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    Red alert: Massive Stars Sound Warning they are about to go Supernova

    October 17, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. Credit: European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

    Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about ...

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    Flatworm-Inspired Medical Adhesives Stop Blood Loss

    October 14, 2022, Categories  Biology/Biotechnology, Health/Medical

    Design of LIMB. a Schematic illustration of marine organisms that contain interconnected micropores for adhesiveness and transport of liquid reagents. b Schematic of LIMB adhering on blood-exposed substrates. c Schematics showing that LIMB can uptake interfacial fluid, secrete functional liquids, and coagulate blood, thereby providing adhesion, hemostatic, and sealing function. d Confocal image of rhodamine-labeled LIMB (red) containing micropores, partially filled with a FITC-labeled chitosan functional liquid (green). e Sizes of surface and internal pores in LIMB containing 2 M or 5 M PAAm. f–h Stress-stretch curves (f), fracture energy (g), and fractocohesive lengths (h) of LIMBs with varying PAAm content. Values in e, g, h represent the mean ± s.d. (n = 40 for 2M-LIMB Surfa...
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    New Measurements Quantifying Qudits provide Glimpse of Quantum Future

    October 14, 2022, Categories  Physics

    The micro-ring resonator, shown here as a closed loop, generated high-dimensional photon pairs. Researchers examined these photons by manipulating the phases of different frequencies, or colors, of light and mixing frequencies, as shown by the crisscrossed multicolor lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
    The micro-ring resonator, shown here as a closed loop, generated high-dimensional photon pairs. Researchers examined these photons by manipulating the phases of different frequencies, or colors, of light and mixing frequencies, as shown by the crisscrossed multicolor lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

    Using existing experimental and computational resources, a multi-institutional team has developed an effective method for measuring high-dimensional qudits encoded in quantum frequency combs, which are a type of photon source, on a single optical chip.

    Although the word “qudit” might look like a typo, this lesser-known cousin of the qubit, or quantum bit, can carry more information and is more resistant to noise — both of which are key qualities needed to improve the ...

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    Dust Plumes Observed being ‘Pushed’ into Interstellar Space by Intense Starlight

    October 14, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Dust Rings in the Wolf-Rayet 140 System, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope
    Dust Rings in the Wolf-Rayet 140 System, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JPL-Caltech

    Astronomers have observed directly for the first time how intense light from stars can ‘push’ matter. Researchers made the observation when tracking a giant plume of dust generated by the violent interactions between two massive stars.

    The results, made using infrared images of the binary star system WR140 taken over 16 years, are reported in the journal Nature.

    In a complementary study of WR140, published in Nature Astronomy, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was able to see much deeper to snap an image of not just a single accelerating dust plume, but almost 20 of them, nested inside each other like a giant set of onion skins.

    WR140 is compri...

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