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How silver iodide triggers ice formation at the atomic level

No one can control the weather, but certain clouds can be deliberately triggered to release rain or snow. The process, known as cloud seeding, typically involves dispersing small silver iodide particles from aircraft into clouds. These particles act as seeds on which water molecules accumulate, forming ice crystals that grow and eventually become heavy enough to fall to the ground as rain or snow.

Until now, the microscopic details of this process have remained unclear. Using and , researchers at TU Wien have investigated how interacts with water at the .

Their findings, published in Science Advances, reveal that silver iodide exposes two fundamentally different surfaces, but only one of them promotes . The discovery deepens our understanding of how clouds form rain and snow and may guide the design of improved materials for inducing precipitation.

First observation of single top quark production with W and Z bosons

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detect rare events on a daily basis, but some are exceptionally rare, such as this latest result from the CMS collaboration. For the first time, the collaboration has observed the production of a single top quark along with a W and a Z boson, an extremely rare process that happens only once every trillion proton collisions. Finding this event in the LHC data is like searching for a needle in a haystack the size of an Olympic stadium.

The creation of a top , a W boson and a Z boson, known as tWZ production, opens up a new window for understanding the fundamental forces of nature. By closely studying tWZ production, physicists can investigate how the top quark interacts with the electroweak force, which is carried by the W and Z bosons.

In addition, the top quark is the heaviest known fundamental particle, meaning that it has the strongest interaction with the Higgs field, so, studying the tWZ process could give us a deeper understanding of the Higgs mechanism. It could also point us to signs of new phenomena and physics beyond the Standard Model.

CERN’s electrostatic trap ‘recycles’ anions to illuminate the heaviest elements

From the burning of wood to the action of medicines, the properties and behavior of matter are governed by the way chemical elements bond with one another. For many of the 118 known elements, the intricate electronic structures of the atoms that are responsible for chemical bonding are well understood. But for the superheavy elements lying at the far edge of the periodic table, measuring even a single property of these exotic species is a major challenge.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers working at the ISOLDE facility at CERN report a novel technique that could help unlock the chemistry of (super)heavy elements and has potential applications in fundamental physics research and medical treatments.

Superheavy elements are highly unstable and can only be produced in accelerator laboratories in minute amounts. This is why researchers tend to first perfect their techniques on elements that are stable and lighter.

Global initiative advances next-generation light sensors based on emerging materials

A global team of experts from academia and industry has joined forces in a landmark Consensus Statement on next-generation photodetectors based on emerging light-responsive materials, which could accelerate innovative applications across health care, smart homes, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Professor Vincenzo Pecunia, head of the Sustainable Optoelectronics Research Group (www.sfu.ca/see/soe), has led this global initiative culminating in the publication of a Consensus Statement in Nature Photonics. Featured on the journal’s cover, the paper provides a unified framework for characterizing, reporting, and benchmarking emerging light-sensing technologies. These guidelines could catalyze the adoption of such sensors across a wide range of applications, enhancing quality of life, productivity, and sustainability.

Light sensors, also known as photodetectors, are devices that convert light into electrical signals. They are at the heart of countless smart devices and represent a valued at over $30 billion, reflecting both their ubiquity and economic significance. Emerging photodetectors—including those based on organic semiconductors, perovskites, , and two-dimensional materials—could take this field even further by enabling ultrathin, flexible, stretchable, and lightweight sensors. These next-generation photodetectors promise lower costs, enhanced performance, and unique functionalities, paving the way for applications that were previously impossible.

Brains and stock markets follow the same rules in crisis, study finds

What do brains and the stock market have in common? While this might sound like a set-up for a joke, new research from U-M researchers reveals that the behaviors of brains and economies during crises can be explained using observations common in the realm of physics. Their work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

UnCheol Lee, Ph.D. of the U-M Department of Anesthesiology and his collaborative team came up with the idea upon observing that some patients under anesthesia recover faster than others.

“Anesthetic drugs can be considered as introducing a controlled crisis in the brain, interrupting the brain’s network to induce unconsciousness,” explained Lee.

Physicist discusses the Higgs boson and whether it might change the fate of the universe

On July 4, 2012, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland announced with great fanfare that they had successfully detected the Higgs boson, the manifestation of the mechanism that gives some elementary particles their mass. The finding was a triumph of both the experimental skill required to definitively detect the particle, and the theoretical acumen of those who predicted its existence, recognized by the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Brown University researchers played key roles in both sides of the accomplishment. Experimentalists including David Cutts, Ulrich Heintz, Greg Landsberg and the late Meenakshi Narain made key contributions to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC credited with making the discovery. Years earlier, the late Gerald Guralnik was part of a group that made a theoretical prediction of the particle, which many scientists believe to be the most complete description of the Higgs mechanism.

The Higgs was the final missing piece in the standard model of —the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. But its discovery was by no means a final destination for particle physics. Fundamental questions about the Higgs itself remain unanswered.

“This Is From a Meteorite”: Scientist Stunned by Water Inside 400-Million-Year-Old Plant

The research, led by Zachary Sharp, a professor in UNM’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study centers on horsetails, a family of hollow-stemmed plants that have survived on Earth for more than 400 million years.

The researchers found that water moving through these plants experiences such a powerful natural purification process that its oxygen isotope composition closely matches that of meteorites and other materials from beyond our planet.

“It’s a meter-high cylinder with a million holes in it, equally spaced. It’s an engineering marvel,” Sharp said. “You couldn’t create anything like this in a laboratory.”

The Evolution of SOC Operations: How Continuous Exposure Management Transforms Security Operations

Security Operations Centers (SOC) today are overwhelmed. Analysts handle thousands of alerts every day, spending much time chasing false positives and adjusting detection rules reactively. SOCs often lack the environmental context and relevant threat intelligence needed to quickly verify which alerts are truly malicious. As a result, analysts spend excessive time manually triaging alerts, the majority of which are classified as benign.

Addressing the root cause of these blind spots and alert fatigue isn’t as simple as implementing more accurate tools. Many of these traditional tools are very accurate, but their fatal flaw is a lack of context and a narrow focus — missing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, sophisticated attackers exploit exposures invisible to traditional reactive tools, often evading detection using widely-available bypass kits.

While all of these tools are effective in their own right, they often fail because of the reality that attackers don’t employ just one attack technique, exploit just one type of exposure or weaponize a single CVE when breaching an environment. Instead, attackers chain together multiple exposures, utilizing known CVEs where helpful, and employing evasion techniques to move laterally across an environment and accomplish their desired goals. Individually, traditional security tools may detect one or more of these exposures or IoCs, but without the context derived from a deeply integrated continuous exposure management program, it can be nearly impossible for security teams to effectively correlate otherwise seemingly disconnected signals.

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