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Category: space – Page 41

Structure of liquid carbon measured for the first time

With the declared aim of measuring matter under extreme pressure, an international research collaboration headed by the University of Rostock and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) used the high-performance laser DIPOLE 100-X at the European XFEL for the first time in 2023. With spectacular results: In this initial experiment they managed to study liquid carbon—an unprecedented achievement as the researchers report in the journal Nature.

Liquid carbon can be found, for example, in the interior of planets and plays an important role in like nuclear fusion. To date, however, only very little was known about carbon in its because in this state it was practically impossible to study in the lab: Under normal pressure, carbon does not melt but immediately changes into a gaseous state.

Only under and at temperatures of approximately 4,500 degrees Celsius—the highest melting point of any material—does carbon become liquid. No container would withstand that.

Researchers simulate tens of thousands of electrons in real time

A research team from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with North Carolina State University, has developed a simulation capable of predicting how tens of thousands of electrons move in materials in real time, or natural time rather than compute time.

The project reflects a longstanding partnership between ORNL and NCSU, combining ORNL’s expertise in time-dependent quantum methods with NCSU’s advanced quantum simulation platform developed under the leadership of Professor Jerry Bernholc.

Using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Frontier supercomputer, the world’s first to break the exascale barrier, the research team developed a real-time, time-dependent density functional theory, or RT-TDDFT, capability within the open-source Real-space Multigrid, or RMG, code to model systems of up to 24,000 electrons.

Jupiter was formerly twice its current size and had a much stronger magnetic field, study says

Understanding Jupiter’s early evolution helps illuminate the broader story of how our solar system developed its distinct structure. Jupiter’s gravity, often called the “architect” of our solar system, played a critical role in shaping the orbital paths of other planets and sculpting the disk of gas and dust from which they formed.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Konstantin Batygin, professor of planetary science at Caltech; and Fred C. Adams, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan; provide a detailed look into Jupiter’s primordial state.

Their calculations reveal that roughly 3.8 million years after the solar system’s first solids formed—a key moment when the disk of material around the sun, known as the protoplanetary nebula, was dissipating—Jupiter was significantly larger and had an even more powerful magnetic field.

Go-Based Malware Deploys XMRig Miner on Linux Hosts via Redis Configuration Abuse

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new Linux cryptojacking campaign that’s targeting publicly accessible Redis servers.

The malicious activity has been codenamed RedisRaider by Datadog Security Labs.

“RedisRaider aggressively scans randomized portions of the IPv4 space and uses legitimate Redis configuration commands to execute malicious cron jobs on vulnerable systems,” security researchers Matt Muir and Frederic Baguelin said.

Aversive memories can be weakened during human sleep via the reactivation of positive interfering memories

Our behavioral findings indicated that TMR weakened earlier acquired aversive memories while increasing positive memory intrusions in the interference condition. To examine how TMR reactivated aversive and positive memories during NREM sleep, we extracted cue-locked, time-frequency resolved EEG responses in the interference and noninterference conditions, and compared them with the EEG responses elicited by control sounds.

We found that when compared to the control sounds that did not involve any memory pairs before sleep, both interference and noninterference memory cues increased EEG power across the delta, theta, sigma, and beta bands in frontal and central areas (Pclusters < 0.01, corrected for multiple comparisons across time, frequency, and space, Fig. 4 A–D). However, when contrasting interference with noninterference memory cues, we did not identify any significant clusters (Pclusters 0.05). These findings suggested that delta-theta and sigma-beta power increases may indicate memory reactivation during sleep.

We next examined whether cue-elicited theta and beta power were associated with subsequent memory accuracies (i.e., remembered vs. forgotten) for individual positive or aversive stimulus in the interference condition, given the relationship between theta activity and emotional processing (19), and between beta activity and memory interference during sleep (27, 34). Employing BLMM across all channels revealed that the cue-elicited theta power over the right central-parietal region (FC5, C2, C4, CP2, CP4, TP7) was significantly higher for subsequently remembered than for forgotten positive memories (mediandiff = 1.39, 95% HDI [0.32, 2.43], Fig. 4E). For aversive memories, a few channels’ (Fp2, F6, C5) theta power was higher for remembered than for forgotten aversive memories (mediandiff = 1.04, 95% HDI [0.16, 1.86]; Fig. 4F).

Project Astra | Exploring the Capabilities of a Universal AI Assistant

Last year we introduced Project Astra, our research prototype of a universal AI assistant. Since then we’ve improved memory, added computer control and enhanced voice output, and are working to bring these new capabilities to Gemini Live and other products.

Learn more about Project Astra: https://deepmind.google/technologies/.… #AIAssistant #ProjectAstra Subscribe to our Channel: / google Find us on X: / google Watch us on TikTok: / google Follow us on Instagram: / google Join us on Facebook: / google.

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Exoplanet’s Companion Found Via Orbital Mechanics Variations

Tracking exoplanets via orbital mechanics isn’t easy. Plenty of variables could affect how a planet moves around its star, and determining which ones affect any given exoplanet requires a lot of data and a lot of modeling. A recent paper from researchers led by Kaviya Parthasarathy from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan tries to break through the noise and determine what is causing the Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) of HAT-P-12b, more commonly known as Puli.

Puli is a “sub-Saturn” exoplanet that orbits the star HAT-P-12, also known as Komondor. Both the star and its planet are named after dog breeds as they reside in the constellation Canes Venatici and lie about 463 light years away from Earth. Nothing is particularly special about the star or the planet, except that they have had a lot of data collected on them.

The paper analyzed 46 light curves watching Puli traverse in front of Komondor. Some were previously published, whereas others, including some ground-based observations and some new data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, were never before analyzed.

2025 Milky Way photo contest features its first winning image taken from space

The winners of the 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year contest have been announced, highlighting epic imagery of the Milky Way from around the world, and even from above it. The contest, hosted by travel photography blog Capture the Atlas, is in its eighth year.

This year, the contest received 6,000 entries from photographers of 16 different nationalities. Images spanned 25 locations around the globe, including Chile, the United States, Greece, Switzerland, Guatemala, New Zealand, Taiwan, Yemen, Chad, India, Namibia, Spain and more. Plus, an image taken from space was included in the collection for the first time. Some photos captured celestial events like a comet, a meteor shower and a lunar eclipse.

Dan Zafra, the editor of Capture the Atlas, curates the annual list based on image quality, the story behind the shot and the overall inspiration it provides. Zafra says the project’s goal is to inspire people to connect with the night sky and “to encourage photographers to explore and photograph the Milky Way from new angles.”

On the Qualia Problem of Perception and the Measurement Problem of Quantum Theory

The qualia problem of perception is simply pointing out that the way we perceive the world is in terms of subjective qualities rather than numerical quantities. For example, we perceive the color of light in the things we see rather than the frequency of light wave vibrations or wavelengths, just as we perceive the quality of the sounds we hear rather than the frequency of sound wave vibrations. Another example is emotional qualities, like the perception of pleasure and pain and the perception of other emotional qualities, like the emotional qualities that color the perception of the emotional body feelings we perceive with emotional expressions of fear and desire. There is no possible way to understand the perception of these emotional qualities, just as there is no way to understand the perception of the colors we see or the qualities of the sounds we hear, in terms of the neuronal firing rates of neurons in the brain or other nervous systems. The frequency of wave vibrations and the neuronal firing rates of neurons are both examples of quantities. The problem is we do not perceive things in terms of numerical quantities, but rather in terms of subjective qualities.

All our physical theories are formulated in terms of numerical quantities, not in terms of subjective qualities. For example, in ordinary quantum theory or in quantum field theory, we speak of the frequency of light wave vibrations or the wavelength of a light wave in terms of a quantum particle called the photon. A photon or light wave is characterized by the numerical quantities of frequency and wavelength. When we formulate the nature of a light wave or photon in quantum theory in terms of Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field, we can only describe numerical quantities. In ordinary quantum theory and quantum field theory, the electromagnetic field is the quantum wave-function, ψ(x, t), that specifies the quantum probability that the point particle called the photon can be measured at a position x in space at a moment t in time. That quantum probability is specified in terms of the frequency and wavelength that characterizes the wave-function for the photon.

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