Recent Comments

    Study Predicts Black Hole Chirps occur in Two Universal Frequency Ranges

    August 1, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The universal sound of black holes
    Ripples in the spacetime around a merging binary black-hole system from a numerical relativity simulation. Credit: Deborah Ferguson, Karan Jani, Deirdre Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, Georgia Tech, MAYA Collaboration

    They are mysterious, exciting and inescapable—black holes are some of the most exotic objects in the universe. With gravitational-wave detectors, it is possible to detect the chirp sound that two black holes produce when they merge, approximately 70 such chirps have been found so far.

    A team of researchers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) now predicts that in this “ocean of voices” chirps preferentially occur in two universal frequency ranges. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    The discovery of gravitational waves...

    Read More

    Astronomers Shed New Light on Formation of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts

    July 31, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    China's FAST radio telescope

    More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic explosions of electromagnetic radiation—astronomers worldwide have been combing the universe to uncover clues about how and why they form.

    Nearly all FRBs identified have originated in deep space outside our Milky Way galaxy. That is until April 2020, when the first Galactic FRB, named FRB 20200428, was detected. This FRB was produced by a magnetar (SGR J1935+2154), a dense, city-sized neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field.

    This groundbreaking discovery led some to believe that FRBs identified at cosmological distances outside our galaxy may also be produced by magnetars...

    Read More

    Lifespan of Aging Science’s Model Organism driven by Reproductive Self-destruction

    July 31, 2023, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    C elegans worm venting

    The lifespan of a small roundworm that has been used as a key model organism in ageing research is limited by how it self-sacrifices to feed its young, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

    The authors of the new Nature Communications paper say their findings raise questions about how well insights from the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worm can be translated to human ageing advances.

    C. elegans is widely used as a laboratory animal, and has been central to ageing research for 40 years thanks to discoveries of genes that can be supressed to produce up to a tenfold increase in the worm’s lifespan.

    The UCL research team investigated what drives the lifespan of C...

    Read More

    Researchers use Quantum Computer to Identify Molecular Candidate for Development of more Efficient Solar Cells

    July 31, 2023, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    ORNL team members applied three independent strategies to decrease their project’s computational workload, which reduced their time to solution from months to a few weeks. First, in a technique called qubit tapering, they decreased the number of qubits required to express the problem, reducing the size of the problem itself. Second, they took fewer measurements to solve the problem by measuring groups of terms once rather than measuring each individual term from every group (a process called qubit-wise commutativity). Third, instead of implementing each circuit individually, they found a way to run four circuits in parallel, allowing them to use all 20 qubits in the H1-1. Illustration credit: Adam Malin/ORNL.

    Using the full capabilities of the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer, resear...

    Read More