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Evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the galaxy NGC 1,068 has been found by an international team of scientists for the first time. First spotted in 1,780, NGC 1,068, also known as Messier 77, is an active galaxy in the constellation Cetus and one of the most familiar and well-studied galaxies to date. Located 47 million light-years away from us, this galaxy can be observed with large binoculars. The results, to be published today (November 4, 2022) in the journal Science, were shared yesterday in an online scientific webinar that gathered experts, journalists, and scientists from around the globe.

Physicists often refer to the neutrino as the “ghost particle” because they almost never interact with other matter.

The detection was made at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This massive neutrino telescope, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, encompasses 1 billion tons of instrumented ice at depths of 1.5 to 2.5 kilometers (0.9 to 1.2 miles) below Antarctica’s surface near the South Pole. This unique telescope explores the farthest reaches of our universe using neutrinos. It reported the first observation of a high-energy astrophysical neutrino source in 2018. The source is a known blazar named TXS 0506+056 located 4 billion light-years away off the left shoulder of the Orion constellation.

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NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges.

For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in their orbit to each other (during an “Opposition”). Using current technology, it would take six to nine months to transit from Earth to Mars.

Even with nuclear-thermal or nuclear-electric propulsion (NTP/NEP), a one-way transit could take 100 days to reach Mars.

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“It is not enough to study brain connectivity with one single method, or even two,” says HBP Scientific Director and author of the Science article Katrin Amunts, who leads the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the C. & O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at the University Hospital Düsseldorf. “The connectome is nested at multiple levels. To understand its structure, we need to look at several spatial scales at once by combining different experimental methods in a multi-scale approach and by integrating the obtained data into multilevel atlases such as the Julich Brain Atlas that we have developed.”

Markus Axer from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Physics Department of the University of Wuppertal, who is the first author of the Science article, has together with his team at INM-1 developed a unique method called 3D Polarised Light Imaging (3D-PLI) to visualise nerve fibres at microscopic resolution. They trace the three-dimensional courses of fibres across serial brain sections with the aim of developing a 3D fibre atlas of the entire human brain.

Together with other HBP researchers from Neurospin in France and the University of Florence in Italy, Axer and his team have recently imaged the same tissue block from a human hippocampus using several different methods: anatomical and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (aMRI and dMRI), two-photon fluorescence microscopy (TPFM) and 3D-PLI, respectively.

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With the new observations we are seeing a mixture of particle physics being the new physics governing even long standing laws like gravity. Also that string theory is still alive and well. I think we may never know everything unless we essentially get to a type 5 civilization or beyond.

Finding cannot be explained by classical assumptions.

An international team of astrophysicists has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing certain star clusters. The finding challenges Newton’s laws of gravity, the researchers write in their publication. Instead, the observations are consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity. However, this is controversial among experts. The results have now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The University of Bonn played a major role in the study.

In their work, the researchers investigated the so-called open star clusters, which are loosely bound groups of a few tens to a few hundred stars that are found in spiral and irregular galaxies. Open clusters are formed when thousands of stars are born within a short time in a huge gas cloud. As they “ignite,” the galactic newcomers blow away the remnants of the gas cloud. In the process, the cluster greatly expands. This creates a loose formation of several dozen to several thousand stars. The cluster is held together by the weak gravitational forces acting between them.

Continue reading “Are Newton’s Laws of Gravity Wrong: Observation Puzzles Researchers” | >

Given a 3D piece of origami, can you flatten it without damaging it? Just by looking at the design, the answer is hard to predict, because each and every fold in the design has to be compatible with flattening.

This is an example of a combinatorial problem. New research led by the UvA Institute of Physics and research institute AMOLF has demonstrated that machine learning algorithms can accurately and efficiently answer these kinds of questions. This is expected to give a boost to the artificial intelligence-assisted design of complex and functional (meta)materials.

In their latest work, published in Physical Review Letters this week, the research team tested how well (AI) can predict the properties of so-called combinatorial mechanical metamaterials.

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Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are becoming increasingly advanced, enabling increasingly engaging and immersive digital experiences. To make VR and AR experiences even more realistic, engineers have been trying to create better systems that produce tactile and haptic feedback matching virtual content.

Researchers at University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and other institutes in China have recently created WeTac, a miniaturized, soft and ultrathin wireless electrotactile system that produces on a user’s skin. This system, introduced in Nature Machine Intelligence, works by delivering through a user’s .

“As the tactile sensitivity among and different parts of the hand within a person varies widely, a universal method to encode tactile information into faithful feedback in hands according to sensitivity features is urgently needed,” Kuanming Yao and his colleagues wrote in their paper. “In addition, existing haptic interfaces worn on the hand are usually bulky, rigid and tethered by cables, which is a hurdle for accurately and naturally providing haptic feedback.”

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To produce the next generation of high-frequency antennae for 5G, 6G and other wireless devices, a team at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has invented the machine and manufacturing technique to manipulate microscopic objects using 3D printing and braid them into filaments a mere micrometre in diameter.

How small is this? One human hair varies in diameter between 20 and 200 micrometres from tip to root. Spider web silk can vary from 3 to 8 micrometres in diameter. So that’s teeny tiny. And for us to pack in the many antennae that go into mobile phone technology today, the smaller the better.

Current manufacturing techniques can’t make one-micrometre filaments. But the machine invented by the Harvard SEAS team can. How does it do it? It uses the surface tension of water to grab and manipulate micromaterials. The capillary forces in the water are harnessed to help in the assembly using the variable width channels contained within the machine. Using 3D printing and the hydrophilic properties of the machine’s walls, the team used surface tension to guide kevlar nanowires attached to small floats which as they travelled through the device plaited into micrometre-scale braids.

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