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Classical physics can explain quantum weirdness, study shows

When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.

Or so we’ve thought.

MIT scientists have now shown that certain mathematical ideas from everyday classical physics can be used to describe the often weird and nonintuitive behavior that occurs at the quantum, subatomic scale.

It wasn’t just water: The hidden force inside Japan’s 2011 tsunami changed everything

Mud-rich coastlines could face a greater tsunami risk, at least that may have been the case for the 2011 Tōhoku-oki tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. According to a new study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, mud may have made the catastrophic ocean waves more destructive than they might otherwise have been.

On 11 March 2011, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island, triggered a massive tsunami. A wall of water swept away boats, cars, and buildings as it surged inland.

Patrick Sharrocks from the University of Leeds and colleagues studied helicopter news footage of the event, noting how the wave passed specific landmarks, such as greenhouses, houses, and road signs, to calculate its speed. They also compared before and after images from Google Earth to measure distances between landmarks and calculate how steep the front of the wave was.

When humidity changes, so do the colors of sweat bees

Nature is a riot of color. In the animal kingdom, many species, from insects to cephalopods, use their permanent color or change it for communication, camouflage, and thermoregulation. While this type of reversible shift has been extensively studied, less is known about how the environment may passively affect coloration. In a paper published in the journal Biology Letters, scientists report that sweat bees change color as ambient humidity fluctuates.

Sweat bees are small to medium-sized bees that are known for their attraction to human perspiration. The study was prompted by a student researcher, Jorge De La Cruz, who noticed something strange while working at the UC Santa Barbara museum. When he placed the bees in a high-humidity chamber (a common technique to make dried specimens flexible for handling), he noticed they changed color. His colleagues decided to investigate further.

The researchers exposed two dozen preserved female specimens of fine-striped sweat bees (Agapostemon subtilior) to high and low humid conditions while cameras tracked color changes over 55 hours. They also looked at more than 1,000 photos of these bees that regular people had uploaded to the iNaturalist app, matching each bee’s color with the estimated humidity at the time and location the photo was taken.

Particle thought to break physics followed rules all along, research reveals

A tiny discrepancy in particle physics has loomed for decades as an exciting possible crack in one of science’s most successful theories, hinting at unknown forces or quantum objects. Now, an international team led by a Penn State physicist has published the most precise study yet to reveal the discrepancy was a fluke in calculation, not nature.

More than half a century of measurements of a fundamental property of the muon—the more massive, short-lived cousin of the electron—did not line up with theoretical predictions, raising hopes that new physics might be behind the unexplained inconsistency.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, a team led by a Penn State researcher describes one of the most precise calculations ever performed in particle physics, showing that the Standard Model—the theory describing the known building blocks of matter—still holds.

A new route for plasma-based particle accelerators

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, consists of a gas in which electrons are no longer bound to atoms, which allows electricity to flow freely. When beams of particles moving close to the speed of light travel through plasma, they disturb electrons and drive so-called plasma waves.

Researchers at the ELI Beamlines Facility and Czech Technical University in Prague recently explored the possibility of leveraging plasma waves driven by fast-moving beams of charged particles, such as protons or electrons, to create a relativistic mirror, a concept rooted in Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Their theoretical analyses and the results of simulations testing their predictions were published in Physical Review E and Physical Review Research.

Cold fronts in nearby galaxy group may redistribute metals, Chandra and GMRT data reveal

Astronomers from South Africa and India have analyzed archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) regarding a nearby small galaxy group known as IC 1262. Results of the new study, presented April 14 on the preprint server arXiv, provide more insights into metal enrichment of IC 1,262, which could help us better understand the nature of this group.

IC 1,262 is a rich galaxy group located at a redshift of 0.032, named after its brightest cluster galaxy (BCG). It exhibits complex substructures in its hot gas that include ripples, prominent sharp discontinuities (cold fronts) extending in both the east and west directions, a large-scale radio jet, recurrent active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity, and X-ray cavities filled with radio emission.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Satish Shripati Sonkamble of the North-West University in South Africa has explored the IC 1,262 group in detail, focusing on metal transport via radio jet, sloshing cold fronts, and shock front. In general, it is assumed that cold fronts, gas sloshing, and AGN activity are responsible for metal enrichment in the intracluster medium (ICM) and intragroup medium (IGrM).

Excuse me, is that solar panel pointing in the right direction?

On a bright morning, graduate student Jeremy Klotz and professor Shree Nayar walked through upper Manhattan with a tall tripod and a camera that takes 360-degree images. Their route took them to bike docking stations, which use solar energy to power their kiosks, docking mechanisms, wireless communication, and even E-bike recharging in recent installations. At each docking station, the researchers raised the camera above the panel, snapped a spherical picture, and sent it to Klotz’s laptop.

Seconds later, the team’s computer vision program told them something remarkable: how much energy that panel would generate in a year—and how much it could generate if it were pointed at the optimal angle.

As it turns out, the solar panels powering the bike docking stations—and likely many solar panels across New York City and other urban destinations—may be leaving significant energy untapped simply because they are not at their best orientation.

Laser-plasma ‘mirror’ unlocks a new path to extreme light intensities

An international team of physicists has achieved a significant advance in laser science, demonstrating for the first time a practical route to dramatically boosting the intensity of high-power laser light.

The results, published in Nature, could unlock the route towards creating the most intense light ever produced in a laboratory, opening the door to experiments that probe the fundamental laws of physics by directly interacting light with the quantum vacuum.

The work was led by Professor Peter Norreys and Dr. Robin Timmis at the University of Oxford, working in close collaboration with Professor Brendan Dromey and Dr. Mark Yeung at Queen’s University Belfast, and scientists from the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Central Laser Facility (CLF).

Quantum simulations that bypass resolution limits offer insights into high-temperature superconductivity

A new method developed at LMU overcomes fundamental resolution limits and may provide insights into high-temperature superconductivity. Physicist Dr. Sebastian Paeckel has developed a method that can be used to calculate spectral functions of complex quantum systems much more precisely than was possible previously. His approach reconstructs precise energy spectra without requiring lengthy calculations.

This reveals previously hidden details, as Paeckel reports in the journal Physical Review Letters. He conducts research at the Faculty of Physics at LMU and at the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST).

Do decoherence, gravity, dark matter and dark energy all originate from quantum corrections?

Only about 5% of the universe is composed of normal matter that we can directly observe, while the remaining 95% is widely believed to consist of dark matter and dark energy. Paradoxically, however, the nature of these dark components remains unknown. Is this due to limitations in our observational capabilities, or does it reflect a more fundamental incompleteness in the classical laws of physics that have long underpinned our understanding of the universe?

In a recent study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D, I proposed that dark matter and dark energy may not correspond to physically existing substances, but could instead emerge as effective phenomena arising from the quantum nature of gravity.

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