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How Zelda and Studio Ghibli inspire happiness and purpose

A new study published in JMIR Serious Games reveals that playing the open-world video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and watching Studio Ghibli films can significantly improve young people’s overall happiness and sense of purpose in life.

Led by researchers from Imperial College London, Kyushu Sangyo University, and Georgia State University, the exploratory randomized controlled study, titled “Effects of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Studio Ghibli Films on Young People’s Sense of Exploration, Calm, Mastery and Skill, Purpose and Meaning, and Overall Happiness in Life: Exploratory Randomized Controlled Study,” involved 518 postgraduate students.

Participants were randomly assigned to either play Zelda or not and to either watch nostalgic Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service or not. Researchers then measured feelings of exploration, calm, skill mastery, purpose, and life happiness.

Sunlight-powered catalyst sets new standard for hydrogen peroxide production efficiency

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) packs so much chemical energy into a small space that it is powerful enough to fuel rockets. But this same ability to concentrate energy also makes hydrogen peroxide useful for more earthly energy applications, such as powering fuel cells. It also holds promise as a green and sustainable energy source: when hydrogen peroxide releases its stored energy, the main byproduct is simply water.

Apollo Moon sample opened after 50 years contains evidence of extraterrestrial landslide

More than 50 years after the last manned moon mission, the Apollo program is still making groundbreaking discoveries.

Lunar rock collected by Apollo 17 is revealing more about the Light Mantle, a distinctive bright streak across the moon’s surface. It’s believed to be the remains of an ancient landslide that happened in the distant past, but the exact cause is unknown.

Asteroid strikes, debris from a nearby mountain and seismic activity are all possibilities, but orbital photographs can only reveal so much. Scientists are now studying a rock core from Apollo 17 that was recently unsealed for the first time in 50 years, allowing new insights into the geology of the area.

Scientists discover new phenomenon in chiral symmetry breaking

Researchers at The University of Osaka have discovered a new type of chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) in an organic crystalline compound.

This phenomenon, involving a solid-state structural transition from an achiral to a chiral crystal, represents a significant advance in our understanding of chirality and offers a simplified model to study the origin of homochirality. This transformation also activates circularly polarized luminescence, enabling new optical materials with tunable light properties.

The work has been published in Chemical Science.

Theoretical study reveals failure of key quark-gluon plasma probe in low-energy region

According to theoretical predictions, within a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, nucleons had not yet formed, and matter existed as a hot, dense “soup” composed of freely moving quarks and gluons. This state of matter is known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Finding definitive evidence for the existence of QGP is crucial for understanding cosmic evolution.

Physicists create stable, ‘breathing’ solitons in settings without energy conservation

Solitonic waves—waves that keep their shape and direction of motion for a long time—have intrigued physicists for almost two centuries. In real-world circumstances, these waves eventually die out due to energy loss. A team of UvA physicists have now discovered how a particular type of interaction can be used to create very stable solitons, even in circumstances where energy is not conserved.

In 1834, John Scott Russell observed an unusual phenomenon in the Union Canal in Scotland. After a moving boat had come to a halt, the water wave that the boat had caused continued moving through the canal, keeping virtually the same speed and the same shape.

It took more than half a century, until the work of Dutch mathematicians Diederik Korteweg and Gustav de Vries in 1895, before the phenomenon that Russell observed had been explained in all its mathematical detail. What Russell had seen was a “solitary wave,” a phenomenon now better known as a soliton.

James Webb Spots Birthplace of Planets in Extreme Ultraviolet Conditions

Penn State astronomers are using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, combined with theoretical models, to investigate a distant, radiation-bathed protoplanetary disk. The basic ingredients needed to build planets can survive even in regions flooded with intense ultraviolet radiation, acc

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