Free Republic

Moscovium and nihonium have been identified as more reactive than flerovium, demonstrating the significance of relativistic effects in superheavy elements. Research on moscovium and nihonium shows they are more reactive than flerovium and subject to notable relativistic effects, broadening our understanding of superheavy elements and their potential uses. An international team led by scientists from GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz has successfully determined the chemical properties of the artificially produced superheavy elements moscovium and nihonium (elements 115 and 113). Moscovium is now the heaviest element ever to be chemically studied. Their research, published...

credit: NASA/CSA/ESA, M. Xiao & P. A. Oesch (University of Geneva), G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute), Dawn JWST Archive Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered three massive galaxies from the early universe, revealing them to be as massive as the Milky Way and forming stars with surprising efficiency. This finding, which contradicts earlier models of slow stellar formation, suggests that star formation in the early universe was much more productive than previously believed. Three Galactic “Red Monsters” Discovered in the Early Universe An international research team, led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has discovered three ultra-massive...

Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, has resigned after receiving fierce backlash for her online expletive-filled tirade where she called Trump voters “f–king fascists” on election night. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” Helmuth announced on her Bluesky account Thursday. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” The president of the magazine, Kimberly Lau, said that Helmuth decided to step down on her own. She thanked Helmuth for her time leading Scientific American, noting that the magazine “won major science communications awards...

To combat tungsten sputtering in tokamaks, researchers have developed a method using boron powder to protect the plasma, demonstrated effectively in global experiments and supported by new computer modeling. Credit: SciTechDaily.com ============================================================================ Tungsten, the preferred material for tokamak fusion reactors, poses challenges due to sputtering that cools plasma, making fusion hard to sustain. Researchers at PPPL suggest that sprinkling boron powder into tokamaks could prevent this by shielding walls and preventing tungsten entry into the plasma. Recent experiments across global tokamaks and a new computer model support the potential of boron powder in maintaining optimal plasma conditions for fusion. Tungsten...

This simulation shows a top-down view of how different light patterns in red and green are generated when fed with input from a waveguide on the left. Credit: Md Nafiz Amin =================================================================================== A new miniature spectrometer combines cutting-edge technology with affordability, offering high precision in fields such as astronomy and health diagnostics. This device promises to bring complex spectral analysis into more frequent use by reducing size and cost, without sacrificing performance. Spectrometers, tools for analyzing light, have been around since the time of 17th-century physicist Isaac Newton. They function by splitting light waves into their various colors, or spectra,...

Spiral galaxy IC 3225, captured in this dynamic image by the Hubble Space Telescope, is seen speeding through space within the dense Virgo galaxy cluster. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun =============================================================================== This week, the Hubble Space Telescope brings us the stunning image of IC 3225, a spiral galaxy soaring through the cosmos resembling a comet with a tail of gas. The spiral galaxy featured in this stunning Hubble Space Telescope image is IC 3225. It looks as though it’s been shot from a cannon, racing through space like a comet, with a stream of gas trailing from its disk....

This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright blobs), challenging physicists’ understanding of how the first quasars and supermassive black holes formed. Credit: Christina Eilers/EIGER team ===================================================================================== Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect ancient lonely quasars with murky origins. They appear to have few cosmic neighbors, raising questions about how they first emerged more than 13 billion years ago. A quasar is an incredibly bright region at the center of a galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole. As this black hole...

A research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), led by Prof. Jianwei Pan, Qiang Zhang, and Kai Chen, in collaboration with CHEN Jingling from Nankai University, has achieved the loophole-free test of Hardy's paradox for the first time. The team successfully demonstrated Hardy's nonlocality, closing both the detection efficiency loophole and the locality loophole...Hardy's paradox, introduced by Lucien Hardy in the 1990s, offers a simplified test of local realism—the classical idea that physical properties exist independently of observation and that no signals exceed the speed of light. This...

Is there anything after death? What is the meaning of life? Are we just a bag of atoms? The scientist Sabine Hossenfelder, born in Frankfurt (Germany) 48 years ago, is convinced that if there is a branch of science capable of finding answers to humanity’s existential questions, it is physics. Specialized in theoretical physics and quantum gravity, Hossenfelder combines her research work with science communication (she is the creator of the YouTube channel Science without the gobbledygook). Her latest book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (published in English in 2022, and out in Spanish this year)...

The galaxy NGC 1549, seen 700 million years after the Big Bang. Credit: JADES Collaboration =================================================================== Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted an ‘inside-out’ galaxy that formed around 13 billion years ago. Like a large city, the galaxy has its densest collection of stars at its core. However, that density decreases as one moves from the city center to the galactic ‘suburbs,’ giving the galaxy its inside-out shape. Although scientists have seen similarly shaped galaxies form in the last 10 million years, the unique ability of the JWST to peer billions of years back in time has...

Two symbols of the Cold War, nuclear explosions and U2 spy planes, combine in new storm research investigating the radioactive nature of lightning. NASA satellites that are usually pointed at the stars detected something entirely unexpected coming from the Earth; gamma radiation bursts. Now, scientists are getting to the bottom of the decades-long mystery of those readings from the 1990s. Discovering that thunderstorms were the cause of the bursts didn’t take long, but many questions remained. The scale and frequency of radioactive lightning storms were unknown. Existing satellites were designed to look for energy coming from space, not the Earth....

Scientists have for the first time observed quantum entanglement — a state in which particles intermingle, losing their individuality so they can no longer be described separately — between quarks. The feat, achieved at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, could open the door to further probes of quantum information in particles at high energies. Entanglement has been measured in particles such as electrons and photons for decades, but it is a delicate phenomenon and easiest to measure in low-energy, or ‘quiet’, environments, such as in the ultracold refrigerators that house quantum computers. Particle collisions, such as those between...

This is a new image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. By comparing Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 near-infrared exposures taken in 2009, 2012, and 2023, astronomers found evidence for flickering supermassive black holes in the hearts of early galaxies. One example is seen as a bright object in the inset. Some supermassive black holes do not swallow surrounding material constantly, but in fits and bursts, making their brightness flicker. Credit: NASA, ESA, Matthew Hayes (Stockholm University), Steven V.W. Beckwith (UC Berkeley), Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz), Richard Ellis (UCL), Joseph DePasquale (STScI) =========================================================================== A Survey of Hubble’s Deepest Look...

A recent study led by a Kansas State University engineer has provided evidence that supports the "Tired Light" theory, a century-old concept that challenges the widely accepted Big Bang theory. ... Shamir's findings align with the long-standing "Tired Light" theory, originally proposed in the 1920s. "In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble and George Lemaitre discovered that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to move away from Earth," Shamir explained. "That discovery led to the Big Bang theory, which suggests that the universe began expanding approximately 13.8 billion years ago. Around the same time, astronomer Fritz Zwicky proposed...

Webb Telescope observations reveal that supermassive black holes starve galaxies of star-forming gas, as seen in ‘Pablo’s Galaxy’, where high-speed gas expulsion by the black hole has ceased new star formation. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com ================================================================================= Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered that supermassive black holes can exhaust the resources necessary for star formation in their host galaxies, effectively starving them. This was observed in a galaxy similar in size to the Milky Way, located in the early universe. The discovery reveals that the black hole is actively preventing star formation by expelling essential star-forming gas at...

Artistic view of the imploding wire: a strong current of high-energy electrons (pink) heats up the surface, thus driving subsequent shockwaves that compress the wire radially. Credit: HZDR / T. Toncian, edited Using a novel laser method, scientists mimicked the extreme environments of stars and planets, enhancing our understanding of astrophysical phenomena and supporting nuclear fusion research. Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an...

“We proved that the Einstein field equation from general relativity is actually a relativistic quantum mechanical equation,” the researchers note in their study. In simple words, this new framework connects the science that governs the macroscopic world with that of the microscopic world. Therefore, it has the potential to explain every physical phenomenon known to humanity ranging from the mysterious dark matter in space to the photons emitted by your phone’s flashlight. “To date, no globally accepted theory has been proposed to explain all physical observations,” the researchers added. They claim that their theory can challenge the foundations of physics...

A recent study underscores the dynamic nature of black holes and extends similar thermodynamic characteristics to Extremely Compact Objects, advancing our comprehension of their behavior in quantum gravity scenarios.A paper titled "Universality of the thermodynamics of a quantum-mechanically radiating black hole departing from thermality," published in Physics Letters B highlights the importance of considering black holes as dynamical systems, where variations in their geometry during radiation emissions are critical to accurately describing their thermodynamic behavior.The study also suggests that extremely compact objects (ECOs) share these thermodynamic properties with black holes, regardless of their event horizon status. The significance of this...

A research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers...It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs.

Earth's North Pole points to a direction in space marked by the North Star. Polaris is both a navigation aid and a remarkable star in its own right. It is the brightest member of a triple-star system and is a pulsating variable star. Polaris gets brighter and fainter periodically as the star’s diameter grows and shrinks over a four-day cycle.Polaris is a kind of star known as a Cepheid variable. Astronomers use these stars as "standard candles" because their true brightness depends on their period of pulsation: Brighter stars pulsate slower than fainter stars. How bright a star appears in...