By analyzing the data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have investigated a star-forming region known as G34.26+0.15. As a result, they discovered an explosive outflow in this complex. The study was reported in a paper published on April 22 on the arXiv preprint server.
The presence of cellular defects of multifactorial nature can be hard to characterize accurately and early due to the complex interplay of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. With this study, by bridging optically-induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP), microfluidics, live-cell imaging, and machine learning, we provide the ground for devising a robotic micromanipulation and analysis system for single-cell phenotyping. Cells under the influence of nonuniform electric fields generated via ODEP can be recorded and measured. The induced responses obtained under time-variant ODEP stimulation reflect the cells’ chemical, morphological, and structural characteristics in an automated, flexible, and label-free manner.
As demand grows for more powerful and efficient microelectronics systems, industry is turning to 3D integration—stacking chips on top of each other. This vertically layered architecture could allow high-performance processors, like those used for artificial intelligence, to be packaged closely with other highly specialized chips for communication or imaging. But technologists everywhere face a major challenge: how to prevent these stacks from overheating.
Now, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed a specialized chip to test and validate cooling solutions for packaged chip stacks. The chip dissipates extremely high power, mimicking high-performance logic chips, to generate heat through the silicon layer and in localized hot spots. Then, as cooling technologies are applied to the packaged stack, the chip measures temperature changes. When sandwiched in a stack, the chip will allow researchers to study how heat moves through stack layers and benchmark progress in keeping them cool.
“If you have just a single chip, you can cool it from above or below. But if you start stacking several chips on top of each other, the heat has nowhere to escape. No cooling methods exist today that allow industry to stack multiples of these really high-performance chips,” says Chenson Chen, who led the development of the chip with Ryan Keech, both of the laboratory’s Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group.
Astronomers have discovered a previously unknown birthplace of some of the universe’s rarest elements: a giant flare unleashed by a supermagnetized star. The astronomers calculated that such flares could be responsible for forging up to 10% of our galaxy’s gold, platinum and other heavy elements.
The discovery also resolves a decades-long mystery concerning a bright flash of light and particles spotted by a space telescope in December 2004. The light came from a magnetar—a type of star wrapped in magnetic fields trillions of times as strong as Earth’s—that had unleashed a giant flare.
The powerful blast of radiation only lasted a few seconds, but it released more energy than the sun does in 1 million years. While the flare’s origin was quickly identified, a second, smaller signal from the star, peaking 10 minutes later, confounded scientists at the time. For 20 years, that signal went unexplained.
Author summary Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to regulate their actions in response to changing environmental demands. An essential aspect of action regulation is action inhibition that occurs when stopping unwanted or inappropriate actions. However, everyday life rarely calls for complete inhibition of responses without switching behavior to adapt to new situations. Despite extensive research to understand how the brain switches actions, the computations underlying the switching process and how it relates to the selecting and stopping processes remain elusive. Part of this challenge lies in the fact that these processes are rarely studied together, making it difficult to develop a unified theory that explains the computational aspects of the action regulation mechanism. The current study aims to delineate the computations underlying action regulation functions that involve inhibitory control, explore how these functions interrelate, and how they can be implemented within brain networks, opening new avenues for future neurophysiological investigations.
Fluctuations of twisted beams of random light, such as sunlight, lead to an angular Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect.
Teleportation isn’t just science fiction anymore — scientists have found a way to send information more clearly and efficiently than ever before.
Using an incredibly tiny material called a nanophotonic platform, researchers dramatically improved how well quantum information can travel, even with just single particles of light. This breakthrough means teleportation could one day be part of real-world communication networks, opening the door to a future where information zips through space in ways once thought impossible.
Nonlinear optics: the key to quantum communication.
Earth’s atmosphere is much more sensitive to ripples of radiation from the sun than scientists previously believed, new research by Queen’s University Belfast has found.
Solar flares, which are sudden and intense bursts of energy from the sun’s magnetic field, happen regularly.
Understanding how they impact the Earth’s atmosphere is important as very powerful flares can cause inaccuracies in GPS systems and, in extreme cases, can cause total radio blackouts, where all signal is lost.
The NASA team behind the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – due to launch in 2027 – have shared the designs for the mission’s 3 core surveys.
Roman will deepen understanding into the mysteries of astrophysics and the universe.
“Roman’s setting out to do wide, deep surveys of the universe in a way that will help us answer questions about how dark energy and dark matter govern cosmic evolution, and the demographics of worlds beyond our solar system,” says Gail Zasowski, an associate professor at the University of Utah, US, and co-chair of the Roman Observations Time Allocation Committee (ROTAC).
One of the most famous findings in physics could be wrong – the double-slit experiment was long thought to confirm that light can be a wave, but its results can be fully explained using only quantum particles