Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen is associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. He contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
There is a new speck of light in the sky right now, best observable from Earth around midnight. This blurry speck — dim as it may be, small as it may be — represents the grit and unity of thousands of people who worked together to place it in the heavens.
Humans experience the world in three dimensions, but a collaboration in Japan has developed a way to create synthetic dimensions to better understand the fundamental laws of the Universe and possibly apply them to advanced technologies.
They published their results today (January 28, 2022) in Science Advances.
“The concept of dimensionality has become a central fixture in diverse fields of contemporary physics and technology in past years,” said paper author Toshihiko Baba, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yokohama National University. “While inquiries into lower-dimensional materials and structures have been fruitful, rapid advances in topology have uncovered a further abundance of potentially useful phenomena depending on the dimensionality of the system, even going beyond the three spatial dimensions available in the world around us.”
Humans experience the world in three dimensions, but a collaboration in Japan has developed a way to create synthetic dimensions to better understand the fundamental laws of the universe and possibly apply them to advanced technologies.
They published their results on January 28, 2022 in Science Advances.
“The concept of dimensionality has become a central fixture in diverse fields of contemporary physics and technology in past years,” said paper author Toshihiko Baba, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yokohama National University. “While inquiries into lower-dimensional materials and structures have been fruitful, rapid advances in topology have uncovered a further abundance of potentially useful phenomena depending on the dimensionality of the system, even going beyond the three spatial dimensions available in the world around us.”
Columbia, Maryland — January 27, 2022. Universities Space Research Association (USRA) today announced the start of operations for phase-2 of DARPA’s Optimization with Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program. This award follows the ONISQ phase 1 launch in 2020, in which USRA was selected to lead the “Scheduling Applications with Advanced Mixers” (SAAM) project, in collaboration with Rigetti Computing and, through DARPA, under DARPA-NASA Interagency agreement (IAA) 8,839 Annex 114, with the NASA Quantum AI Laboratory.
A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—wi…
Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined. Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars […].
After a successfull simulated launch countdown on January 24, only a few tests remain for NASA’s big Moon rocket.
‘A watershed in furthering our understanding of these structures,’ researcher says.
An unprecedented new telescope image of the Milky Way galaxy’s turbulent center has revealed nearly 1,000 mysterious strands, inexplicably dangling in space.
Stretching up to 150 light years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced, side by side like strings on a harp. Using observations at radio wavelengths, Northwestern University ’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered the highly organized, magnetic filaments in the early 1980s. The mystifying filaments, he found, comprise cosmic ray electrons gyrating the magnetic field at close to the speed of light. But their origin has remained an unsolved mystery ever since.
From creating a Zen garden on Mars to conducting sound experiments in the massive wind tunnel at NASA Ames, artist-adventurer Charles Lindsay’s work questions our understanding of time and consciousness. Lindsay is the founder of the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence program and is now a visiting professor at Kyoto University of Arts. His sculptures, sound installations, and immersive environments, built from salvaged aerospace and bio-tech equipment, invite us to ponder ideas about technology, eco-systems, and semiotics.
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