Category Physics

Most accurate Statistical Description of Faint Primordial Galaxies 500 M yrs after Big Bang generated

The University of California, Irvine and Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute team describes its use of a new statistical method to analyze Hubble data of lengthy sky surveys. The method enabled the scientists to parse out signals from the noise in Hubble’s deep-sky images, providing the first estimate of the number of small, primordial galaxies in the early universe. There are close to 10X more of these galaxies than were previously detected in deep Hubble surveys.

The period under investigation is called the “epoch of reionization”, post-Big Bang and a few hundred million years in which a dark universe was dominated by photon-absorbing neutral hydrogen, the epoch of reionization...

Peter Ford Dominey and the robot Nao, study of developmental robotic cognition. Instead of using pre-established plans, the robot can learn in real time through direct interaction with a human. Credit: ©Inserm/Patrice Latron

An “autobiographical memory” for robot Nao enables it to pass on knowledge learnt from humans to other, less knowledgable humans. This technological progress could notably be used for operations on the International Space Station, where the robot, which is the only permanent member, would liaise between the different crews that change every 6 months in order to pass on information.

In order for a robot to understand cooperative behavior, which is necessary for the cultural transmission of knowledge, researchers developed a system whereby a human agent can teach the ...

A solitary oxygen dopant (red sphere) covalently attached to the sidewall of the carbon nanotube (gray) can generate single photons (red) at room temperature when excited by laser pulses (green).

In optical communication, critical info eg credit card numbers to national security data needs to be secure. Eavesdropping can be prevented by encoding bits of information on quantum mechanical states (e.g. polarization state) of single photons. The ability to generate single photons on demand holds the key. Now, by incorporating single-walled carbon nanotubes, CNTs into a SiO2 matrix, it could lead to creation of solitary oxygen dopant state capable of fluctuation-free, room-temperature single photon emission, ie on-demand single photon generation.

Photons emitted from lasers are distributed rand...

A NASA worker in a clean room at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, checks out the CLASP instrument prior to shipping to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for Sept. 3 launch. Credits: NASA/MSFC

Imagine trying to study a specific region of the sun, eg, from a vantage point some 93 M miles away, probing that area at a level of precision <0.1% – with <5 minutes to do the job. That’s what NASA’s CLASP instrument is for, a joint effort b/n US, Japan, Spain and France, that was flown Sept 3 to an altitude of 167 miles. CLASP is shorthand for the Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter, a high-tech telescope that studies the sun for some 300 seconds.

During that time, CLASP will delivered the first-ever measurement of the magnetic field in the sun’s m...