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Peering Into the Heart of Clouds: NASA’s CloudSat Wraps a Revolutionary Journey

Over the course of nearly two decades, its powerful radar provided never-before-seen details of clouds and helped advance global weather and climate predictions.

CloudSat, a NASA mission that peered into hurricanes, tallied global snowfall rates, and achieved other weather and climate firsts, has ended its operations. Originally proposed as a 22-month mission, the spacecraft was recently decommissioned after almost 18 years observing the vertical structure and ice/water content of clouds.

As planned, the spacecraft — having reached the end of its lifespan and no longer able to make regular observations — was lowered into an orbit last month that will result in its eventual disintegration in the atmosphere.

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Beyond Graphene: A New World of 2D Materials Is Opening Up

Materials that are incredibly thin, only a few atoms thick, exhibit unique properties that make them appealing for energy storage, catalysis, and water purification. Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have now developed a method that enables the synthesis of hundreds of new 2D materials. Their study has been published in the journal Science.

Since the discovery of graphene, the field of research in extremely thin materials, so-called 2D materials, has increased exponentially. The reason is that 2D materials have a large surface area in relation to their volume or weight. This gives rise to a range of physical phenomena and distinctive properties, such as good conductivity, high strength or heat resistance, making 2D materials of interest both within fundamental research and applications.

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Turning Invisible Dark Matter Into Visible Light

Explorations in dark matter are advancing with new experimental techniques designed to detect axions, leveraging advanced technology and interdisciplinary collaboration to uncover the secrets of this elusive component of the cosmos.

A ghost is haunting our universe. This has been known in astronomy and cosmology for decades. Observations suggest that about 85% of all the matter in the universe is mysterious and invisible. These two qualities are reflected in its name: dark matter.

Several experiments have aimed to unveil what it’s made of, but despite decades of searching, scientists have come up short. Now our new experiment, under construction at Yale University in the US, is offering a new tactic.

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2D Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal: The Next Big Thing in Display Technology

Researchers discovered ferroelectricity in 2D vermiculite, boosting electric field responsivity in liquid crystals and paving the way for innovative large-scale displays.

Electro-optical liquid crystal (LC) device with wide applications is a cornerstone of the information society, which can continuously and dynamically modulate the light intensity, polarization, and phase retardation. An ancient theoretical insight proposes that a LC material with both an extremely large geometrical anisotropy and an inherent electric dipole is highly expected to improve the electric field responsivity of LCs.

However, neither commercial organic LC molecules nor R&D LC nanomaterials meet both aforementioned perquisites, while such LCs have not been reported so far. As for now, they are open questions for LC community about whether such an LC exists and the upper limit of its electric field responsivity.

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Einstein’s Legacy Proven Again With Monumental Black Hole Discovery

Researchers utilizing the European Gaia spacecraft have discovered a black hole in a binary system, located 1,500 light-years away and weighing 33 times the mass of the sun, making it the heaviest known in the Milky Way.

The black hole, discovered using data from the European Gaia spacecraft, is more than three times heavier than the known black holes in our galaxy.

An international team of researchers, with the participation of researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) led by Prof. Tsevi Mazeh, discovered a star that orbits a black hole 33 times heavier than the sun’s mass, and lies 1,500 light-years away from Earth. The black hole, discovered using data from the European Gaia spacecraft, is more than three times heavier than the other known black holes in our galaxy.

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Interstellar Peptides Point to Extraterrestrial Origin of Life’s Building Blocks

Peptides can form on cosmic dust despite water presence, challenging previous beliefs and suggesting a possible extraterrestrial origin for life’s building blocks.

Peptides are organic compounds that play a crucial role in many biological processes, for example, as enzymes. A research team led by Dr. Serge Krasnokutski from the Astrophysics Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at the University of Jena had already demonstrated that simple peptides can form on cosmic dust particles. However, it was previously assumed that this would not be possible if molecular ice, which covers the dust particle, contains water – which is usually the case.

Now, the team, in collaboration with the University of Poitiers, France, has discovered that the presence of water molecules is not a major obstacle for the formation of peptides on such dust particles. The researchers report on their findings in the journal Science Advances.

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AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs

Meta presents AdvPrompter Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs.

Meta presents AdvPrompter.

Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

While recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes, they are vulnerable to certain jailbreaking attacks that lead to generation of inappropriate or harmful…

Join the discussion on this paper page.

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