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Blog – Page 14

The detection of longitudinally polarized W boson production at the Large Hadron Collider is an important step towards understanding how the primordial electroweak symmetry broke, giving rise to the masses of elementary particles.

In 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN opened a new window on the innermost workings of the universe. It revealed the existence of a mysterious, ancient field with which elementary particles interact to acquire their all-important masses.

This process is governed by a delicate mechanism called electroweak symmetry breaking, which was first proposed in 1964 but remains among the least understood phenomena of the Standard Model of particle physics. To probe this critical mechanism in the evolution of the universe, physicists require a very large dataset of high-energy particle collisions.

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Using the radial velocity method, an international team of astronomers has discovered a new extrasolar planet orbiting a nearby star known as GI 410. The newfound alien world was classified as a sub-Neptune exoplanet with a mass of at least 8.4 Earth masses. The discovery was reported April 4 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The radial velocity (RV) method of detecting an exoplanet is based on the detection of variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull from an unseen exoplanet as it orbits the star. Thanks to this technique, more than 600 exoplanets have been detected so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Andres Carmona of the Grenoble Alpes University in France reports another detection using the RV technique. The discovery was made with the SPIRou near-infrared spectropolarimeter at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). The observations were complemented by data from the optical velocimeter SOPHIE at the Haute-Provence Observatory.

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A trio of animal physiologists at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, has found that at least one species of crow has the ability to recognize geometric regularity. In their study published in the journal Science Advances, Philipp Schmidbauer, Madita Hahn and Andreas Nieder conducted several experiments that involved testing crows on their ability to recognize geometric shapes.

Recognizing regularity in geometric shapes means being able to pick out one that is different from others in a group—picking out a plastic star, for example, when it is placed among several plastic moons. Testing for the ability to recognize geometric regularity has been done with many animals, including chimps and bonobos. Until now, this ability has never been observed in any creature except for humans.

Because of that, the team started with a bit of skepticism when they began testing carrion crows. In their work, the testing was done using computer screens—the birds were asked to peck the outlier in a group; if they chose correctly, they got a food treat. The team chose to test carrion crows because prior experiments have shown them to have exceptional intelligence and mathematical capabilities.

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Babies and young children may breathe and absorb plasticizers called phthalates, flame retardants, and other harmful chemicals from their mattresses while they sleep, according to a pair of studies published by the University of Toronto in Environmental Science & Technology and Environmental Science & Technology Letters. These chemicals are linked to neurological and reproductive problems, asthma, hormone disruption, and cancer.

“Sleep is vital for brain development, particularly for infants and toddlers. However, our research suggests that many mattresses contain chemicals that can harm kids’ brains,” says senior author Miriam Diamond, professor at the University of Toronto.

“This is a wake-up call for manufacturers and policymakers to ensure our children’s beds are safe and support healthy .”

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Researchers have discovered a type of “molecular glue” that can be used to inhibit certain pathological protein interactions. Their findings were published in the paper, “Molecular glues that inhibit deubiquitylase activity and inflammatory signaling,” in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The Wistar Institute’s Joseph Salvino, Ph.D.—in collaboration with Elton Zeqiraj, Ph.D., of The University of Leeds and Roger Greenberg, M.D., Ph.D., of The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania—led the study.

“Molecular glues are an exciting new area of research that allows us to fight disease by working with the body’s systems rather than against them,” said Dr. Salvino. “By gluing together an inactive form of the BRISC complex with our system, we’re able to reduce the continuous inflammatory signaling due to dysregulated BRISC complex activity in .”

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Imagine waking up thirsty at night and having to reach for a glass of water in the dark. Without a clear view, your brain has to estimate where the glass is and where your hand is—a challenge that often leads to imprecise movements. The brain processes two key pieces of information: It needs to know where the hand is and where to move it. But what happens if this information is inaccurate?

Scientists from the Sensorimotor Research Group at the DPZ have investigated this problem of visual uncertainty during movement control in a study with . The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

In the experiment, the monkeys moved a cursor on a screen by hand, using a kind of joystick. Two types of uncertainty were investigated. In target uncertainty, the target of the movement was represented by several scattered objects, so that it remained unclear where exactly the target was located. In the case of uncertainty, the cursor was replaced by several scattered, small objects so that it remained unclear exactly where the user’s own hand was located.

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Industrial farming practices often deplete the soil of important nutrients and minerals, leaving farmers to rely on artificial fertilizers to support plant growth. In fact, fertilizer use has more than quadrupled since the 1960s, but this comes with serious consequences. Fertilizer production consumes massive amounts of energy, and its use pollutes the water, air, and land.

Plant biologists at the Salk Institute are proposing a new solution to help kick this unsustainable fertilizer habit.

In a new study, the researchers identified a key molecule produced by plant roots, a small peptide called CLE16, that encourages plants and beneficial soil fungi to interact with each other. They say boosting this symbiotic relationship, in which the fungi provide mineral nutrients to the plants through CLE16 supplementation, could be a more natural and sustainable way to encourage crop growth without the use of harmful artificial fertilizers.

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Imagine if phones never got hot no matter how many apps were running. Picture a future where supercomputers use less energy, electric cars charge faster, and life-saving medical devices stay cooler and last longer.

In a study published in Nature Materials, a team of engineers at the University of Virginia and their collaborators revealed a radical new way to move heat, faster than ever before. Using a special kind of crystal called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), they found a way to move heat like a beam of light, sidestepping the usual bottlenecks that make electronics overheat.

“We’re rethinking how we handle heat,” said Patrick Hopkins, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Whitney Stone Professor of Engineering at UVA. “Instead of letting it slowly trickle away, we’re directing it.”

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Neutrinos are among the most enigmatic particles in the universe. They are omnipresent yet interact extremely rarely with matter.

In cosmology, they influence the formation of large-scale galaxy structures, while in , their minuscule mass serves as an indicator of previously unknown physical processes. Precisely measuring the neutrino mass is therefore essential for a complete understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.

This is precisely where the KATRIN experiment with its international partners comes into play. KATRIN utilizes the beta decay of tritium, an unstable hydrogen isotope, to assess the mass of neutrinos. The energy distribution of the electrons resulting from the decay enables a direct kinematic determination of the neutrino mass.

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Although air pollution is associated with worse cognitive performance, whether these relationships differ by cognitive domain and which sources of air pollution are particularly detrimental to cognition remains understudied. This study examined associations between cognitive scores across three domains in older adults and 8–10 years of exposure to air pollutants (NO2, total PM2.5, and PM2.5 from different emission sources).

Methods.

We used data from the 2018 Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol sub-study of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (N=1,127). Outdoor concentrations of each pollutant were estimated for 2008÷10−2017 and summarised using means and group-based trajectories. Linear regression models were used to assess long-term air pollution exposure relationships with memory, executive function, language, and global cognitive function after adjustment for key individual and neighbourhood-level confounders.

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