A new type of Photonic Time Crystal gives Light a Boost

 Time varying interface and light
Time varying interface and light. Photo: Viktar Asadchy

Researchers have developed a way to create photonic time crystals and shown that these bizarre, artificial materials amplify the light that shines on them. These findings, described in a paper in Science Advances, could lead to more efficient and robust wireless communications and significantly improved lasers.

Time crystals were first conceived by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012. Mundane, familiar crystals have a structural pattern that repeats in space, but in a time crystal, the pattern repeats in time instead. While some physicists were initially sceptical that time crystals could exist, recent experiments have succeeding in creating them...

Read More

Scientists Map Gusty Winds in a far-off Neutron Star System

In black space, the accretion disk is represented as a flat swirling disk with blue, pink red colors, and in the middle of it is tiny, glowing white sphere, the neutron star. Behind the accretion disk is a large teal sphere, the sun-like star. A teal noodle flows from the star to the accretion disk, representing the material drawn away from the star.
Caption: MIT astronomers mapped the “disk winds” associated with the accretion disk around Hercules X-1, a system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a sun-like star, represented as the teal sphere. The findings may offer clues to how supermassive black holes shape entire galaxies.
Credits:Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on an image of Hercules X-1 by D. Klochkov, European Space Agency

The 2D map of this ‘disk wind’ may reveal clues to galaxy formation.

Astronomers have mapped the ‘disk winds’ associated with the accretion disk around Hercules X-1, a system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a sun-like star. The findings may offer clues to how supermassive black holes shape entire galaxies.

An accretion disk is a colossal whirlpool o...

Read More

Novel Immunotherapy Agent Safe, shows promise against High-risk Prostate Cancers

Shenderov
Prostate cancer nodule with dramatized anti-B7-H3 antibody therapy Credit: Adobe stock per investigator

A new drug, a monoclonal antibody known as enoblituzumab, is safe in men with aggressive prostate cancer and may induce clinical activity against cancer throughout the body, according to a phase 2 study led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. If confirmed in additional studies, enoblituzumab could become the first promising antibody-based immunotherapy agent against prostate cancer.

In a clinical trial, 32 men with high-risk or very high-risk prostate cancers who were scheduled for prostate cancer surgery were treated with six weekly infusions of enoblituzumab prior to surgery, and were followed fo...

Read More

Powerful new Meta AI Tool can Identify Individual Items within Images

Meta took a big leap forward this week with the unveiling of a model that can detect and isolate objects in an image even if it never saw them before. The technology is introduced and described in an article on the arXiv pre-print server.

The AI tool represents a major advance in one of technology’s tougher challenges: allowing computers to detect and comprehend the elements of a previously unseen image and isolate them for user interaction.

It recalls a concept the former chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Robert O. Work once described: “What AI and machine learning allows you to do is find the needle in the haystack.”

In this instance, Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) hunts for related pixels in an image and identifies the common compone...

Read More