Blue Supergiant Stars Open Doors to Concert in Space

A snapshot from a hydrodynamical simulation of the interior of a star three times as heavy as our Sun, which shows waves generated by turbulent core convection and propagating throughout the star’s interior. Darker and lighter colours represent fluctuations due to waves.
© Tamara Rogers (Newcastle University)

Almost all blue supergiants shimmer in brightness because of waves on their surface. Blue supergiants are rock-and-roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented, few blue supergiants had been observed, so our knowledge of these stars was limited...

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A Novel Technique that uses Quantum Light to Measure Temperature at the Nanoscale

Illustration of nanoscale diamonds probing temperature of electronic circuits. Credit: Dr. Trong Toan Tran

Being able to measure, and monitor, temperatures and temperature changes at miniscule scales—inside a cell or in micro and nano-electronic components—has the potential to impact many areas of research from disease detection to a major challenge of modern computation and communication technologies, how to measure scalability and performance in electronic components.

A collaborative team, led by scientists from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), developed a highly-sensitive nano-thermometer that uses atom-like inclusions in diamond nanoparticles to accurately measure temperature at the nanoscale...

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Embryo Stem Cells created from Skin Cells


Direct Induction of the Three Pre-implantation Blastocyst Cell Types from Fibroblasts

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) have found a way to transform skin cells into the 3 major stem cell types that comprise early-stage embryos. The work (in mouse cells) has significant implications for modelling embryonic disease and placental dysfunctions, as well as paving the way to create whole embryos from skin cells.

As published in Cell Stem Cell, Dr. Yossi Buganim of HU’s Department of Developmental Biology and Cancer Research and his team discovered a set of genes capable of transforming murine skin cells into all three of the cell types that comprise the early embryo: the embryo itself, the placenta and the extra-embryonic tissues, such as the umbilical cord...

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Sculpting Super-fast Light Pulses

Schematic shows a novel technique to reshape the properties of an ultrafast light pulse. An incoming pulse of light (left) is dispersed into its various constituent frequencies, or colors, and directed into a metasurface composed of millions of tiny silicon pillars and an integrated polarizer. The nanopillars are specifically designed to simultaneously and independently shape such properties of each frequency component as its amplitude, phase or polarization. The transmitted beam is then recombined to achieve a new shape-modified pulse (right).
Credit: S. Kelley/NIST

Nanopillars shape light precisely for practical applications...

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