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JWST Captures Stunning Evidence of How Supermassive Black Holes Feed

An international team using the JWST has found photographic evidence that brings astronomers closer to solving a long-standing mystery about black holes.

For decades, astronomers have faced a puzzle at the centers of massive galaxies: how can a supermassive black hole keep feeding when its own powerful jets heat the surrounding gas that supplies it? New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, are bringing that process into much sharper view.

The images provide the clearest look yet at gaseous filaments linking a galaxy’s hot atmosphere to the rotating disk that supplies material to its central supermassive black hole.

Aging Changes Memory in a Surprising Way, New Study Finds

A new study finds that as people age, they remember fewer details from their past and have more difficulty switching between different types of memories.

As people grow older, the broad story of a past experience may remain even as the sights, sounds, and emotions tied to a particular moment become harder to retrieve. Research from the University of East Anglia suggests that aging changes not only how much people remember, but also the type of information their memories emphasize.

The study found that older adults recalled fewer details from their past and had more difficulty when they needed to switch between different kinds of memories. At the same time, their recollections contained more general knowledge and interpretation, suggesting that aging may gradually shift memory away from vivid, moment-specific experiences and toward a broader account of what happened.

Galaxies May Be Mimicking the Dark Matter Signals Astronomers Have Been Hunting

Galaxies can create many of the same stellar stream distortions that astronomers have looked to as possible signs of dark matter.

Astronomers have long hoped that gaps, bends, and other distortions in long bands of stars around the Milky Way could reveal the hidden influence of dark matter. But new simulations suggest many of those features can arise from the galaxy itself, even without the small dark matter clumps thought to produce them.

University of Washington researchers modeled roughly 15,000 of these bands, known as stellar streams, across four Milky Way-sized galaxies. The simulations omitted small dark matter clumps called subhalos. After five billion simulated years, irregularities appeared in nearly every stream, and only 70 remained perfectly smooth.

Dual-purpose qubit design could speed operations while cutting quantum errors

Researchers from MIT have designed a new qubit architecture that enables qubits to interact with each other much more quickly while remaining very stable. This advance could someday help scientists build practical quantum computers that can run long, complex algorithms with high accuracy.

Qubits, which are the building blocks of a quantum computer, usually only store data and rely on other electronics to perform operations and communicate. But qubits are so fragile and error-prone that it is difficult for scientists to connect enough qubits before they lose their information and need to be reset.

The MIT team designed a dual-purpose qubit with two separate parts: one component that stores data and one component that interacts with other qubits and electronics. This design improves the reliability of the qubit and enables it to operate with a reduced error rate, so it can perform more computations in the same time span.

Quantum control algorithm looks to explain how birds migrate

The hidden world of quantum mechanics exists at scales many orders of magnitude smaller than living organisms, yet scientists have long theorized that quantum effects play an important role in biology. Birds’ ability to sense magnetic fields during migration is one of the best-known mysteries in this field, with leading theories suggesting that this sensing could be achieved by exploiting quantum entanglement.

By proving a mathematical principle about how best to control quantum systems, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have taken what could be the penultimate step toward finally putting this avian hypothesis to the test, while also unlocking new biological platforms for quantum computing. Their results are published in the journal Quantum.

Ugur Abdulla, head of the Analysis and Partial Differential Equations Unit at OIST, explains, “Many researchers have studied quantum effects and their role in biology, though it isn’t always easy to translate an idea or hypothesis into a laboratory experiment. We hope that by laying the mathematical foundation for controlling quantum phenomena, we can bring some of these ideas from quantum biology out of the theoretical realm and into the lab.”

Scientists observe Einstein’s gravity in the quantum world

An international team including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Sir Roger Penrose has observed a long-predicted effect of gravity on a falling quantum object for the first time. The result shows that a fundamental principle at the heart of Einstein’s theory of gravity remains consistent with the behavior of matter in the quantum world. The study, led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Ulm and the University of Oxford, was published today (Sept. 2) in Science Advances.

For more than a century, physicists have relied on two extraordinarily successful descriptions of nature. Quantum mechanics explains the strange behavior of atoms and other tiny objects. Einstein’s theory of gravity explains how objects fall and how gravity shapes the universe. Yet physicists still do not fully understand how the two fit together.

Now, an international team has performed an experiment that probes the point where they meet. In the study, the researchers observed a distinctive change in the quantum properties of atoms as they fell under gravity. Crucially, the effect they measured is the same one predicted when Einstein’s equivalence principle, a cornerstone of his theory of gravity, is applied to a quantum object.

Physicists test the weak equivalence principle in an orbiting space station

The weak equivalence principle (WEP) is central to Einstein’s general relativity. It posits that gravity must accelerate everything equally, regardless of what it is made from. For the first time, a team led by Ming-Sheng Zhan at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics has tested the principle using clouds of continuously free-falling atoms aboard an orbiting space station.

Their research has been published in Science Advances.

Sorry, this neutrino laser won’t work, physicists say

Neutrinos are pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars and our bodies by the trillions each second. The elementary particles are often described as “ghostly” for their near-zero mass and elusive nature, as they have very little interaction with normal matter.

Since their discovery in 1956, neutrinos have continued to surprise physicists with their unexpected properties and behaviors. For instance, the particles come in multiple “flavors” and can morph from one to another like subatomic shape-shifters. Neutrinos may also be their own antiparticles, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like quantum duality. And their extremely weak interactions make them nearly impossible to detect.

Last year, scientists seemed to add to the particles’ mystique with a concept for a neutrino laser. They proposed that a concentrated beam of neutrinos could be produced by cooling a cloud of radioactive atoms to nanokelvin temperatures, one-billionth that of interstellar space.

Trapped light generates nanoscale magnetization

Using an engineered metasurface that traps light, Cornell researchers have demonstrated a new way to generate strong static magnetic fields without using external magnets or magnetic materials—an approach that could advance spintronics, quantum and photonic computing, and data storage.

In an article published in Advanced Science, Shivaksh Rawat, a Ph.D. candidate working with Gennady Shvets, the J. Preston Levis Professor of Engineering in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, and Samyobrata Mukherjee, a postdoc in the same group, described how a new technique for light manipulation—the so-called “time interface”—can be used to convert part of an optical wave’s energy into static magnetization.

When a light wave experiences a spatial interface—for example, when it travels through air and then water—some of the light is reflected off the surface while the rest is transmitted through it. Similarly, when a light wave experiences a time interface—a sudden change in the optical properties of the propagation medium, such as an increase or decrease in the refractive index—it also produces reflected and transmitted waves.

PACMAN AI framework for controlling fusion systems safely makes key decisions in milliseconds

Inside some fusion energy systems, particles hotter than the core of the sun can become unruly in a few thousandths of a second, far faster than any human operator can react. A new software framework developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University hands those split-second decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), while keeping the machine safe and humans firmly in charge of the goals.

Known as PACMAN (a novel abbreviation for Prediction And Control using MAchiNe learning), the AI framework was successfully tested on a real fusion system in five experiments. The framework’s design and first results are detailed in a new paper in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

Fusion could one day serve as a virtually unlimited source of electricity. Scientists are working on several ways to perfect the process here on Earth, including devices called tokamaks, which use powerful magnetic fields to hold a plasma: an electrically charged gas often called the fourth state of matter. Keeping the plasma hot, dense and stable requires constant adjustments to the tokamak, including its heating systems, magnets and gas injectors. The fusion reaction can be thwarted by small disturbances in the plasma, known as instabilities, that grow in milliseconds.

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