Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an eye and in a tiny volume.

So far, this has required the world’s most powerful lasers, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. But there are only a few of these light giants, and the opportunities for experiments are correspondingly rare. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), together with colleagues from the European XFEL, has now succeeded in creating and observing extreme conditions with a much smaller laser.

At the heart of the new technology is a copper wire, finer than a human hair, as the group reports in the journal Nature Communications (“Cylindrical compression of thin wires by irradiation with a Joule-class short-pulse laser”).

If we don’t understand why we’re conscious, how come we’re so sure that extremely simple minds are not? I propose to think of consciousness as intrinsic to computation, although different types of computation may have very different types of consciousness – some so alien that we can’t imagine them. Since all physical processes are computations, this view amounts to a kind of panpsychism. How we conceptualize consciousness is always a sort of spiritual poetry, but I think this perspective better accounts for why we ourselves are conscious despite not being different in a discontinuous way from the rest of the universe. Introduction ‘don’t hold strong opinions about things you don’t understand’ —Derek Hess Susan Blackmore believes the way we typically […].

Captured by the James Webb, the Little Red Dots indicate galaxies we’ve never seen before, and what’s inside them is unclear.

The team successfully tracked the orbit of the close companion and measured changes in the size of the Cepheid as it pulsated. The orbital motion showed that Polaris has a mass five times larger than that of the Sun. The images of Polaris showed that it has a diameter 46 times the size of the Sun.

The biggest surprise was the appearance of Polaris in close-up images. The CHARA observations provided the first glimpse of what the surface of a Cepheid variable looks like.

CHARA Array false-color image of Polaris from April 2021 that reveals large bright and dark spots on the surface. Polaris appears about 600,000 times smaller than the Full Moon in the sky.

“Traditional measures of chirality have struggled to identify the concentration of right-and left-handed molecules in samples containing almost equal amounts of both,” says physicist Nicola Mayer, from the Max Born Institute.

“With our new method, a tiny excess in the concentration of either mirror twin can be detected, possibly enough to make a life-changing difference.”

We’re not sure how chirality first emerged, but it may have originated from deep space, before going on to play a profound role in so many different aspects of life on Earth. Having instruments that can better detect chiral molecules would be a major step forward.

Leonard Susskind on P-adic numbers in de Sitter Space.

September’s full Harvest Moon will drift into Earth’s shadow for a partial eclipse on Sept. 17. It is also the second of four consecutive supermoons this year, making our natural satellite look bigger and brighter than usual.