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Blog – Page 113

Experiments support a controversial proposal to generate electricity from our planet’s rotation by using a device that interacts with Earth’s magnetic field.

“It seems crazy,” says Chris Chyba of Princeton University, talking about the hollow magnetic cylinder he has built to generate electricity using Earth’s magnetic field. The cylinder doesn’t move—at least not in the lab—but it rotates with the planet and is thus dragged through Earth’s magnetic field. “It has a whiff of a perpetual motion machine,” Chyba says, but his calculations show that the harvested energy comes from the planet’s rotational energy. He and his colleagues now report that 18 microvolts (µV) are generated across the cylinder when it is held perpendicular to Earth’s field [1]. Next they have to convince other scientists that the effect is real.

Chyba became interested in electricity generation about a decade ago while studying a possible warming mechanism in moons moving through a planet’s magnetic field. He wondered if a similar effect might occur for objects on Earth’s surface.

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In human society, men tend to be seen as risk-takers, while women are seen as being more cautious. According to evolutionary psychologists, this difference developed in the wake of threats to each sex and their respective needs. While such generalizations are, of course, too binary and simplistic to faithfully describe complex and multifaceted human behavior, clearcut differences between females and males are often evident in other animals, even in simple organisms such as worms.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers showed that male worms are worse at learning from experience and find it hard to avoid taking risks—even at the cost of their own lives—and that allowing them to mate with members of the opposite sex improves these capabilities.

The scientists also discovered a protein, evolutionarily conserved in creatures from worms all the way to humans, that appears to be responsible for the different learning abilities of the two sexes.

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Interstellar objects are among the last unexplored classes of solar system objects, holding tantalizing information about primitive materials from exoplanetary star systems. They pass through our solar system only once in their lifetime at speeds of tens of kilometers per second, making them elusive.

Hiroyasu Tsukamoto, a faculty member in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has developed Neural-Rendezvous—a -driven guidance and control framework to autonomously encounter these extremely fast-moving objects.

The research is published in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics and on the arXiv preprint server.

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A study led by the University of Portsmouth has achieved unprecedented precision in detecting tiny shifts in light displacements at the nanoscale. This is relevant in the characterization of birefringent materials and in high-precision measurements of rotations.

The quantum sensing breakthrough is published in the journal Physical Review A, and has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of daily life, industry, and science.

Imagine two photons, massless particles of light, that are intertwined in a unique way, meaning their propagation is connected even when they are separated. When these photons pass through a device that splits the particles of light into two paths—known as a beam-splitter—they interfere with each other in special patterns. By analyzing these patterns, researchers have developed a highly precise method to detect even the tiniest initial spatial shifts between them.

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Sleep is known to contribute to the healthy functioning of the brain and the consolidation of memories. Past psychology research specifically highlighted its role in retaining episodic memories, which are memories of specific events or experiences.

Researchers at Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, University of Toronto and other institutes recently carried out a study to better understand the extent to which transforms how we remember real-world experiences over time and what processes could underpin this transformation. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that sleep actively and selectively improves the accuracy with which we remember one-time real-world experiences.

“My lab studies real-life memory such as the memory of events that occur as part of daily experiences,” Brian Levine, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “We are interested in how these memories are transformed over time and why some elements are remembered while others are forgotten. This is hard to do with naturalistic events in peoples’ lives where we have no control over what happened. So we set up the Baycrest Tour as a controlled but naturalistic event that we could use to memory.”

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Researchers will soon be able to study biological changes at scales and speeds not previously possible to significantly expand knowledge in areas such as disease progression and drug delivery.

Physicists at The University of Queensland have used “tweezers made from light” to measure activity within microscopic systems over timeframes as short as milliseconds. Professor Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop from UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics said the method could help biologists understand what was happening within single living cells.

“For example, they will be able to look at how a cell is dividing, how it responds to outside stimuli, or even how affect cell properties,” Professor Rubinsztein-Dunlop said.

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The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy: the fundamental ingredient that drives its accelerating expansion. New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration use the largest 3D map of our universe ever made to track dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years. Researchers see hints that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time in unexpected ways.

DESI is an international experiment with more than 900 researchers from more than 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The collaboration shared their findings today in multiple papers that will be posted on the online repository arXiv and in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.

“What we are seeing is deeply intriguing,” said Alexie Leauthaud-Harnett, co-spokesperson for DESI and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. “It is exciting to think that we may be on the cusp of a major discovery about dark energy and the fundamental nature of our .”

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Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and collaborators have discovered a new way to control superconductivity—an essential phenomenon for developing more energy-efficient technologies and quantum computing—by simply twisting atomically thin layers within a layered device.

By adjusting the twist angle, they were able to finely tune the “superconducting gap,” which plays a key role in the behavior of these materials. The research is published in Nature Physics.

The superconducting gap is the energy threshold required to break apart Cooper pairs—bound electron pairs that enable superconductivity at low temperatures. Having a larger gap allows superconductivity to persist at higher, more accessible temperatures, and tuning the gap is also important for optimizing Cooper pair behavior at the nanoscale, contributing to the high functionality of quantum devices.

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