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Incubating The UAE National Space Program — H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri — Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center

H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri, is Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), in Dubai, UAE, which is an advanced scientific and technological hub, responsible for making the UAE a world leader in space services and exploration.

Established in 2006, MBRSC started out with five engineers but since then, the center has significantly expanded on a journey to be the incubator of the UAE National Space Program, building, developing, and operating a number of Earth observation satellites, providing imaging services and analysis, as well as producing relevant data to scientific communities and research centers around the world. Among the satellites that the center operates are DubaiSat-1 & DubaiSat-2. The MBRSC is also responsible for KhalifaSat, celebrated as the first satellite that was fully built by Emiratis in 2018. Recently, the center revealed its plan to develop the new satellite MBZ-SAT, which is expected to be launched at the end of 2023 and to be the latest in the field of high-resolution imaging from outer space.

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The ATLAS collaboration, the large research consortium involved in analyzing data collected by the ATLAS particle collider at CERN, recently observed the electroweak production of two Z bosons and two jets. This crucial observation, presented in Nature Physics, could greatly contribute to the understanding of standard model ℠ particle physics.

The SM of is a well-established theory describing the building blocks and fundamental forces in the universe. This model describes weak bosons (i.e., bosons responsible for the so-called ‘weak force’) as mediators of the electroweak interaction.

The scattering of massive weak bosons, such as W and Z bosons, is constrained specifically to interactions, where the mediators directly interact and scatter off each other. This scattering, also known as vector-boson scattering (VBS), also involves a type of Feynman diagrams or vertices known (i.e., quartic gauge vertices) that physicists have so far been unable to experimentally probe through other .

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Before undergoing surgeries and other invasive medical procedures, patients typically undergo anesthesia. Anesthesia consists in giving patients a class of drugs (i.e., anesthetics) that cause them to lose feeling in specific areas of the body (i.e., local anesthesia) or fully lose awareness during a procedure (i.e., general anesthesia). These anesthetics can be administered to patients via injection, inhalation, skin-numbing lotions, and other means.

In the past, doctors and viewed as a passive process that could not be influenced or interrupted once drugs were administered. More recently, however, studies showed that it is in fact an active process that can be experimentally controlled and acted on.

A research team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning while under general and those associated with the subsequent re-emergence of awareness. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlight possible strategies that could help anesthesiologists to extend and deepen or shorten periods of anesthesia.

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Online romance fraud is an increasingly common phenomenon, which can affect people of all ages worldwide. This type of fraud occurs when a malicious individual or members of a criminal organization engage with users online pretending to be romantically interested in them, while trying to trick them into sending money or sharing confidential information with them.

Online scams can have a detrimental effect on a victim’s life, causing them to spend all their savings, become indebted, and even be subjected to blackmail or identity theft. A team of researchers at Abertay University in the U.K. recently reviewed existing literature focusing on romance and then summarized some of the most recurring findings in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

“Romance fraud has been growing over the last decade or so and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which saw a surge in cybercrime and cyberattacks,” Dr. Lynsay Shepherd, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Our paper provides a comprehensive overview of romance fraud research, which could serve as a starting point for future research in the field.”

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Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have analyzed RNA editing in postmortem brains of four schizophrenia cohorts and uncovered a significant and reproducible trend of hypo-editing in patients of European descent.

The paper “Widespread RNA hypo-editing in schizophrenia and its relevance to ,” published in Science Advances, details the research team’s efforts to isolate functionally impacting RNA editing sites to understand how dysregulated editing contributes to various disorders.

In the data analysis, researchers identified 26,841 unique differential editing sites. They observed a significant trend of lower than expected amounts of RNA editing in the schizophrenia groups, which was reproduced in three of the four cohorts of European individuals.

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Quantum information is a powerful technology for increasing the amount of information that can be processed and communicated securely. Using quantum entanglement to securely distribute a secret quantum state among multiple parties is known as “quantum state sharing.”

An important in and cryptography, sharing works like this (in simple terms): a secret quantum state is divided into n shares and given to n players. The secret state can only be reconstructed if k (where kn/2) players cooperate, while the remaining n-k players cannot access the information. This protocol can also be used for , allowing the reconstruction of the secret state even if some of the information is lost.

In quantum information, there are two types of systems: discrete variable and continuous variable systems. Discrete variable systems are good because they don’t lose information easily, while continuous variable systems are good because the generation and processing of quantum states are deterministic rather than probabilistic, which enables a high degree of precision.

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Some mysteries in science vanish with more accurate measurements, resolving gaps with a puff of new data. And sometimes, a second look simply reinforces the fact you have a mystery on your hands.

It’s the latter in the case of a new study that challenges the Universe’s most fundamental laws of physics.

The Hubble constant is an expression of the speed of Universe’s expansion. Unfortunately, there’s more than one solution for it, depending on how it’s measured.

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Dr. H. Rusty Harris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has discovered a novel circuit element referred to as a meminductor.

A circuit element refers to an electrical component utilized to regulate and guide the flow of electricity within an electrical circuit. The traditional three circuit elements are the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Recently, within the past 15 years, two additional circuit elements, the memristor, and the memcapacitor, have been discovered. These newer circuit components are referred to as the “mem-” versions of their classical counterparts and exhibit unique current and voltage properties that depend on previous values of current or voltage in time, acting like a memory.

“Those two discoveries set the world a little bit on its head as far as electrical engineering,” Harris said. “All of a sudden, we thought we had three, but now we found these two others. And so that led us to think, ‘OK, there’s got to be more then, but how do we understand what they are? How do we map all of these things relative to each other?’ And it turns out, there is a relationship between each of the resistors and its family and each of the capacitors and its family.”

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