Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a new planetary system by observing a nearby star known as HD 18,599 (or TOI-179). It appears that this star is orbited by a Neptune-mass exoplanet and a massive sub-stellar object. The finding was detailed in a paper published October 14 on the arXiv pre-print server.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 6,000 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 266 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Silvano Desidera of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, has recently confirmed another TOI monitored by TESS. They report that a transit signal has been identified in the light curve of a bright K-dwarf star—TOI-179 (other designations HD 18,599 and HIP 13754). The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up observations using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instruments.

Scientists have shown that they can detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the air by using a nanotechnology-packed bubble that spills its chemical contents like a broken piñata when encountering the virus.

Such a detector could be positioned on a wall or ceiling, or in an air duct, where there’s constant air movement, to alert occupants immediately when even a trace level of the virus is present.

Continue reading “COVID-causing virus in air detected with high-tech bubbles” »

The ability to analyze the properties of individual cells is vital to broad areas of life science applications, from diagnosing diseases and developing better therapeutics to characterizing pathogenic bacteria and developing cells for bioproduction applications. However, the accurate analysis of individual cells is a challenge, especially when it comes to a cell’s biophysical properties, due to large property variations among cells even in the same cell population as well as the presence of rare cell types within a larger population.

Addressing this need, Dr. Arum Han, Texas Instruments Professor II in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, together with his graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, have developed a new technology that can accurately analyze cell properties through the use of a single-cell electrorotation microfluidic device, which utilizes an electric field to probe the cell’s properties.

The technology works by using an electric field to first capture a single cell in a microfluidic device, followed by applying a rotating electric field to rotate the trapped single cell and then measuring the speed of rotation. By knowing the input electric field parameters and analyzing the rotation speed, accurately analyzing the dielectric properties of a single cell becomes possible.

Light-pulse matter-wave interferometers exploit the quantized momentum kick given to atoms during absorption and emission of light to split atomic wave packets so that they traverse distinct spatial paths at the same time. Additional momentum kicks then return the atoms to the same point in space to interfere the two matter-wave wave packets. The key to the precision of these devices is the encoding of information in the phase ϕ that appears in the superposition of the two quantum trajectories within the interferometer. This phase must be estimated from quantum measurements to extract the desired information. For N atoms, the phase estimation is fundamentally limited by the independent quantum collapse of each atom to an r.m.s. angular uncertainty \(\Delta {\theta }_{{\rm{SQL}}}=1/\sqrt{N}\) rad, known as the standard quantum limit (SQL)².

Here we demonstrate a matter-wave interferometer^31,32 with a directly observed interferometric phase noise below the SQL, a result that combines two of the most striking features of quantum mechanics: the concept that a particle can appear to be in two places at once and entanglement between distinct particles. This work is also a harbinger of future quantum many-body simulations with cavities^26,27,28,29 that will explore beyond mean-field physics by directly modifying and probing quantum fluctuations or in which the quantum measurement process induces a phase transition³⁰.

Quantum entanglement between the atoms allows the atoms to conspire together to reduce their total quantum noise relative to their total signal^1,3. Such entanglement has been generated between atoms using direct collisional^{33,34,35,36,37,38,39} or Coulomb^40,41 interactions, including relative atom number squeezing between matter waves in spatially separated traps^33,35,39 and mapping of internal entanglement onto the relative atom number in different momentum states⁴². A trapped matter-wave interferometer with relative number squeezing was realized in ref. ³⁵, but the interferometer’s phase was antisqueezed and thus the phase resolution was above the SQL.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a unique property in complex nanostructures that had previously only been seen in simple nanostructures. They have also uncovered the internal mechanics of the materials that allow for this property to exist.

The findings were reported in a recent paper that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists found these properties in oxide-based “nanolattices,” which are tiny, hollow materials with a structure resembling that of sea sponges.

“This has been seen before in simple nanostructures, like a nanowire, which is about 1,000 times thinner than a hair,” said Yong Zhu, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State, and one of the lead authors on the paper. “But this is the first time we’ve seen it in a 3D nanostructure.”

Researchers uncover details of two Windows event log vulnerabilities, dubbed LogCrusher and OverLog.

A high-severity vulnerability has been disclosed in the SQLite database library, which was introduced as part of a code change dating all the way back to October 2000 and could enable attackers to crash or control programs.

Tracked as CVE-2022–35737 (CVSS score: 7.5), the 22-year-old issue affects SQLite versions 1.0.12 through 3.39.1, and has been addressed in version 3.39.2 released on July 21, 2022.

Cybercriminals used two point-of-sale malware strains (POS) to steal the details of more than 167,000 credit cards worth nearly $3.34 million.

Maybe by 5 to 10 years JWST will have an answer for us.

Researchers from Japan add a new wrinkle to a popular theory and set the stage for the formation of monstrous black holes.