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White Rabbit (WR) is a technology developed at CERN, in collaboration with institutes and companies, to synchronise devices in the accelerators down to sub-nanoseconds and solve the challenge of establishing a common notion of time across a network. Indeed, at a scale of billionths of a second, the time light takes to travel through a fibre-optic cable and the time the electronics take to process the signal are no longer negligible. To avoid potential delays, the co-inventors of White Rabbit designed a new ethernet switch.

First used in 2012, the application of this fully open-source technology has quickly expanded outside the field of particle physics. In 2020, it was included in the worldwide industry standard known as Precision Time Protocol (PTP), governed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

What’s more, CERN recently launched the White Rabbit Collaboration, a membership-based global community whose objective is to maintain a high-performance open-source technology that meets the needs of users and to facilitate its uptake by industry. The WR Collaboration will provide dedicated support and training, facilitate R&D projects between entities with common interests and complementary expertise and establish a testing ecosystem fostering trust in products that incorporate the open-source technology. At CERN, the WR Collaboration Bureau – a dedicated team composed of senior White Rabbit engineers and a community coordinator – will facilitate the day-to-day running of the Collaboration’s activities and support its members.

The cerebral cortex forms early in development according to a series of heritable neurodevelopmental instructions. Despite deep evolutionary conservation of the cerebral cortex and its foundational six-layered architecture, significant variations in cortical size and folding can be found across mammals, including a disproportionate expansion of the prefrontal cortex in humans. Yet our mechanistic understanding of neurodevelopmental processes is derived overwhelmingly from rodent models, which fail to capture many human-enriched features of cortical development. With the advent of pluripotent stem cells and technologies for differentiating three-dimensional cultures of neural tissue in vitro, cerebral organoids have emerged as an experimental platform that recapitulates several hallmarks of human brain development.

Webb’s infrared views of Cepheids agreed with Hubble’s optical-light data.

Webb confirmed that the Hubble’s keen eye was right all along, erasing any lingering doubt about Hubble’s measurements.

The bottom line is that the Hubble Tension between what happens in the nearby Universe compared to the early Universe’s expansion remains a nagging puzzle for cosmologists.

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre made a startling discovery that forever changed our perception of the Universe. Upon observing galaxies beyond the Milky Way and measuring their spectra, they determined that the Universe was expanding. By the 1990s, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists took the deepest images of the Universe to date and made another startling discovery: the rate of expansion is speeding up! This parameter, denoted by Lambda, is integral to the accepted model of cosmology, known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model.

Since then, attempts to measure distances have produced a discrepancy known as the “Hubble Tension.” While it was hoped that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would resolve this “crisis in cosmology,” its observations have only deepened the mystery. This has led to several proposed resolutions, including the idea that there was an “Early Dark Energy” shortly after the Big Bang. In a recent paper, an international team of astrophysicists proposed a new solution based on an alternate theory of gravity that states that our galaxy is in the center of an “under-density.”

The study was led by Sergij Mazurenko, an undergraduate physics student at the University of Bonn. He was joined by Indranil Banik, a Research Fellow with the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance at the University of Saint Andrews; Pavel Kroupa, an astrophysicist professor with The Stellar Populations and Dynamics Research Group at the University of Bonn and the Astronomical Institute at Charles University, and Moritz Haslbauer, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR). The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Neuromorphic computing is an emerging solution for companies specializing in small, energy-efficient edge computing devices and robotics, striving to improve their products. There has been a paradigm shift in computing since the advent of neuromorphic chips. With the potential to unlock new levels of processing speed, energy efficiency, and adaptability, neuromorphic chips are here to stay. Industries from robotics to healthcare are exploring the potential of neuromorphic chips in various applications.

What is Neuromorphic Computing?

Neuromorphic computing is a field within computer science and engineering that draws inspiration from the structure and operation of the human brain. Its goal is to create computational systems, including custom hardware replicating the neural networks and synapses in biological brains. These custom computational systems are commonly known as neuromorphic chips or neuromorphic hardware.

Neutron star mergers are a treasure trove for new physics signals, with implications for determining the true nature of dark matter, according to research from Washington University in St. Louis.

On Aug. 17, 2017, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in the United States, and Virgo, a detector in Italy, detected gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars. For the first time, this astronomical event was not only heard in gravitational waves but also seen in light by dozens of telescopes on the ground and in space.

Physicist Bhupal Dev in Arts & Sciences used observations from this neutron star merger — an event identified in astronomical circles as GW170817 — to derive new constraints on axion-like particles. These hypothetical particles have not been directly observed, but they appear in many extensions of the standard model of physics.