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Habitable planet potential increases in the outer galaxy

What can the galactic habitable zone (GHZ), galactic regions where complex life is hypothesized to be able to evolve, teach scientists about finding the correct stars that could have habitable planets?

This is what a recent study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated a connection between the migration of stars, commonly called stellar migration, and what this could mean for finding habitable planets within our galaxy. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the astrophysical parameters for finding habitable worlds beyond Earth and even life as we know it. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate how stellar migration could influence the location and parameters of the GHZ. The models included scenarios both with and without stellar migration to ascertain the statistical probabilities for terrestrial (rocky) planets forming around stars throughout the galaxy. The researchers also used a chemical evolution model to ascertain the formation and evolution of our galaxy, specifically regarding its thickness.

Stored for 130 years: Bottles reveal evidence of Danish butter production and hygiene practices of the past

Two forgotten bottles in a basement in Frederiksberg containing bacterial cultures from the 1890s have provided researchers at the University of Copenhagen with unique insight into Denmark’s butter production history. Using advanced DNA analysis, they have examined the contents of the bottles, which offered several bacterial surprises and a reminder of the challenges of hygiene at the time.

Lactic acid bacteria have long been used to flavor food and extend its by acidifying it and displacing . Denmark was among the first to use the magic of lactic acid bacteria industrially, which, together with the introduction of pasteurization, helped to ensure the high quality of dairy products and, not least, keep them free of disease.

This is evidenced by the discovery of two bottles of white powder, which researchers from the University of Copenhagen found by chance in a dusty moving box last year. The bottles had labels indicating that they contained cultures consisting of lactic acid bacteria, but had not seen the light of day since the late 1800s and were well hidden away in a basement under the greenhouses on Rolighedsvej near the old Agricultural College in Frederiksberg.

Uniting the light spectrum on a single microchip

Focused laser-like light that covers a wide range of frequencies is highly desirable for many scientific studies and for many applications, for instance, quality control of manufacturing semiconductor electronic chips. But creating such broadband and coherent light has been difficult to achieve with anything but bulky, energy-hungry tabletop devices.

Now, a Caltech team led by Alireza Marandi, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, has created a tiny device capable of producing an unusually wide range of laser-light frequencies with ultra-high efficiency—all on a microchip. The work has potential in areas ranging from communications and imaging to spectroscopy, where the light would aid the detection of atoms and molecules in various settings.

The researchers describe the new nanophotonic device and approach in a paper that appears in the journal Nature Photonics. The lead author of the paper, “Multi-Octave Frequency Comb from an Ultra-Low-Threshold Nanophotonic Parametric Oscillator,” is Ryoto Sekine (Ph. D.), who completed the work while a graduate student in Marandi’s lab.

“Below 100 Degrees and It Falls Apart”: Japanese Scientists Create First Recyclable Battery That Dissolves in Warm Water

In the rapidly evolving field of energy storage, the quest for safer and more sustainable solutions is ongoing. A recent breakthrough in the development of

Revisiting the IPIP-NEO Personality Hierarchy with Taxonomic Graph Analysis

Describing and understanding personality structure is fundamental to predict and explain human behavior. Recent research calls for large personality item pools to be analyzed from the bottom-up, as item-level analysis may reveal meaningful differences often obscured by aggregation. This study introduces and applies Taxonomic Graph Analysis (TGA), a comprehensive network psychometrics framework aimed at identifying hierarchical structures in personality from the bottom-up, to an open-source 300-item IPIP-NEO dataset (N = 149,337). This framework addresses key methodological challenges that have hindered accurate recovery of hierarchical structures, including local independence violations, wording effects, dimensionality assessment, and structural robustness.

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