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    Groundbreaking Discovery Confirms existence of Orbiting Supermassive Black Holes

    June 27, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes

    Artist’s conception shows two supermassive black holes, similar to those observed by UNM researchers, orbiting one another more than 750 million light years from Earth. Credit: Joshua Valenzuela/UNM

    For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they’ve been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth – a discovery more than a decade in the making. In early 2016, an international team, including a UNM alumnus, working on the LIGO project detected gravitational waves, confirming Albert Einstein’s 100-year-old prediction. These waves were the result two stellar mass black holes (~30 solar mass) colliding in space within the Hubble time...

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    Cool Power: Breakthroughs in Solar Panel Cooling Technology

    June 27, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The solar array cooling system for the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft — one element of which is the large, square black radiator visible at center, one of two that will be installed — is shown undergoing thermal testing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in late February. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

    The solar array cooling system for the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft — one element of which is the large, square black radiator visible at center, one of two that will be installed — is shown undergoing thermal testing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in late February. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

    As NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft begins its first historic encounter with the sun’s corona in late 2018 – flying closer to our star than any other mission in history – a revolutionary cooling system will keep its solar arrays at peak performance, even in extremely hostile conditions...

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    Microscope can Scan Tumors during Surgery and Examine Cancer Biopsies in 3D

    June 26, 2017, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    This comparison shows images of breast tissue taken by the open-top light-sheet microscope (left), traditional pathology techniques (middle) and frozen sectioning during surgery (right). The first two images reveal crisp details of cellular and nuclear features, while the frozen-section image is distorted due to the challenges of freezing fatty breast tissues. While the formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded section requires hours of preparation, the open-top light-sheet microscope image is captured in minutes. Credit: Glaser et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering

    This comparison shows images of breast tissue taken by the open-top light-sheet microscope (left), traditional pathology techniques (middle) and frozen sectioning during surgery (right). The first two images reveal crisp details of cellular and nuclear features, while the frozen-section image is distorted due to the challenges of freezing fatty breast tissues. While the formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded section requires hours of preparation, the open-top light-sheet microscope image is captured in minutes. Credit: Glaser et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering

    Currently there’s no reliable way to determine during surgery whether the excised tissue is completely cancer-free at its margins – the proof that doctors need to be confident that they removed all of the tumor...

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    One Billion Suns: World’s Brightest Laser Sparks new behavior in Light

    June 26, 2017, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    A rendering of how changes in an electron's motion (bottom view) alter the scattering of light (top view), as measured in a new experiment that scattered more than 500 photons of light from a single electron. Previous experiments had managed to scatter no more than a few photons at a time. Credit: Extreme Light Laboratory|University of Nebraska-Lincoln

    A rendering of how changes in an electron’s motion (bottom view) alter the scattering of light (top view), as measured in a new experiment that scattered more than 500 photons of light from a single electron. Previous experiments had managed to scatter no more than a few photons at a time. Credit: Extreme Light Laboratory|University of Nebraska-Lincoln

    Physicists from University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light. By focusing laser light to a brightness one billion times greater than the surface of the sun – the brightest light ever produced on Earth – the physicists have observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter...

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