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Department of Energy user facility helps probe questions from changes in the structure of nuclei to nuclear reactions that shape the Universe.

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) enables discoveries in the science of atomic nuclei, their role in the cosmos, and the fundamental symmetries of nature. This accelerator facility uses beams of short-lived nuclei not available elsewhere. Results from FRIB address questions such as the limits of the nuclear chart, the origin of the elements, and the reason for why there is more matter than antimatter in our Universe.

In FRIB’s first year, its measurements tackled the changes in the structure of the shortest-lived nuclei, exotic decay modes, nuclear reactions that affect cosmic events such as X-ray bursts, and processes in the crusts of neutron stars.

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Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney have opened Pandora’s box, opening them up to considerable legal trouble by training their chatbots on the vastness of the internet while largely turning a blind eye to copyright.

As professor and author Gary Marcus and film industry concept artist Reid Southen, who has worked on several major films for the likes of Marvel and Warner Brothers, argue in a recent piece for IEEE Spectrum, tools like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney could land both companies in a “copyright minefield.”

It’s a heated debate that’s reaching fever pitch. The news comes after the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging it was responsible for “billions of dollars” in damages by training ChatGPT and other large language models on its content without express permission. Well-known authors including “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin and John Grisham recently made similar arguments in a separate copyright infringement case.

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Stanford Medicine scientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily enhance hypnotizability in patients with chronic pain, making them better candidates for hypnotherapy.

How deeply someone can be hypnotized — known as hypnotizability — appears to be a stable trait that changes little throughout adulthood, much like personality and IQ. But now, for the first time, Stanford Medicine researchers have demonstrated a way to temporarily heighten hypnotizablity — potentially allowing more people to access the benefits of hypnosis-based therapy.

In the new study, published on January 4 in Nature Mental Health, the researchers found that less than two minutes of electrical stimulation targeting a precise area of the brain could boost participants’ hypnotizability for about one hour.

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Scientists uncover new insights on polaritons, showing potential for breakthroughs in light manipulation and nanotechnology applications.

An international team of scientists provides an overview of the latest research on light-matter interactions. A team of scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute, the City University of New York, and the Universidad de Oviedo has published a comprehensive review article in the scientific journal Nature Reviews Materials. In this article, they provide an overview of the latest research on polaritons, tiny particles that arise when light and material interact in a special way.

Understanding Polaritons

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Thousands of satellites have been launched into Earth orbit over the past decade or so, with tens of thousands more planned in coming years. Many of these will be in “mega-constellations” such as Starlink, which aim to cover the entire globe.

These bright, shiny satellites are putting at risk our connection to the cosmos, which has been important to humans for countless millennia and has already been greatly diminished by the growth of cities and artificial lighting. They are also posing a problem for astronomers – and hence for our understanding of the universe.

In new research accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, we discovered Starlink satellites are also “leaking” radio signals that interfere with radio astronomy. Even in a “radio quiet zone” in outback Western Australia, we found the satellite emissions were far brighter than any natural source in the sky.

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Researchers who have been working for years to understand electron arrangement, or topology, and magnetism in certain semimetals have been frustrated by the fact that the materials only display magnetic properties if they are cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

A new MIT study led by Mingda Li, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, and co-authored by Nathan Drucker, a graduate research assistant in MIT’s Quantum Measurement Group and PhD student in applied physics at Harvard University, along with Thanh Nguyen and Phum Siriviboon, MIT graduate students working in the Quantum Measurement Group, is challenging that conventional wisdom.

The open-access research, published in Nature Communications, for the first time shows evidence that topology can stabilize magnetic ordering, even well above the magnetic transition temperature — the point at which magnetism normally breaks down.

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