which are currently being developed. They have created…

Solar flares emit sudden, strong bursts of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s surface and its atmosphere, and eject plasma and energetic particles into inter-planetary space. Since large solar flares can cause severe space weather disturbances affecting Earth, to mitigate their impact their occurrence needs to be predicted. However, as the onset mechanism of solar flares is unclear, most flare prediction methods so far have relied on empirical methods. The research team led by Professor Kanya Kusano (Director of the Institute…

A new letter has been found in the mysterious alphabet of black holes. Two astrophysicists share this discovery in the journal Nature Communications. Black holes are at the center of almost all galaxies that have been studied so far. They have an unimaginably large mass and therefore attract matter, gas and even light. But they can also emit matter in the form of plasma jets – a kind of plasma beam that is ejected from the centre of the galaxy…

Wearable soft mask will be useful for new, cutting-edge sleep and psycho-social studies From the team that invented physiology-sensing pajamas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, now comes a new, lightweight eye mask that can unobtrusively capture pulse, eye movement and sleep signals, for example, when worn in an everyday environment. Senior authors writing this week in the journal Matter are materials chemist and Wearable Electronics Lab director Trisha L. Andrew, with computer scientist Deepak Ganesan and others. They point…

The Sun is a magnetized star. Its magnetic field is essentially three dimensional and it occupies all layers of the solar atmosphere. However, routine measurements of the solar magnetic field have only been achieved at the photospheric level, or the solar surface. Lacking precise knowledge about the magnetic field in the outermost solar atmosphere, the corona, has impeded our understanding of the solar magnetism and many phenomena in the solar atmosphere. An international team led by TIAN Hui, a professor…

NASA JPL team uses TACC’s Maverick2 system to develop software, trains models NASA’s Mars rovers have been one of the great scientific and space successes of the past two decades. Four generations of rovers have traversed the red planet gathering scientific data, sending back evocative photographs, and surviving incredibly harsh conditions — all using on-board computers less powerful than an iPhone 1. The latest rover, Perseverance, was launched on July 30, 2020, and engineers are already dreaming of a future…