Lifeboat Foundation

Say cheese! Researchers have developed a tiny camera that takes amazingly clear photos. Just don’t sneeze while it’s in your hand. At the size of a coarse grain of salt, you may never find it again.

Smaller cameras could mean lighter smartphones and new James Bond–style gadgets. But that’s not all. Cameras on this scale could swim through the body, hitch a ride on an insect, scope out your brain or monitor hostile environments. And those are just a few of the possibilities.

How do you pack that much picture-taking power into something the size of a crumb? It takes a “radically different approach” to making a camera lens, says Felix Heide. He’s a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. His lab developed the camera with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle. The team shared its work in Nature Communications in November.

In 1,832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a phenomenon that’s been known since at least the days of Aristotle—and immortalized in E.B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web—but scientists have only recently made progress in gaining a better understanding of its underlying physics.

Now, physicists have developed a new mathematical model incorporating all the various forces at play as well as the effects of multiple threads, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review E. Authors M. Khalid Jawed (UCLA) and Charbel Habchi (Notre Dame University-Louaize) based their new model on a computer graphics algorithm used to model fur and hair in such blockbuster films as The Hobbit and Planet of the Apes. The work could one day contribute to the design of new types of ballooning sensors for explorations of the atmosphere.

There are competing hypotheses for how ballooning spiders are able to float off into the air. For instance, one proposal posits that, as the air warms with the rising sun, the silk threads the spiders emit to spin their “parachutes” catch the rising convection currents (the updraft) that are caused by thermal gradients. A second hypothesis holds that the threads have a static electric charge that interacts with the weak vertical electric field in the atmosphere.

Cognitive dissonance in the government’s decision to approve Bay-du-Nord while professing to fight fossil fuel emissions responsible for climate change.

The decision to approve Bay-du-Nord is based on the low emissions intensity of the oil that will be produced with no accounting for end-use.

See more.

The global surface average for carbon dioxide during 2021 rose more than 2 parts per million for the 10th consecutive year, NOAA said.

Researchers are creating Explainable AI and such other AI applications that can explain themselves for the generated decisions. Well, artificial intelligence can now support human intelligence.

At roughly 70 years human age, the mice looked elderly and unremarkable. Yet hidden underneath was a youthful cellular clock, turned back in time based on a Nobel-Prize-winning strategy. It’s also the latest bet for finding the fountain of youth, backed by heavy-hitter anti-aging startups in Silicon Valley.

At the center is partial cellular reprogramming. The technique, a sort of gene therapy, forces cells to make four proteins, collectively dubbed the Yamanaka factors. Like erasers, the factors wipe a cell’s genetic history clean, reverting adult cells—for example, skin cells—to a stem cell-like identity, giving them back the superpower to turn into almost any type of cell.

The process isn’t all-or-nothing. In a twist, scientists recently found that they can use the factors to rewind a cell’s genetic history tape rather than destroying it altogether. And if they stop at the right point, the cell dramatically loses its age, becoming more youthful but retaining its identity. The results spurred a wave of interest in moving the therapy to humans, with Calico Life Sciences—a sister company to Google—and Altos Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos, in the race.

Walmart has teamed up with Zipline to launch a trial for an on-demand drone delivery service.

Early next year, Walmart will service customers within a 50-mile radius of their headquarters in Arkansas, promising to deliver health and wellness products within an hour of purchase. They hope to expand to include general merchandise in the future. If the trial is successful, it could be the start of a nationwide drone delivery service.

“Trial deliveries will take place near Walmart’s headquarters here in Northwest Arkansas using Zipline’s proprietary technology which is, simply put, really cool,” Tom Ward, a Senior VP at Walmart, wrote in a blog post. The stork-like delivery service would drop a package at your doorstep with a mini-parachute attached.

An international team, co-led by researchers at The University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute (NGI) in the UK and the Penn State College of Engineering in the US, has developed a tunable graphene-based platform that allows for fine control over the interaction between light and matter in the terahertz (THz) spectrum to reveal rare phenomena known as exceptional points. The team published their results today in Science.

The work could advance optoelectronic technologies to better generate, control and sense light and potentially communications, according to the researchers. They demonstrated a way to control THz waves, which exist at frequencies between those of microwaves and infrared waves. The feat could contribute to the development of ‘beyond-5G’ wireless technology for high-speed communication networks.

In particle physics, data long outlives the detectors that generate it. A decade ago the 4,100-metric-ton Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) reached the end of its life and was shut down, stripped of its parts for use in other experiments. Now a fresh analysis of old CDF data has unearthed a stunning discrepancy in the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, that could point the way to new, as yet undiscovered particles and interactions.

The W boson is massive, some 80 times heavier than a proton. Crucially, the W boson is responsible for certain forms of radioactive decay, allowing neutrons to convert into protons. Because its mass is constrained by (and itself constrains) many other particles and parameters within the Standard Model—particle physicists’ theory of fundamental particles and how they behave—the W boson has become a target for researchers seeking to understand where and how their best theories fail.

Although physicists have long known the W boson’s approximate mass, they still do not know it exactly. Plugging data into the Standard Model framework, however, predicts that the so-called W mass should be 80,357 mega-electron-volts (MeV), plus or minus 6 MeV. (One MeV is about twice the mass-energy contained within a single electron.) But in a new analysis published on Thursday in Science, physicists on the CDF collaboration have instead found the W boson mass to be 80,433.5 ± 9.4 MeV. The new measurement, which is more precise than all previous measurements combined, is nearly 77 MeV higher than the Standard Model’s prediction. Although these numbers differ by only about one part in 1,000, the uncertainties for each are so minuscule that even this small divergence is of enormous statistical significance—it is exceedingly unlikely to be an illusion produced through sheer chance. The well-studied W boson, it seems, still holds plenty of secrets about the workings of the subatomic world—or at least about how we investigate it. Taken by surprise, particle physicists are only beginning to grapple with the implications.