Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: mapping

Neutron-based technique reveals uneven lithium flow in batteries

A neutron-based mapping technique has been used to track the movement of lithium ions in real time inside a functioning all-solid-state battery.

Researchers at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in France discovered unexpected structural complexities, which could inform the design of safer, more efficient solid-state batteries.

The operando neutron powder diffraction technique was used to peer inside the battery interface. Interestingly, the experiment revealed a chaotic structure within the electrode, showing that lithium doesn’t flow through the battery nearly as smoothly as previously thought.

The same sounds are mapped similarly in the human and mouse brain, study finds

While exploring the world around them, both humans and other animals continuously interpret information they pick up with their sight, hearing, touch and other senses. Neuroscience research suggests that the brain does not individually process every single sensory experience, but rather organizes information into mental models known as internal representations.

Internal representations can help recognize familiar patterns or relationships between different stimuli and experiences. While many past studies have explored the role of these perceptual “maps,” fewer have looked at how stimuli are represented in the brains of different species and how they influence learning and decision-making.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recently carried out experiments aimed at better understanding how humans and mice perceive, mentally represent and distinguish the same sounds. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that sounds are organized similarly in the human and mouse brain, but also that auditory maps tend to remain surprisingly stable during learning and decision-making.

NASA space telescope maps magnetic fields of ‘Lighthouse’ pulsar

For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within what is often referred to as the Lighthouse Nebula. The results provide new insight into the structure of some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos, as NASA continues to explore the secrets of how the universe works. A paper describing the results was published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star with a strong magnetic field that spins incredibly fast. The pulsar at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula is rotating 16 times per second. Neutron stars are the leftover cores of massive stars, formed at the end of their life cycles, that possess more mass than the sun. They are condensed down to the size of a city, making them natural laboratories for studying extreme physics.

In June 2025, IXPE spent nearly 18 days focused on the Lighthouse Nebula.

New model maps solar storms across 1 million miles around Earth

A team at the Applied Physics Lab is working to understand the complex science behind predicting invisible threats that can quickly cripple electric grid infrastructure on Earth.

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, telegraph operators all over North America and Europe suddenly lost control of their machines. Lines disconnected. Wires sparked and caught fire. Operators received electric shocks.

The source of this widespread disturbance was more than 150 million kilometers (more than 93 million miles) away: the sun. That night, a solar storm caused brilliant auroras to appear far beyond Earth’s poles, waking people in some regions who mistook the light for morning.

Dark energy flips its sign, but the Hubble tension refuses to budge

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, two independent teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, discovered something strange: The expansion is speeding up. The finding earned them the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The leading explanation for this acceleration is “dark energy,” a mysterious force usually modeled as a constant called Lambda, pushing space apart. Combined with cold dark matter, this gives us the LCDM model, the standard picture of the cosmos for the past 25 years.

LCDM is remarkably successful. It fits observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), i.e., the leftover glow from the Big Bang, as well as maps of galaxy clustering and the brightness of exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae. But it has one nagging problem: the Hubble tension.

Cosmologists have proposed dark energy that switches sign over cosmic history. A rigorous new analysis published in Physical Review D checks whether it actually closes the gap.

Robots can now ‘see’ touch thanks to a new color-changing tactile sensor

Engineers at Queen Mary University of London have built a new color-changing tactile sensor, which allows robots to “see” and touch in real-time. The novel idea was invented by Giacomo Sasso, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Engineering and Materials Science at Queen Mary University of London, and it works by transforming invisible forces into dynamic color patterns. This enables high-resolution maps of contact, strain and pressure to emerge instantly.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

When pressure is applied to a soft sensing surface, the material produces spatially varying structural colors that can be captured immediately using a standard camera, removing the need for complex reconstruction algorithms.

Single ion maps 3D electromagnetic fields above chips with record sensitivity

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a method that uses a single ion to detect electromagnetic fields above a surface and to create a three-dimensional map of them. In the future, this approach can be used to improve chips for quantum computers and quantum sensors.

Single electrically charged atoms—ions—have been successfully used for some time as quantum bits in quantum computers and quantum sensors. Unlike the bulky ion traps of the early years, there are now miniaturized chips in which ions can be trapped and manipulated only a hair’s breadth above the surface of the chip. This has many advantages, but also one decisive drawback: Noisy electromagnetic fields coming from the chip itself can severely impair the sensitive quantum states of the ions and hence the performance of the computer or sensor.

A team of researchers led by Jonathan Home, a professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, has now developed a technique that allows them to create a very precise three-dimensional map of electric and magnetic fields very close to the surface of the chip. In the future, materials for chip production can be better optimized and tested for their suitability for use in quantum applications. The results of their research were recently published in Science Advances.

XMM-Newton and Chandra help revise distance to Milky Way’s outer spiral arms

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.

Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know much about the structure of our galaxy’s outer regions. It’s difficult to observe our galaxy from the inside: The solar system is well embedded in its disk, preventing a bird’s-eye view, and many regions are obscured by thick clouds of cosmic dust.

But this is changing: We have learned a huge amount since the launch of ESA’s star-surveying Gaia space telescope. Using data collected by Gaia, scientists are mapping the Milky Way galaxy in more detail than ever before by measuring precise distances to its stars. Before Gaia, we weren’t even sure whether our galaxy had two or four spiral arms (we now know the answer to be four).

RNA Folding Energy of Long-Range Genomic Interactions Regulates Discontinuous Transcription in SARS-CoV-2

Coronaviruses use discontinuous transcription to generate subgenomic RNAs (sgRNAs) that encode structural and accessory proteins. However, the factors regulating sgRNA abundance in SARS-CoV-2 remain unclear. Here, we combined strand-specific RNA sequencing, RNA–RNA interaction mapping, prediction of RNA folding energies, and targeted mutagenesis to define the regulation of (–) sgRNA synthesis in SARS-CoV-2 infection. We demonstrated that the relative (–) sgRNA abundance across viral genes is stable throughout infection and largely correlates with corresponding (+) sgmRNA levels. Through meta-analysis of published SPLASH data, we found that the frequency of long-range interactions between the 5′ genomic transcription regulatory sequence TRS-Leader and downstream TRS-Body sequences correlates with sgRNA abundance.

/* */