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People have been gazing skyward at night for all of human history, studying the stars and wondering what could lie beyond them. But soon, scientists will have a powerful new tool at their disposal: the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is expected to be the world’s largest optical telescope once it’s completed.

Under the football stadium at the University of Arizona, Patrick McCarthy, the vice president and senior astronomer at the GMT project, heads the international group building the Giant Magellan.

“One of the big discoveries in astronomy in the past 20 years is that 97% of the universe, we have no idea what it is,” McCarthy said.

Stunning payload separation footage of the UP Aerospace SL-10 rocket. One of the four payloads deployed was a test version of the Maraia Capsule, a concept that was to be used to provide the inexpensive and autonomous on-demand return of small science samples from the International Space Station. Credit: UP Aerospace.

Using a new technique, scientists have performed the world’s smallest magnetic resonance imaging to capture the magnetic fields of single atoms. It’s an incredible breakthrough that could improve quantum research, as well as our understanding of the Universe on subatomic scales.

“I am very excited about these results,” said physicist Andreas Heinrich of the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul. “It is certainly a milestone in our field and has very promising implications for future research.”

You’re probably most familiar with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, as a method used to image internal body structures in medicine. An MRI machine uses highly powerful magnets to induce a strong magnetic field around the body, forcing the spin of the protons in the nuclei of your body’s hydrogen atoms to align with the magnetic field, all without producing side-effects.