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University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in 1980’s-era laser physics theorem. A research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall ’22MS has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Physics. Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets. In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold...

China’s dramatic change in its COVID policies could have deleterious consequences for the world’s population: We may face the prospect of a new wave of the virus that will have an enormous impact on public health, three years after the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government seems to have “the Midas touch” in reverse when it comes to COVID-19 — everything it touches turns into a disaster. To this day, China has not revealed the origin of the pandemic, after denying epidemiologists critical information that might have weakened the outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020. China still censors...

One of America’s largest retailers said Wednesday that the surge in crime is inflicting deep losses. Target said its stores are getting looted at a massive scale. The damage to the bottom line has amounted to $400 million so far this year, the company said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. The company is not the only retailer to point to a rise in theft recently. A spokesman for CVS said earlier this year that it has experienced a 300 percent increase in theft. Rite Aid said in October it suffered $5 million in losses due to theft in...

The “red wave” political pundits have been predicting for months failed to materialize this past Tuesday. But what happened was not a “blue wave” either — rather, the 2022 election should be categorized as a “youth wave,” with near-historic numbers of young people turning out to vote, motivated not by party, but by the issues impacting them. Early data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts (CIRCLE) suggests that 27 percent of people ages 18-29 cast a ballot in 2022, marking the second-highest youth turnout in a midterm election in the past three...

Democrats have wrested power from Republicans in four states that previously had politically divided governments to take full control of state capitols following Tuesday’s midterm elections. The four states that have taken both legislative chambers and the governorship under Democratic control are Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland and Massachusetts. "By all accounts, this election should have been a landslide for Republicans. Instead, their so-called red wave is looking more like a puddle," said Jessica Post, president of the national Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. But even with Democratic gains, Republicans still will control more states and more total legislative seats. Republicans entered the...

The Republican Party’s midterm prospects have markedly improved over the last several weeks. But will 2022 be a red wave election year on par with GOP victories in 1994 and 2010? The warning signs are clearly flashing for the Democratic Party. Recent polling finds that support for Republicans — both generically and in individual races — has increased substantially amid heightened national concerns about the economy and crime, two issues that the GOP leads on. Meanwhile, protecting abortion rights, the crux of the Democratic agenda has become a much less salient issue.

At the beginning of this year’s midterm campaign, analysts and political operatives had every reason to expect a strong Republican showing this November. President Biden’s approval rating was in the low 40s, and the president’s party has a long history of struggling in midterm elections. But as the start of the general election campaign nears, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find any concrete signs of Republican strength. Tuesday’s strong Democratic showing in a special congressional election in New York’s 19th District is only the latest example. On paper, this classic battleground district in the Hudson Valley and Catskills is exactly...

Hundreds of migrants being bused to New York may turn into thousands thanks to the selfie trend, Todd Bensman wrote for the New York Post this week. Smart phones have played a huge role in migration with people in Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela using online sites that “serve as a real-time intelligence network,” Bensman, who is the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, continued:

The midterms are still four months away - but the ad wars have already begun. Some of the most endangered House Democrats are hoping to inoculate themselves ahead of a potentially brutal November by going up on TV months before the typical end-of-summer ad rush. Nine incumbents in battleground seats were already airing ads by early July, according to a POLITICO analysis - and some plan to keep going straight through to November. It’s much earlier than House candidates typically start their general election advertising, and it’s a sign of Democrats’ political reality: Republican candidates and big-spending allied super PACs...

The projection of 100 million potential infections is an estimate based on a range of outside models that are being closely tracked by the administration and would include both the fall and winter, a senior administration official told CNN. Officials say this estimate is based on an underlying assumption of no additional resources or extra mitigation measures being taken, including new Covid-19 funding from Congress, or dramatic new variants.

A growing list of high-profile Democrats are coming down with COVID-19 just as President Biden and party leaders are set to roll back public health precautions designed to combat the highly contagious virus. The rash of positive cases — which has hit both members of Congress and prominent figures in the administration — is not so much a health concern for the affected policymakers, who all say they’re vaccinated, boosted and showing no symptoms that might require hospitalization.

Thanks to a new analysis technique, precision measurements of the Earth-Moon distance should improve estimates of the size of the gravitational-wave background. NASA Precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance can allow researchers to estimate the maximum possible amplitude of the steady background “hum” of gravitational waves. (This time-lapse series of photos was taken by a satellite a million miles from Ea... Show more The barrage of all gravitational waves that continuously hit Earth in the microhertz frequency range—roughly one oscillation every few weeks—might be detected by measuring their subtle effects on the Earth-Moon system. By exploiting this decades-old idea, researchers...

A pair of researchers at the University of Victoria, have confirmed the observation of a record breaking "rogue wave" off the coast of Vancouver Island two years ago. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, Johannes Gemmrich and Leah Cicon describe data they analyzed from a buoy anchored off Vancouver Island. Rogue waves are a type of wave with a crest disproportionately higher than the waves around it. Though sometimes confused with tsunamis, rogue waves are quite different. They are thought to be generated by winds, whereas tsunamis are generally created by geologic events such as earthquakes. Also,...

COVID passports are reportedly set to be scrapped this month in Britain amid waning cases of the Chinese coronavirus. At present, England is under ‘Plan B’ restrictions, meaning that masks are required for indoor public spaces and health passes are required to enter large events.

The White House is currently limiting gatherings at the complex to under 30 people amid the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the wave of the omicron coronavirus variant, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday. Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One that the policy has been put in place “over the last several weeks” and will remain "for this period of time."

Covid-19 cases in the U.S. need to fall “well below 10,000” per day for the country to achieve some semblance of pre-pandemic life, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated Tuesday. The U.S. reported an average of nearly 83,500 new Covid cases every day over the last week, a 14% increase from the week before, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University. Fauci said in an interview at the 2021 STAT Summit that Covid cases may need to fall as low as 3,300 per day for the nation to gain control over the virus....

A red tide swept over Long Island, with the Republican candidates for district attorney in both Nassau and Suffolk counties winning their races in stunning landslides Tuesday - turning the campaigns into a referendum on New York’s controversial bail reform law. In Nassau, career local prosecutor Anne Donnelly upset Democratic state Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor, who voted for the 2019 law that eliminated cash bail to defendants accused of many misdemeanor and “non-violent” felony crimes. Donnelly, who was deputy chief of the Nassau DA’s organized crime and rackets bureau, won 145,766 or 60 percent of the vote...

Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro on Tuesday predicted there would be a “red wave in in-person voting” in Virginia’s gubernatorial race between Democratic candidate former Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin. MSNBC “José Díaz-Balart Reports” anchor José Díaz-Balart asked Schapiro, “How efficient and effective is the system in Virginia? Do you think that we’ll have results tonight?”

Quantum mechanicsResearch updateWave–particle duality quantified for the first time 01 Sep 2021 Complementarity A new twist on the double-slit experiment. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Andrey VP) One of the most counterintuitive concepts in physics – the idea that quantum objects are complementary, behaving like waves in some situations and like particles in others – just got a new and more quantitative foundation. In a twist on the classic double-slit experiment, scientists at Korea’s Institute for Basic Sciences (IBS) used precisely controlled photon sources to measure a photon’s degree of wave-ness and particle-ness. Their results, published in Science Advances, show that the properties of...

Former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb is warning that the “true Delta wave” has yet to begin in the Northeast — and predicted it would start soon after Labor Day. “I think there’s sort of a perception that we’re sort of through this Delta wave here in the Northeast because we’ve seen Delta cases go up and go down in places like the New York metropolitan region. We’re also seeing positive [tests] come down,” said Dr. Gottlieb, the former head of the federal Food and Drug Administration, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.