People who have gone into cardiac arrest can get treatment faster if a drone delivers a defibrillator, but there needs to be someone nearby trained in CPR, shows a trial in Sweden.

By David Cox

The new shots could make malaria protection more plentiful and affordable.

In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.

Published on Thursday, the new report (see.pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.

“Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable,” the new report states.

The mission was successful, and Dimorphos’ orbit was shortened by 33 minutes in the weeks after the impact.

However, a team of high school students led by teacher Jonathan Swift at Thacher School in California have discovered that Dimorphos’ orbit continued to shrink by another minute more than a month after the collision.

‘The number we got was slightly larger, a change of 34 minutes,’ said Mr Swift. ‘That was inconsistent at an uncomfortable level.’

New details of the previously reported incident underscore how dependent the U.S. government has become on a company that once had to fight in court to become part of the Washington establishment.

You may have heard of light as both particles and waves, but have you ever imagined the secret dance within? Researchers from the University of Ottawa and Sapienza University in Rome have just uncovered a groundbreaking technique that enables the real-time visualization of the wave function of entangled photons — the fundamental components of light.

Imagine choosing a random shoe from a pair. If it’s a “left” shoe, you immediately know the other shoe you’ve yet to unbox is meant to go on your right foot. This instantaneous information is certain whether the shoe box is within hand’s reach or 4.3 light-years away on some planet in the Alpha Centauri system.

This analogy, though not perfect, captures the essence of quantum entanglement. At its core, quantum entanglement refers to the phenomenon where two or more particles become deeply interconnected in such a way that their properties become correlated, regardless of the spatial separation between them. This means that the state of one particle instantly influences the state of another, even if they are light-years apart.

While optics and mechanics are two distinct branches of physics, they are connected. It is well known that the geometrical/ray treatment of light has direct analogies to mechanical descriptions of particle motion. However, connections between coherence wave optics and classical mechanics are rarely reported. Here we report links of the two through a systematic quantitative analysis of polarization and entanglement, two optical coherence properties under the wave description of light pioneered by Huygens and Fresnel. A generic complementary identity relation is obtained for arbitrary light fields. More surprisingly, through the barycentric coordinate system, optical polarization, entanglement, and their identity relation are shown to be quantitatively associated with the mechanical concepts of center of mass and moment of inertia via the Huygens-Steiner theorem for rigid body rotation.

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to development of new products with inherently antibacterial surfaces that are more effective than current chemical treatments.

When researchers at Stony Brook University’s Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering developed a simple technique to duplicate the cicada wing’s nanostructure, they were still missing a key piece of information: How do the nanopillars on its surface actually eliminate bacteria? Thankfully, they knew exactly who could help them find the answer: Jan-Michael Carrillo, a researcher with the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For nanoscience researchers who seek computational comparisons and insights for their experiments, Carrillo provides a singular service: large-scale, high-resolution molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL.

GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, mapping, and timing across a broad spectrum of applications. But it does have a few shortcomings, most notably not being able to pass through buildings, rocks, or water. That’s why Japanese researchers have developed an alternative wireless navigation system that relies on cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. The team has conducted its first successful test, and the system could one day be used by search and rescue teams, for example, to guide robots underwater or to help autonomous vehicles navigate underground.

“Cosmic-ray muons fall equally across the Earth and always travel at the same speed regardless of what matter they traverse, penetrating even kilometers of rock,” said co-author Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo in Japan. “Now, by using muons, we have developed a new kind of GPS, which we have called the muometric positioning system (muPS), which works underground, indoors and underwater.”

A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral Bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.

Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero, things smaller than a fraction of an atom or which have extremely low states of energy—the world looks very different. “You find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes,” says Sedrakyan, “and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”

Sedrakyan has spent years exploring these wild quantum states, and he is particularly interested in the possibility of what physicists call “band degeneracy,” “moat bands” or “kinetic frustration” in strongly interacting quantum matter.