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New information about an emerging technique that could track microplastics from space has been uncovered by researchers at the University of Michigan. It turns out that satellites are best at spotting soapy or oily residue, and microplastics appear to tag along with that residue.

Microplastics—tiny flecks that can ride ocean currents hundreds or thousands of miles from their point of entry—can harm sea life and , and they’re extremely difficult to track and clean up. However, a 2021 discovery raised the hope that satellites could offer day-by-day timelines of where microplastics enter the water, how they move and where they tend to collect, for prevention and clean-up efforts.

The team noticed that data recorded by the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), showed less —that is, fewer and smaller waves—in areas of the ocean that contain microplastics, compared to clean areas.

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With a big assist from artificial intelligence and a heavy dose of human touch, Tim Cernak’s lab at the University of Michigan has made a discovery that dramatically speeds up the time-consuming chemical process of building molecules that will be tomorrow’s medicines, agrichemicals or materials.

The discovery, published in the Feb. 3 issue of Science, is the culmination of years of chemical synthesis and data science research by the Cernak Lab in the College of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry.

The goal of the research was to identify key reactions in the synthesis of a molecule, ultimately reducing the process to as few steps as possible. In the end, Cernak and his team achieved the synthesis of a complex alkaloid found in nature in just three steps. Previous syntheses had taken between seven and 26 steps.

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A small team of astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in China has found evidence that suggests if wormholes are real, they might magnify light by 100,000 times. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes the theories they have developed and possible uses for them.

Prior theoretical efforts have suggested that might exist in the , described as tunnels of a sort, connecting different parts of the universe. Some in the physics community have suggested that it may be possible to traverse such tunnels, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the universe. The researchers note that prior research has shown that black holes have such a strong gravitational pull that they are able to bend light, a phenomenon known as microlensing. They then wondered if wormholes, if they exist, also exhibit microlensing.

Proving that wormholes cause microlensing would, of course, involve first proving that wormholes exist. Still, the researchers suggest that and other theories could clarify whether the idea is even possible. In their work, they discovered that it was possible to calculate how an associated with a wormhole would warp the light passing by it. They also found theoretical evidence that wormhole would be similar to black hole lensing, which, they note, would make it difficult to tell the two apart.

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We’re used to thinking of space as continuous.

A stone can be anywhere in space. It can be here. Or it can be an inch to the left. Or it can be half an inch further to the left. Or it can be an infinitesimal fraction of an inch even further to the left. Space is infinitely divisible.

The graphs of Wolfram Physics, however, are discrete.

If, as Stephen Wolfram proposes, the universe is a graph, then you can’t be just anywhere in space. It makes sense to think about a node of the graph as a position in space. It makes no sense to think about anywhere in between the nodes as positions in space. This space is not infinitely divisible.

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