“We could be wrong. But if we are right, it’s profoundly important.” Leading mineralogist Dr. Robert Hazen on the missing law of nature that could explain why life emerges.
After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.
Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.
In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe. These can erupt with a quintillion (10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our sun, and are thought to be caused by several types of event.
Physics meets machine learning.
The Progress and Promise for Science in Indonesia Regional Special Feature focuses on biodiversity and climate change, highlighting research based on the unique geology and biology of a nation comprising more than 17,600 islands, containing about 10 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests, and home to over 300,000 species of wildlife.
A JWST/MIRI spectrum of an early quasar in the mid-infrared indicates that J1120+0641 had a mature feeding structure 760 Myr after the Big Bang. This finding suggests that supermassive black holes and their torii build up surprisingly quickly.
Soft bioelectronic devices are made from polymer-based and hybrid electronic materials that form natural interfaces with the human body. In this Review, the authors present recent developments in soft bioelectronic sensors and actuators, and discuss system-level integration for wearable and implantable medical applications.
Brain-on-a-chip models, mimicking brain physiology, hold promise for developing treatments for neurological disorders. This Review discusses the engineering challenges and opportunities for these devices, including the integration of 3D cell cultures and electrodes and scaffold engineering strategies.
Heat facilitates electrical resistance switching in Mott insulators and can synergistically enhance neuromorphic computing.
Daiki Nishioka and colleagues show a nanodevice implementation of deep reservoir computing using an ion-gating reservoir, achieving record-low error rates on a complex computational task. This device is more efficient and scalable for brain-like computing systems exploiting physical systems.
A new theory of quantum gravity, which attempts to unite quantum physics with Einstein’s relativity, could help solve the puzzle of the universe’s expansion, a theoretical paper suggests.
Several thousand sensors distributed over a square kilometer near the South Pole are tasked with answering one of the large outstanding questions in physics: does quantum gravity exist?
The sensors monitor neutrinos —particles with no electrical charge and almost without mass—arriving at the Earth from outer space. A team from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) at the University of Copenhagen have contributed to developing the method which exploits neutrino data to reveal if quantum gravity exists.
“If as we believe, quantum gravity does indeed exist, this will contribute to unite the current two worlds in physics. Today, classical physics describes the phenomena in our normal surroundings such as gravity, while the atomic world can only be described using quantum mechanics. The unification of quantum theory and gravitation remains one of the most outstanding challenges in fundamental physics. It would be very satisfying if we could contribute to that end,” says Tom Stuttard, assistant professor at NBI.
