A new era of spaceflight headlined by Artemis II in April is making rocket launches in the United States routine. Here’s what the next decade holds.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Spaceflight could change how astronauts swallow, eat and drink in subtle ways
Imagine trying to swallow a sip of water while your face feels stuffed with congestion, your sense of taste is dulled and your body is floating 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.
That scenario is part of everyday life for astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
Spaceflight changes the human body in dramatic ways. Muscles shrink, bones lose density and bodily fluids shift toward the head. Astronauts often return with puffy faces, stuffy noses and a feeling similar to a lingering cold. When you’re congested, you might have more difficulty swallowing—but does microgravity also affect this important body function?
Anomalous quantum oscillations reveal new physics in a topological insulator
A study has been published in Nature Communications that identifies an unusual regime of quantum oscillations in a three-dimensional topological insulator. The results show that, when subjected to temperatures near absolute zero and extreme magnetic fields, electrons in the material zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe₅) exhibit behavior that deviates from the pattern predicted by conventional theory.
The study, led by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Washington, among other U.S. institutions, combines electrical transport experiments conducted in magnetic fields of up to 60 tesla and at temperatures around 0.7 kelvin (−272.45 °C) with detailed theoretical modeling.
“This work expands our understanding of electron transport in exotic phases of matter and suggests that topological insulators support the transport of not only electric charge, but also another fundamental degree of freedom: electron spin,” says Julio Larrea Jiménez, a professor at USP’s Physics Institute (IF) and co-founder and director of the Laboratory for Quantum Matter under Extreme Conditions (LQMEC).
Light Reveals the Hidden Quantum Motion Inside an Exotic Crystal
Optical measurements can reveal the hidden collective motion and quantum dynamics of electrons inside a Wigner crystal.
In a Wigner crystal, electrons behave in an unusual way. Rather than moving independently, strongly interacting electrons confined to a two-dimensional plane can arrange themselves into a repeating lattice similar to the atoms in an ordinary crystal. Researchers at the University of Basel and the Technical University of Munich have now found a way to use light to examine the collective motion hidden within this fragile quantum state.
Unlike an ordinary crystal, the ordering of a Wigner crystal does not come from the structure of the surrounding material. Instead, it emerges from interactions among the electrons themselves, a property that has made this state of matter an important subject of research for decades.