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Category: futurism – Page 2

Daniel Kleppner, Physicist Who Brought Precision to GPS, Dies at 92

Daniel Kleppner, an experimental physicist who helped to develop an atomic clock that became an essential part of global positioning systems, or GPS, and who also helped to discover a rare fundamental state of matter predicted by Albert Einstein and his fellow theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, died on June 16 in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 92.

His wife, Beatrice, confirmed the death. She said he collapsed while visiting their daughter, Sofie Kleppner, and her son, Darwin, who was graduating from high school.

It was in the mid-1950s, while he was doing a fellowship at the University of Cambridge in England, that Dr. Kleppner learned something surprising: It was possible, a tutor told him, to build a clock precise enough to detect the effects of gravity on time. Curious, he went in search of more information and read Norman Ramsey’s 1953 book “Nuclear Moments.”

Next Generation Optical Fibers With 10,000 Times Lower Backscatter

A new instrument has enabled the first measurement of ultra-low backscatter in hollow-core fibers, validating their potential to outperform traditional fiber optics. Researchers from the University of Southampton and Université Laval, Canada, have successfully measured for the first time back-refle

CDH2 mutation affecting N-cadherin function causes attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in humans and mice

Molecular mechanisms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are not fully understood. Here the authors demonstrate a mutation in CDH2, encoding N-cadherin, that is associated with ADHD, and in a mouse model, delineate molecular electrophysiological characteristics associated with this mutation.

How plants sense heat during the day

For a decade, scientists have believed that plants sensed temperature mainly through specialized proteins, and mainly at night when the air is cool. New research suggests that during the day, another signal takes over. Sugar, produced in sunlight, helps plants detect heat and decide when to grow.

The study shows that plants rely on multiple heat-sensing systems, and that sugar plays a central and previously unrecognized role in daytime temperature response. The findings, published in Nature Communications, reshape a long-standing view of how plants interact with their environment and could influence future strategies for climate-resilient agriculture.

“Our textbooks say that proteins like phytochrome B and early flowering 3 (ELF3) are the main thermosensors in plants,” the senior author said. “But those models are based on nighttime data. We wanted to know what’s happening during the day, when light and temperature are both high because these are the conditions most plants actually experience.”

Some sharks in the north Atlantic may delay their fall migrations south

Certain migratory species of sharks may remain swimming and feeding in Atlantic Ocean waters in areas of the northeast coast for longer periods of time later into fall before they head toward southern waters. Led by researchers in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at Stony Brook University, the study tracked six shark species over five years by way of tagging them and acoustically tracking their movement.

This Mineral Could Hold the Key to Earth’s Hidden Ocean

New research reveals that only the oldest and fastest-sinking oceanic plates can transport water deep into Earth’s mantle, due to the unique heat-transferring properties of the mineral olivine.

Because of the way the mineral olivine conducts heat through radiation, only oceanic tectonic plates that are more than 60 million years old and moving downward at speeds greater than 10 centimeters per year are able to stay cool enough to carry water deep into the Earth’s mantle.

This conclusion comes from a team of researchers at the University of Potsdam and the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) Potsdam, along with international partners. They reached this finding after measuring how transparent olivine is to infrared light under the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found within the Earth’s mantle. Their study was published in Nature Communications.