Researchers believe they’ve found the chemical process that gave rise to RNA, and not only is it remarkably simple, it could have happened on Mars, too.
India launches its first liquid-mirror telescope for astronomy, which is Asia’s largest and the only one of its kind operational in the world.
An interdisciplinary team led by Boston College physicists has discovered a new particle—or previously undetectable quantum excitation—known as the axial Higgs mode, a magnetic relative of the mass-defining Higgs Boson particle, the team reports in the online edition of the journal Nature.
The detection a decade ago of the long-sought Higgs Boson became central to the understanding of mass. Unlike its parent, axial Higgs mode has a magnetic moment, and that requires a more complex form of the theory to explain its properties, said Boston College Professor of Physics Kenneth Burch, a lead co-author of the report “Axial Higgs Mode Detected by Quantum Pathway Interference in RTe3.”
Theories that predicted the existence of such a mode have been invoked to explain “dark matter,” the nearly invisible material that makes up much of the universe, but only reveals itself via gravity, Burch said.
Sascha Roth remembers the phone call came on a hectic Friday evening.
She was racing around her home in Washington, D.C., to pack for New York, where she was scheduled to undergo weeks of radiation therapy for rectal cancer. But the phone call from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) medical oncologist Andrea Cercek changed everything, leaving Sascha “stunned and ecstatic — I was so happy.”
“Aim high. We have always achieved what we wanted to, never in the timeline. We fail on timeline, but that feels like the right fail to make as oppose to not achieving what you are trying to achieve technically.”
In this View From The Top, Christopher Stromeyer, MBA ’22, sits down with Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, to discuss balancing ambitious goals, putting people on Mars in a decade, leading collaboratively, and why she likes making decisions with data.
The 179-year-old tool company Stanley Black & Decker is becoming a model e-commerce player, as global digital enterprise Vtex has helped it transform its digital offering to stay ahead of the game.
The Ingenuity chopper on Mars has lost an instrument that helps it navigate. Flight controllers have found a work-around.
Things are getting challenging for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The latest news from Håvard Grip, its chief pilot, is that the “Little Chopper that Could” has lost its sense of direction thanks to a failed instrument. Never mind that it was designed to make only a few flights, mostly in Mars spring. Or that it’s having a hard time staying warm now that winter is coming. Now, one of its navigation sensors, called an inclinometer, has stopped working. It’s not the end of the world, though. “A nonworking navigation sensor sounds like a big deal – and it is – but it’s not necessarily an end to our flying at Mars,” Grip wrote on the Mars Helicopter blog on June 6. It turns out that the controllers have options.
Like other NASA planetary missions, Ingenuity sports a fair amount of redundancy in its systems. It has an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that measures accelerations and angular rates of ascent and descent in three directions. In addition, there’s a laser rangefinder that measures the distance to the ground. Finally, the chopper has a navigation camera. It gives visual evidence of where Ingenuity is during flight or on the ground. An algorithm takes data from these instruments and uses it during flight. But, it needs to know the chopper’s roll and pitch attitude, and that’s what the inclinometer supplies.
Since it failed, the team had to find a way to impersonate the inclinometer. So, they applied a software patch to the code running on Ingenuity’s flight computer. It intercepts what Grip describes as “garbage packets” of data and replaces them with good data. Essentially, the flight controllers tricked the copter’s navigation algorithms into thinking that the data they have came from the inclinometer.