Lifeboat Foundation

An easy-to-use technique could assist everyone from economists to sports analysts.

Pollsters trying to predict presidential election results and physicists searching for distant exoplanets have at least one thing in common: They often use a tried-and-true scientific technique called Bayesian inference.

Bayesian inference allows these scientists to effectively estimate some unknown parameter — like the winner of an election — from data such as poll results. But Bayesian inference can be slow, sometimes consuming weeks or even months of computation time or requiring a researcher to spend hours deriving tedious equations by hand.

Amplified Industries’ sensors and analytics give oil well operators real-time alerts when things go wrong, allowing them to respond to issues before they become disasters. Credit: MIT News, iStock.

Amplified Industries, founded by Sebastien Mannai, helps oil field operators eliminate spills and stop methane leaks.

There is a staggeringly long list of things that can go wrong during the complex operation of an oil field.

Study shows neutrons can bind to nanoscale atomic clusters known as quantum dots. The finding may provide insights into material properties and quantum effects.

Neutrons are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, unlike protons and electrons. That means that while the electromagnetic force is responsible for most of the interactions between radiation and materials, neutrons are essentially immune to that force.

Neutron interaction through the strong force.

Rice University physicists have discovered a phase-changing quantum material — and a method for finding more like it — that could potentially be used to create flash-like memory capable of storing quantum bits of information, or qubits, even when a quantum computer is powered down.

Phase-Changing Materials and Digital Memory

Phase-changing materials have been used in commercially available non-volatile digital memory. In rewritable DVDs, for example, a laser is used to heat minute bits of material that cools to form either crystals or amorphous clumps. Two phases of the material, which have very different optical properties, are used to store the ones and zeros of digital bits of information.

„Wir wollen die fundamentalen Rätsel der Physik lösen

Im Interview berichtet Joachim Mnich von den physikalischen Durchbrüchen mit und deren Zukunft.

Dr. Jackie Faherty: “Methane emission was not on my radar when we started this project but now that we know it can be there and the explanation for it so enticing I am constantly on the look-out for it. That’s part of how science moves forward.”

Brown dwarfs are too large to be considered planets and too small to produce nuclear fusion like stars. But can they still exhibit some of the same characteristics as planets, like aurorae? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated how the brown dwarf W1935, which is located approximately 47 light-years from Earth, could not only possess methane but also have aurorae, all of which are observed on Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of brown dwarfs, as brown dwarfs remain some of the most mysterious objects in the cosmos despite thousands being identified.

For the study, the researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its powerful infrared instruments to observe 12 brown dwarfs, including W1935. In the end, JWST observed strong evidence for the existence of methane with W1935, which the researchers compared to atmospheric models to confirm these findings, along with methane existing on Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth.

Continue reading “JWST Observes Rare Methane Glow on Brown Dwarf W1935” »

Researchers at the University of Twente have shown how to improve the efficiency of hydrogen production in an experimental setup. They showed that the magnetic order of the molecules plays a critical role.

SpaceX is making significant progress in the construction and testing of their test stand systems and booster recovery operations, showcasing their operational prowess and efficiency. Questions to inspire discussion What progress has SpaceX made in test stand systems? —SpaceX has made significant progress in the construction and testing of their test stand systems, demonstrating their operational prowess and efficiency.

SpaceX The Space Race