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Hubble observations challenge supernova winds’ role in cosmic reionization

An international team of researchers, including members from the University of Michigan, has revealed surprising results that could rewrite our understanding of a key transition in the early universe.

Within the first billion years after the Big Bang, the universe filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen that was impenetrable to ultraviolet light. Today, however, that fog has cleared thanks to an epoch that began about 13 billion years ago known as reionization.

During reionization, energetic radiation from galaxies in the early universe collided with neutral hydrogen that made up the fog and broke it apart into charged, or ionized, protons and electrons.

X-ray free-electron laser sets new record for shortest high-energy pulses

Researchers at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have measured the shortest high-energy X-ray pulses ever recorded at an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL). The pulses had photon energies of about 9 kiloelectronvolts (keV) and clocked in at durations of 100 to 400 attoseconds—mere billionths of a billionth of a second. The results are published in Nature Photonics.

These high-energy, or “hard,” attosecond X-ray pulses are invaluable for researchers studying the universe at its smallest, fastest scales. “The pulses are both energetic enough to look deep into atomic systems and fast enough to record electronic motion frozen in time,” said Agostino Marinelli, a study author and professor of photon science, particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC.

The challenge, Marinelli explained, wasn’t creating these ultrashort pulses, but rather proving that it had been done. “Over the course of several years, we’ve learned how to create these high-energy attosecond pulses, but measuring pulses this short is really, really difficult. This was the first diagnostic that proves the pulses are indeed only a few hundred attoseconds long.”

Ultrafast light can control ferromagnetism without relying on heating

Despite being known for more mundane uses such as sticking notes to refrigerators or keeping bags shut, magnetization is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of a material. Indeed, it forms the physical basis for storing most of our digital information, encoding the bits used in hard drives, computer memories and credit cards.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, Illinois researchers have found a noninvasive way to control magnetization on the order of trillionths of a second in the ferromagnetic semiconductor chromium germanium telluride (Cr₂Ge₂Te₆, or CGT). Their technique uses ultrafast laser pulses to steer CGT’s magnetization around in time, taking advantage of an effect that couples its conduction electrons to its magnetic states.

James Webb Finds a Tiny World’s Rings Changing in Opposite Ways

James Webb has revealed unexpected changes in Chariklo’s two rings, which appear to be evolving in opposite ways over only a few years.

For much of modern astronomy, rings were believed to belong only to the giant planets of the Solar System, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. That assumption changed in 2013, when astronomers discovered two dense rings around Chariklo, a small body only about 250 kilometers across that travels between Saturn and Uranus at nearly 17 times the Earth-Sun distance.

On October 18, 2022, researchers led by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to examine Chariklo’s rings during a stellar occultation. This method tracks how a star’s light dims as an object passes in front of it. A new study published in Science Advances, also led by the IAA-CSIC, now shows for the first time that Chariklo’s rings can change measurably over the course of only a few years.

New Research Reveals a Hidden Weakness Inside Electric Vehicle Batteries

Researchers analyzing years of EV driving data discovered how differences between individual battery cells can intensify over time.

An electric vehicle (EV) battery can reach the end of its useful life even when many of its individual cells still have substantial capacity remaining. New research shows that a small number of rapidly aging cells can shorten the lifespan of an entire battery pack, leaving a significant share of its potential energy resources unused.

Published in Nature Energy, the study analyzed batteries operating in real vehicles over more than three years. Researchers found that differences between individual cells can reduce battery lifespan, restrict power output, and become more pronounced as vehicles accumulate mileage.

Scientists Say a Simple Blood Test Could Reveal Depression

Scientists have discovered that aging immune cells may hold a hidden blood-based clue to detecting depression.

Scientists have discovered that the biological aging of certain white blood cells may provide an important clue to depression, potentially opening the door to a blood test that could help identify the condition.

The study found that measuring how quickly these immune cells age can help predict emotional and cognitive symptoms of depression, including hopelessness and loss of pleasure. Interestingly, the same biological markers were not associated with physical symptoms such as fatigue or changes in appetite.

New QPACK Flaws Can Crash HTTP/3 Servers, Trigger Up to 4,000-Fold Memory Amplification

A remote attacker who has not logged in can crash many HTTP/3 web servers with a single connection, security firm FoxIO disclosed, releasing working proof-of-concept code.

By sending a small batch of compressed HTTP headers that expands in memory to a much larger set, the attacker can force the server to use thousands of times more memory than it received, enough to run a default server out of memory.

The flaws cause only denial-of-service attacks, with no evidence of data theft or code execution and no public reports of attacks in the wild. Fixes are out for quic-go, Cloudflare quiche, lsquic and Wireshark, but Bun, the h3 Rust library and aioquic were still unpatched at disclosure.