Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The startup Muon Space announced Jan. 9 it will explore the use of climate-monitoring satellites to capture cloud characterization data for the U.S. Air Force.

The Mountain View, California-based company, founded in 2021, is developing small satellites to monitor Earth’s climate and ecosystems.

Under a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract from the U.S. Air Force, Muon Space “will perform a feasibility study to determine the benefit of modifying its multispectral electro-optical infrared (EO/IR) instrument to support the Department of Defense’s cloud characterization observation capability,” the company said.

HELSINKI — China launched its Einstein Probe early Tuesday to detect X-ray emissions from violent, fleeting cosmic phenomena using novel lobster eye-inspired optics.

A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China at 2:03 a.m. (0703 UTC), Jan. 9. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) confirmed launch success within the hour.

The Einstein Probe (EP) is part of growing Chinese strategic space science efforts. The spacecraft will spend at least three years observing distant, violent interactions such as tidal disruption events—in which stars are pulled apart by supermassive black holes—supernovae, and detect and localize the high-energy, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events.

Recent theoretical work has identified the possibility of a new and fundamental form of magnetism.

Collinear magnetism, where magnetic moments of all ions are parallel or antiparallel to each other, is a century-old concept in condensed-matter physics. In the past two decades, researchers began exploring the exotic world of noncollinear magnets, which include spin spirals, skyrmions, spin ices, and more. But more recently a fundamentally new form of collinear magnetism has emerged: altermagnetism. Like ferromagnetism, it breaks time-reversal symmetry and harbors anomalous transport properties, such as the anomalous Hall effect and magneto-optics. Like antiferromagnetism, it has, by symmetry, no net magnetization. The phenomenon was identified between 2019 and 2021 by four different groups [1–4]. In 2022, Libor Šmejkal of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany and colleagues named it altermagnetism [5]. Despite its youth, altermagnetism is already proving a fertile field for theory and for proposed applications.

The rate at which a raft made of ants is stretched determines its properties because the ants take time to fix holes.

Using a soap bubble, researchers have created a laser that could act as a sensitive sensor for environmental parameters including atmospheric pressure.

Soap bubbles are known for their attention-grabbing effect on toddlers, and now researchers have shown that these objects have another dazzling use—generating color-tunable laser light [1]. They demonstrated that a dye dissolved in the soap solution of such a bubble can amplify light circulating in the spherical shell and produce laser light. This light is visible as a glowing ring around the bubble. Such “bubble lasers” could act as precision sensors for measuring atmospheric pressure or for detecting changes in an electric field.

Continue reading “A Soap Bubble Becomes a Laser” »

Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions.

The name was suggested by the 5-year-old daughter of one of the researchers in the group and is due to the diffuse appearance of the object. Its surface brightness is to faint that it had passed unnoticed in the various previous surveys of this part of the sky due to the object’s diffuse appearance as if it were some kind of ghost. This is because its stars are so spread out in such a large volume that “Nube” (Spanish for “Cloud”) was almost undetectable.

This newly discovered galaxy has a set of specific properties which distinguish it from previously known objects. The research team estimate that Nube is a dwarf galaxy 10 times fainter than others of its type, but also 10 times more extended than other objects with a comparable number of stars.

A crippling fuel leak forced a U.S. company on Tuesday to give up on landing a spacecraft on the moon.

Astrobotic Technology’s lander began losing fuel soon after Monday’s launch. The spacecraft also encountered problems keeping its solar panel pointed towards the sun and generating solar power.

“Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,” Astrobotic said in a statement.

A new study in Physical Review Letters illuminates the intricacies of energy exchanges within bipartite quantum systems, offering profound insights into quantum coherence, pure dephasing effects, and the potential impact on future quantum technologies.

In quantum systems, the behavior of particles and energy transfer are governed by probability distributions and wave functions, adding layers of complexity to the understanding of energy exchanges.

The exploration of energy exchanges in quantum systems inherently involves tackling the complexities arising from quantum decoherence and the scales at which quantum systems operate, introducing sensitivity.

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience has found an association between a reduction in gray matter in the brain and early onset psychosis (EOP).

The study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, is the largest ever brain imaging study in EOP and has provided unprecedented levels of detail about the illness. It shows that in contrast to other mental health disorders, people with EOP have a reduced volume of gray matter across nearly all regions of their brain. Researchers hope that this detailed mapping could be used to assist in future diagnosis, as well as to track the effects of treatment in patients with EOP.

EOP occurs before the age of 18 during a critical period of development in the brain. Individuals diagnosed with the illness are likely to experience severe and long-lasting symptoms that respond less well to treatment. Despite this, research into EOP has been limited in sample size and statistical power.