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Lyft drivers study reveals racial profiling by law enforcement

A team of management researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has found that minority Lyft drivers in Florida are more likely to be stopped and ticketed for speeding and to be more highly fined than white drivers.

In their study published in the journal Science, the group analyzed data for more than 200,000 Lyft drivers working in Florida over the years 2017 to 2020.

Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, respectively, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal, outlining the difficulty in finding suitable environments for conducting profiling studies in public settings and the results of the new effort.

Symmetry between up and down quarks is more broken than expected

In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly—a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons.

This suggested that the so-called “isospin ” between up and down quarks might be broken by more than expected due to the differences in their electric charges and masses—a discrepancy that existing would struggle to explain. Known sources of isospin asymmetry only predict deviations of a few percent.

“When Wojciech got started, we thought it would be a trivial verification of the symmetry,” says Marek Gaździcki, who was spokesperson of NA61/SHINE at the time of the discovery. “We expected the symmetry to be closely obeyed—although we had previously measured these types of discrepancies at the NA49 experiment, they had large uncertainties and were not significant.”

Efficient light control: Meta-optics replace conventional lenses

Conventional curved lenses, which direct light by refraction in glass or plastic, are often bulky and heavy, offering only limited control of light waves. Metasurfaces, in contrast, are flat and consist of an array of tiny structures known as meta-atoms. Meta-atoms influence light at a subwavelength scale and thus allow for highly precise control of the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light.

“Using metasurfaces, we can influence the temporal shift, intensity, and direction of oscillation of light waves in a targeted way,” says Dr. Maryna Leonidivna Meretska, Group Leader at KIT’s Institute of Nanotechnology.

“Thanks to its multiplex control capabilities, i.e., the simultaneous and targeted influencing of various parameters, a single metasurface can replace multiple . Thus, the size of the optical system can be reduced without affecting its performance.”

Mach 16 Mayhem: Supercomputer Uncovers Chaos in Hypersonic Flows

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have unlocked new insights into the turbulent behavior of hypersonic flows by using advanced 3D simulations.

Leveraging supercomputing power and custom-built software, they discovered unexpected instabilities and flow breaks around cone-shaped models at Mach 16, disturbances never seen before in previous 2D or experimental studies. These findings could significantly impact the design of future hypersonic vehicles by helping engineers understand how extreme speeds interact with surface geometries in new ways.

Hypersonic Flows and New Discoveries.

Scientists Crack the Hidden Code of Quantum Entanglement

Physicists have made a major leap in our understanding of quantum entanglement by fully mapping out the statistics it can produce – essentially decoding the language of the quantum world.

This breakthrough reveals how the bizarre but powerful correlations in quantum systems can be used to test, secure, and certify the behavior of quantum devices, all without knowing their inner workings. The ability to self-test even partially entangled systems now opens doors to more robust quantum communication, encryption, and computing methods. It’s a game-changer for both fundamental physics and real-world quantum tech.

Cracking the code of quantum entanglement.