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Голливудские звезды Арнольд Шварценеггер, Сильвестр Сталлоне и Дольф Лунгрен сообщили, что не собираются стареть.

На видео, опубликованном в “Инстаграме”, три звезды блокбастеров заявили, что они “мужчины, которые не собираются стареть”.

Как сказал Сталлоне: “В самом деле, зачем? Мы просто веселимся. Стареть — это так некрасиво!”

При этом Сталлоне заслоняет рукой объектив и говорит, что его рука выглядит лучше, чем лицо Шварценеггера. Арнольд на это отвечает: “Он думает, что его рука лучше?! Да посмотрите, какой я красавец”.

“Something happened to them. These findings of the inner ear disorder cannot be faked,” he said. “It is not hysteria. It is not crickets.”


Could a dog’s brain offer any clues to the mysterious concussion-like syndrome affecting Canadian and American diplomats who were posted to Cuba?

That is one of the many threads being pulled in an effort by researchers and scientists — and those affected — to better understand the condition referred to as Havana Syndrome, which has been blamed for debilitating some Canadian diplomats and their families.

The brains of those diplomats and their spouses are being tested at Dalhousie’s Brain Repair Centre. Officials there were unavailable for interviews, but one of the diplomats involved told this newspaper that early findings have amazed researchers.

In 1948, physicist Leonard Eisenbud proposed a particular way of transmitting the waves to overcome this. But not until now have researchers made it happen.


By Michael Slezak.

It’s a call with no response. A new way of creating waves – whether of light, radio or sound – that don’t echo promises to improve everything from your Wi-Fi signal to medical imaging to shining lasers through space.

As a wave travels – think of light shining through water, for example – it can become scattered. This is a problem in telecommunications: if you send digital signals down a very long optical fibre, the pulses can get stretched out, and 1s can start to blend into 0s.

Some call it a SASER and others call it a PHASER.


How do you whisper to someone across the room? With lasers, of course. MIT has developed a system using lasers to transmit audio signals directly to the ear, and no one else in the area can hear them. As a nice bonus, the laser won’t burn your skin or eyes should you turn your head at the wrong moment.

The laser system leverages what is known as the photoacoustic effect. That simply means that the absorption of light waves by a material produces sound waves. In this case, the light is absorbed by water molecules in the air, but the researchers learned to very carefully tune the laser to control where the sound appears. It’s essentially a narrow cone of sound.

Making sound with a laser is one thing, but creating specific tones or transmitting a message is much harder. The team evaluated two methods for doing this. First, there’s the laser sweeping technique, which involves altering the wavelength of light to create different sounds. The traditional photoacoustic method uses varying power to encode a message.

Three newly discovered worlds are among the smallest and nearest we’ve ever detected.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS — a super-powerful orbiting telescope designed to hunt for alien worlds — found the planets orbiting a star just 73 light-years away.

One is a rocky “super-Earth” that’s more massive than our home planet but lighter than giants like Neptune. The other two are icy “sub-Neptunes” that are about half the size of Neptune.

A small, portable breath monitor can quickly and accurately detect acute respiratory distress syndrome, researchers report.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is an often deadly disease that causes fluid to leak into the lungs and demands early diagnosis.

To detect the condition today, doctors rely heavily on their own judgment and time-consuming tests. The researchers say their new technology could improve survival rates and lower the cost of care.

This week’s podcast features an interview with Ray LaPierre, who heads up the department of engineering physics at McMaster University in Canada. Ray talks to fellow Canadian Hamish Johnston about his research in semiconductor nanowires, in particular for use in photonics and quantum computers, and also shares his experiences of working at JDS Uniphase during the telecoms boom.

Physics World’s Anna Demming also joins the podcast to describe a flurry of new results in the emerging field of twistronics – where two layers of graphene are stacked on top of each other but twisted at a slight angle to each other. The discovery last year that bilayer graphene can become a superconductor if the two graphene layers are twisted at the so-called magic angle of 1.1º won Physics World’s 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, and since then the race has been on to investigate other angle-dependent properties of twisted bilayer graphene. Anna describes how different research teams are now trying to work out what causes these intriguing effects.

We also talk to industry editor Margaret Harris about the importance of technology and engineering for scientific progress. Margaret shares her own “light-bulb” moment, when she realized that new laser technology could have saved hours of experimental time during her PhD, and also highlights several articles in the latest Physics World Focus on Instruments and Vacuum that highlight how breakthrough scientific discoveries rely on developments in the enabling technologies – including the first images of a black hole that were revealed in April.