Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2017

NASA is beginning to design its next big astrophysics mission, a space telescope that will provide the largest picture of the universe ever seen with the same depth and clarity as the Hubble Space Telescope.

Scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will function as Hubble’s wide-eyed cousin. While just as sensitive as Hubble’s cameras, WFIRST’s 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument will image a sky area 100 times larger. This means a single WFIRST image will hold the equivalent detail of 100 pictures from Hubble.

Continue reading “NASA’s Next Major Telescope to See the Big Picture of the Universe” »

With the era of dam building coming to an end in much of the developed world, places such as California and Australia are turning to local and less expensive methods to deal with water scarcity, including recycling wastewater, capturing stormwater, and recharging aquifers.

New particles sensitive to the strong interaction might be produced in abundance in the proton-proton collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – provided that they aren’t too heavy. These particles could be the partners of gluons and quarks predicted by supersymmetry (SUSY), a proposed extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that would expand its predictive power to include much higher energies. In the simplest scenarios, these “gluinos” and “squarks” would be produced in pairs, and decay directly into quarks and a new stable neutral particle (the “neutralino”), which would not interact with the ATLAS detector. The neutralino could be the main constituent of dark matter.

The ATLAS Collaboration has been searching for such processes since the early days of LHC operation. Physicists have been studying collision events featuring “jets” of hadrons, where there is a large imbalance in the momenta of these jets in the plane perpendicular to the colliding protons (“missing transverse momentum,” E_T^miss). This missing momentum would be carried away by the undetectable neutralinos. So far, ATLAS searches have led to increasingly tighter constraints on the minimum possible masses of squarks and gluinos.

Is it possible to do better with more data? The probability of producing these heavy particles decreases exponentially with their masses, and thus repeating the previous analyses with a larger dataset only goes so far. New, sophisticated methods that help to better distinguish a SUSY signal from the background Standard Model events are needed to take these analyses further. Crucial improvements may come from increasing the efficiency for selecting signal events, improving the rejection of background processes, or looking into less-explored regions.

Adilson Motter, Northwestern University

After 12 successful seasons, “The Big Bang Theory” has finally come to a fulfilling end, concluding its reign as the longest running multicamera sitcom on TV.

If you’re one of the few who haven’t seen the show, this CBS series centers around a group of young scientists defined by essentially every possible stereotype about nerds and geeks. The main character, Sheldon (Jim Parsons), is a theoretical physicist. He is exceptionally intelligent, but also socially unconventional, egocentric, envious and ultra-competitive. His best friend, Leonard (Johnny Galecki), is an experimental physicist who, although more balanced, also shows more fluency with quantum physics than with ordinary social situations.

Yesterday, the physics community got hyped-up over rumours that scientists might have finally detected gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime predicted by Einstein 100 years ago — and that their observations could be coming to a peer-reviewed journal near you soon.

So far, our understanding of how gravity affects the Universe has been limited to observations of natural gravitational fields created by distant stars and planets. In fact, gravity is the last of the four fundamental forces that humans haven’t figured out how to produce and control. But now André Füzfa, a mathematician at the University of Namur in Belgium, has published a paper proposing a device that could do just that — albeit in tiny doses. And it wouldn’t require any new technology.

Let’s be clear, we’re talking about incredibly small gravitational fields here, not the type of ‘artificial gravity’ that’s used throughout science fiction to keep characters on shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica walking, not floating, around spacecraft. As yet, that technology isn’t possible.

For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple streams of calculations at a time.

While scientists have super-cooled atoms, doing the same for molecules, which are more complex in their behavior and structure, has proven to be a much bigger challenge.

Now MIT physicists have found a way to cool molecules of sodium lithium down to 200 billionths of a Kelvin, just a hair above absolute zero. They did so by applying a technique called collisional cooling, in which they immersed molecules of cold sodium lithium in a cloud of even colder sodium atoms. The ultracold atoms acted as a refrigerant to cool the molecules even further.

No vaccines exist that protect people against infections by coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, or the ones that cause SARS and MERS. As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc, many labs around the world have developed a laser-like focus on understanding the virus and finding the best strategy for stopping it.

This week in mBio, a journal of the American Society of Microbiology, a team of interdisciplinary researchers describes a promising vaccine candidate against the MERS virus. Since the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak began in 2012, more than 850 people have died, and studies suggest the virus has a case fatality rate of more than 30%.

In the new paper, the researchers suggest that the approach they took for a MERS virus vaccine may also work against SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine’s delivery method is an RNA virus called parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5), which is believed to cause a condition known as kennel cough in dogs but appears harmless to people. The researchers added an extra gene to the virus so that infected cells would produce the S, or spike, glycoprotein known to be involved in MERS infections.

The satellite captured a Pakistani Navy hovercraft approaching Manora beach. This is a convenient location, right next to a a major Marines base known as PNS Qasim. From other sources we know that the hovercraft was carrying both Pakistani and Chinese marines. The troops ran down the ramp and across the beach side by side, a formation designed for the cameras. In combat conditions the troops would probably not be deployed in this manner.

The joint exercise was not just for the cameras however. It underscores the close defense relationship which extends into industry. China is a major arms supplier to Pakistan, and has been helping better establish local shipbuilding. The exercise in question, Sea Guardian 2020, took place in January.