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In 1979, CERN decided to convert the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) into a proton–antiproton collider. A technique called stochastic cooling was vital to the project’s success as it allowed enough antiprotons to be collected to make a beam.

The first proton–antiproton collisions were achieved just two years after the project was approved, and two experiments, UA1 and UA2, started to search the collision debris for signs of W and Z particles, carriers of the weak interaction between particles.

In 1983, CERN announced the discovery of the W and Z particles. The image above shows the first detection of a Z0 particle, as seen by the UA1 experiment on 30 April 1983. The Z0 itself decays very quickly so cannot be seen, but an electron–positron pair produced in the decay appear in blue. UA1 observed proton-antiproton collisions on the SPS between 1981 and 1993 to look for the Z and W bosons, which mediate the weak fundamental force.

Deepfakes are the most concerning use of AI for crime and terrorism, according to a new report from University College London.

The research team first identified 20 different ways AI could be used by criminals over the next 15 years. They then asked 31 AI experts to rank them by risk, based on their potential for harm, the money they could make, their ease of use, and how hard they are to stop.

Deepfakes — AI-generated videos of real people doing and saying fictional things — earned the top spot for two major reasons. Firstly, they’re hard to identify and prevent. Automated detection methods remain unreliable and deepfakes also getting better at fooling human eyes. A recent Facebook competition to detect them with algorithms led researchers to admit it’s “very much an unsolved problem.”

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine used a novel genetic sequencing technology to identify the genetic cause of—and a treatment for—a previously unknown severe auto inflammatory syndrome affecting an 18-year-old girl since infancy.

The technology, tailored to the patient’s own genetic code at a single cell level, helped the researchers characterize an unknown mutation in a gene called JAK1 that caused the patient’s immune system to be permanently turned on, resulting in rashes over much of her skin, growth abnormalities, kidney failure, allergic hypersensitivities, and an unusual inflammatory condition throughout the digestive tract.

The study, led by Dusan Bogunovic, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology, and Pediatrics, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, faculty member of The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute and the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai, and Director of the Center for Inborn Errors of Immunity, was published in the August 3 issue of the journal Immunity. The discovery points toward new ways to study how genetic diseases manifest and presents a model of personalized diagnosis and treatment for patients with genetic diseases.

A nuclear physics professor from Florida International University was among a team of researchers that proposed something so out of this world, colleagues first hesitated to accept it was possible.

In 1993, they boldly predicted how the densest materials in the universe—known to exist only in rare neutron —could be made here on Earth. Ultimately, their research was published in Physical Review C, a leading focused on nuclear .

It spawned a wave of follow up research that in 2006 confirmed their prediction was true. For the tiniest sliver of a second, researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia were able to briefly create the material that exists inside a neutron star.

Nationwide effort to build quantum networks and usher in new era of communications.

In a news conference today at the University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy unveiled a report that lays out a blueprint strategy for the development of a national quantum internet, bringing the United States to the forefront of the global quantum race and ushering in a new era of communications. This report provides a pathway to ensure the development of the National Quantum Initiative Act, which was signed into law by President Trump in December 2018.

Around the world, consensus is building that a system to communicate using quantum mechanics represents one of the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century. Scientists now believe that the construction of a prototype will be within reach over the next decade.