Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly, you know that insects react to movement extremely quickly. A newly created biologically inspired compound eye is helping scientists understand how insects use their compound eyes to sense an object and its trajectory with such speed. The compound eye could also be used with a camera to create 3D location systems for robots, self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles.

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, researchers from Tianjin University in China report their new bio-inspired compound eye, which not only looks like that of an insect but also works like its natural counterpart. Compound eyes consist of hundreds to thousands of repeating units known as ommatidia that each act as a separate visual receptor.

“Imitating the vision system of insects has led us to believe that they might detect the trajectory of an object based on the light intensity coming from that object rather than using precise images like human vision,” said Le Song, a member of the research team. “This motion-detection method requires less information, allowing the insect to quickly react to a threat.”

An update on the development of a system that will land NASA Astronauts on the Moon as a part of our #Artemis program, the final four sites selected for our first asteroid sample return mission and our Parker Solar Probe spacecraft prepares for another close encounter with the Sun … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

In what is being called an “unprecedented” discovery, a limestone sarcophagus containing the skeleton of a woman dating to the 7th century has been unearthed by archaeologists in Cahors, in southwestern France.

The discovery of the coffin, believed to be from the mysterious Merovingian era, was made as part of excavations carried out ahead of a redevelopment project by the archaeological unit of the Department of Lot, in cooperation with specialists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research.

Throughout the densely-populated country of Bangladesh, a lack of access to clean drinking water is responsible for a variety of debilitating and often-lethal infections. Soon, however, residents could filter virtually all harmful microbes out of their water, using paper derived from algae.

Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna have experimentally demonstrated what was previously only a theoretical possibility. Together with quantum physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China, they have succeeded in teleporting complex high-dimensional quantum states. The research teams report this international first in the journal “Physical Review Letters”.

In their study, the researchers teleported the quantum state of one photon (light particle) to another distant one. Previously, only two-level states (“qubits”) had been transmitted, i.e., information with values “0” or “1”. However, the scientists succeeded in teleporting a three-level state, a so-called “qutrit”. In quantum physics, unlike in classical computer science, “0” and “1” are not an ‘either/or’ – both simultaneously, or anything in between, is also possible. The Austrian-Chinese team has now demonstrated this in practice with a third possibility “2”.

Novel experimental method.

A team of physicists claims to have discovered a new state of matter — a breakthrough that could vastly improve traditional as well as quantum computing.

The new state, called “topological superconductivity,” could help to increase storage capabilities in electronic devices and enhance quantum computing.

RELATED: ‘QUTRIT’ EXPERIMENTS SHOW PROGRESS IN QUANTUM TELEPORTATION

By Leah Crane

Some ideas about the quantum world appear to suggest there are many versions of you spread out across many parallel universes. Now, two scientists have formulated a proof that attempts to show this is really true.

The proof involves a fundamental construct in quantum mechanics called Bell’s theorem. This theorem deals with situations where particles interact with each other, become entangled, and then go their separate ways. It is what’s called a “no-go theorem”, one designed to show that some assumption about how the world works is not true.

For the first time, Chinese scientists have demonstrated the experiment of transferring quantum information in a 3D state.

Limited in a two-level state for a long time, the study paves the way to teleporting the complete quantum state of a particle, according to an article in American Physical Society a top peer-review journal.

According to Pan Jianwei, coauthor of the study known as the “father of quantum” in China, quantum teleportation is a new communication method to transfer quantum information – a particle’s quantum state in the micro-world.

Mysterious swirling shapes could be leftovers from a black hole.