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Our telescopes find new exoplanets and reveal deeper details about them everyday, unveiling massive hydrogen-rich atmosphere planets and icy worlds which may be able to harbor life even far from any star.

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Continue reading “Hycean Planets & Ice Worlds” »

While time may be a worldwide constant, it can be quite tricky. Several individuals have felt like childhood summers were extremely long in comparison to how they experience the same 3 months as adults. Though individuals can argue about time perception and the factors that dilate and compress time, it is possible to look into it experimentally.

Time Perception Is Different For Adults and Children

Continue reading “Adults, Children Do Not Experience Time in the Same Way; Here’s Why” »

This vibrant new image of the Sun is a treasure trove of science.

NASA and JAXA caught high-energy activity on the Sun. The result is a colorful new image.

Google announced in last week’s earnings call that it would pay millions of dollars to consolidate office leases across the globe.

“In the first quarter of 2023, we expect to incur approximately $500 million of costs related to exiting leases to align our office space with our adjusted global headcount look,” Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said. “We will continue to optimize our real estate footprint.”

Many of the lease terminations will be in the Bay Area. “We’re ending leases for a number of unoccupied spaces, and will work to consolidate under-utilized spaces in the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont wrote SFGATE in an email. “Our campuses remain a cornerstone of our culture, but we’re working to ensure we invest in real estate efficiently and that our investments match the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce.”

The five-year contract is worth up to $192 million and will provide high-resolution electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery.

The company’s prototype is a smaller version of the nuclear reactor it’s hoping to send to the Moon by 2029.

Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.

And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.

Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.

Optical pulses, which appear as a flash of light, are used to transmit information in high speed optical fibers, and are increasingly used in Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for 3-dimensional imaging. Both of these applications demand light sensors or photodiodes that are capable of detecting very low levels of light intensity down to a few photons, where a single photon is the quantized energy unit of light.

A newly published paper, “Extremely low excess noise avalanche photodiode with GaAsSb absorption region and AlGaAsSb avalanche region,” in Applied Physics Letters, details a discovery by a Sheffield research team that has the capability to transform a single electron at its input to a cascade of electrons at its output.

This multiplication process is commonly known as avalanche breakdown, while a photodiode incorporating this process is called avalanche photodiode (APD). Though the application of reverse voltage, avalanche photodiodes (often referred to as APDs) have internal gain, which means that when compared to PIN-photodiodes they typically have a higher signal-to–noise ratio.

From A to B, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.