Using Supernovae to study Neutrinos’ Strange Properties

When supernovae explode, neutrinos from their core carry enormous amounts of energy in all directions.
Photo: Getty Images

New study offers hope to long-standing scientific problem. In a new study, researchers have taken an important step toward understanding how exploding stars can help reveal how neutrinos, mysterious subatomic particles, secretly interact with themselves.

One of the less well-understood elementary particles, neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter, and instead travel invisibly through it at almost the speed of light. These ghostly particles outnumber all the atoms in the universe and are always passing harmlessly through our bodies, but due to their low mass and lack of an electric charge they can be incredibly difficult to find and study.

But in a study p...

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Blood Factor Can Turn Back Time in the Aging Brain

Blood factor can turn back time in the aging brain
Systemic PF4 enhances adult hippocampal neurogenesis in vivo. a Experimental design of PF4 injection paradigm in young mice. b, c Intravenous (i.v.) PF4 injections for 1 week did not affect neural precursor cell proliferation in the subgranular zone (SGZ; n = 10 mice in saline group; n = 9 mice in PF4 group; counts of one hemisphere), but increased the number of doublecortin+ (DCX+) cells (n = 15 mice per group; counts of one hemisphere). d Experimental design of the double-labeling paradigm with CldU and IdU. e Acute administration of PF4 did not affect neural precursor cell proliferation, including the recruitment of cells from quiescence (n = 20 mice per group). f Running paradigm of PF4 knockout (KO) mice. g Representative images of Ki67+ cells in the S...
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Researchers fabricate Phase-Heterojunction All-Inorganic Perovskite Solar Cells with an Efficiency Above 21.5%

Phase-heterojunction all-inorganic perovskite solar cells with an efficiency above 21.5%
Schematic representation of fabrication of phase-heterojunction perovskite solar cells. Credit: Mali et al.

Solar technologies have become increasingly advanced over the years, with the discovery of new photovoltaic materials and designs. While solar cells based on a mixture of organic and inorganic halide perovskite materials have been the topic of numerous research studies and achieved promising performances, these cells are often difficult to fabricate on a large-scale.

Researchers at Chonnam University in South Korea recently introduced an alternative solar cell design fully based on inorganic perovskites. Their solar cells, introduced in Nature Energy, could be easier to fabricate on a large-scale, while nonetheless achieving promising power conversion efficiencies (PCEs).

“...

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XRISM Spacecraft will Open New Window on the Xray Cosmos

Scientists studied NGC 7319, part of the visual grouping of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, using the Medium-Resolution Spectrometer (MRS) in the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy contains a supermassive black hole that is actively accreting material. The spectrometer features integral field units (IFUs) – each containing a camera and spectrograph. IFUs provided the Webb team with a collection of images of the galactic core’s spectral features, shown here. Blue-colored regions indicate movement toward the viewer and orange-colored regions represent movement away from the viewer. Powerful radiation and winds from the black hole ionize hot spots of super-heated gas, creating the argon and neon lines...
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