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Strange Materials Make Waves Behave in Ways That Defy Expectations

Researchers have uncovered an unusual wave phenomenon that links engineered materials to principles found in ocean physics.

Waves bouncing around an irregularly shaped space typically follow increasingly unpredictable paths. Scientists have now shown that certain materials can produce the opposite effect, guiding waves into stable, repeating patterns instead of chaotic trajectories.

Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) discovered this behavior in hyperbolic materials, whose unusual properties restrict the directions in which waves can travel. Their study, published in Nature Physics, identifies structures called “hyperbolic wave attractors” that could eventually help engineers control light, sound, and electromagnetic signals.

Is Einstein Wrong? Deep-Sea Neutrinos Put the Laws of Physics to the Test

Scientists are testing whether one of Einstein’s most fundamental principles holds true throughout the Universe.

A neutrino telescope deep in the Mediterranean Sea has put one of Einstein’s fundamental principles to a new test. After analyzing 5,828 atmospheric neutrino candidate events, scientists found no evidence that Lorentz invariance, a cornerstone of relativity, had been violated. Their findings place new restrictions on theories suggesting that the laws of physics might behave differently under certain conditions.

The international KM3NeT collaboration conducted the study using KM3NeT/ORCA, an underwater detector designed to investigate neutrinos and their unusual behavior. Published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), the research establishes the first direct experimental limits on certain possible violations involving muon and tau neutrinos, two types of these elusive particles.

Hera’s first close-up view of Didymos asteroids

The European Space Agency’s Hera mission for planetary defence has acquired its first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system. NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the smaller Dimorphos asteroid on 26 September 2022 – but this image gives a novel view of its adjacent parent asteroid.

In this image, acquired by Hera’s monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera from 60 km away, most of the 151-m diameter Dimorphos asteroid is hidden by shadow but the 780-m diameter Didymos asteroid that the smaller moonlet orbits around is shown clearly.

“The first thing we said was wow!” observes Hera Principal Investigator Patrick Michel, Director of Research at CNRS / Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur. “This is the other side of Didymos from the one that DART’s camera showed us shortly before impact, so this feels like looking at a whole new world.

Manchester physicists step closer to the ‘Zeptoverse’ after 42-year particle search

Scientists have found the first evidence for an extremely rare particle decay known as ‘Bd to mu mu’.The decay is predicted to happen only once in around 10 billion beauty particles and has taken more than 40 years to find. The result has a statistical significance of 3.2 sigma, enough to constitute evidence, but not enough to claim the gold…

NASA Awards Moon Base Transportation, Technology, Science Projects

NASA announced a suite of awards and mission updates on Saturday to expand the agency’s Moon Base exploration, science, and infrastructure capabilities. The investments will advance commercial robotic deliveries, a nuclear-powered rover named PROMISE, launch and orbital transfer services, and surface infrastructure as the agency works with American industry to establish a sustained presence on the Moon’s South Pole.

The agency shared the news at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“We are building the Moon Base mission by mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Today’s announcements expand nearly every part of that campaign, using the playbook that carried NASA through its greatest eras: fly often, learn, apply those lessons, and get more better and more capable with every mission. When our astronauts return to the Moon, they will arrive with the first elements of the Moon Base already waiting for them on the surface.”

Thermally unfavorable conditions of volatile existence in near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26, the Hayabusa extended mission’s target

The near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26, the target of the Hayabusa2# extended mission, has been proposed as a dark comet that may host volatiles, particularly water, owing to an anomalous out-of-plane nongravitational acceleration that may result from outgassing. This asteroid, however, may also belong to a largely anhydrous taxonomic group. Whether outgassing-driven acceleration is possible strongly depends on how the asteroid stores volatiles in its interior and releases them upon heating at the surface. Thus far, the contentious topic of the existence of volatiles on 1998 KY26 that can cause outgassing has not been extensively examined from a thermophysical standpoint. Here, we show that all locations on the surface or in the interior of 1998 KY26 have orbit-averaged temperatures significantly above the sublimation point of volatiles in vacuum.