Category Physics

Lunar Trailblazer, NASA’s mission led by Caltech in Pasadena, California to understand lunar water and the moon’s water cycle, is one step closer to launching next year. Earlier this month, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California delivered a key science instrument to Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado, and the teams integrated it with the small satellite, or SmallSat.

The instrument, called the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), is one of two on Lunar Trailblazer...

We see the world around us because light is being absorbed by specialized cells in our retina. But can vision happen without any absorption at all—without even a single particle of light? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Imagine that you have a camera cartridge that might contain a roll of photographic film. The roll is so sensitive that coming into contact with even a single photon would destroy it. With our everyday classical means there is no way there’s no way to know whether there’s film in the cartridge, but in the quantum world it can be done. Anton Zeilinger, one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, was the first to experimentally implement the idea of an interaction-free experiment using optics.

Now, in a study exploring the connection between the quantu...

Wi-Fi routers continuously broadcast radio frequencies that your phones, tablets and computers pick up and use to get you online. As the invisible frequencies travel, they bounce off or pass through everything around them—the walls, the furniture and even you. Your movements, even breathing, slightly alter the signal’s path from the router to your device.

Those interactions don’t interrupt your internet connection, but they could signal when someone is in trouble...

Experimental data is often not only highly dimensional, but also noisy and full of artefacts. This makes it difficult to interpret the data. Now a team at HZB has designed software that uses self-learning neural networks to compress the data in a smart way and reconstruct a low-noise version in the next step. This enables to recognise correlations that would otherwise not be discernible...