Hubble reaches new Milestone in Mystery of Universe’s Expansion Rate

This collection of 36 images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features galaxies that are all hosts to both Cepheid variables and supernovae. These two celestial phenomena are both crucial tools used by astronomers to determine astronomical distance, and have been used to refine our measurement of the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe.

Completing a nearly 30-year marathon, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 “milepost markers” of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe — a quest with a plot twist.

Pursuit of the universe’s expansion rate began in the 1920s with measurements by astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Georges Lemaître...

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World-first discovery of Cornea T cells Protecting Eyes from Viral Infections

The cornea—the transparent protective outer layer of the eye critical to helping us see—produces a delicate and limited immune response to fight infections without damaging our vision, according to a new study from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute).

Published today in Cell Reports, the study has shown long-living memory T cells that patrol and fight viral infections are present in the cornea, upending current thought that T cells are not found in healthy corneas—expanding our understanding of the eye’s immune response to infections.

The team used a multiphoton microscope that provides live images of living, intact biological tissues to study cornea cells in mice infected with Herpes Simplex Virus.

Their images revealed long-livin...

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Emulating impossible ‘Unipolar’ Laser Pulses paves the way for processing Quantum Information

The semiconductor nanosheets in the water-cooled copper mount turn an infrared laser pulse into an effectively unipolar terahertz pulse. The team says that their terahertz emitter could be made to fit inside a matchbox. Image credit: Christian Meineke, Huber Lab, University of Regensburg

Quantum materials emit light as though it were only a positive pulse, rather than a positive-negative oscillation. A laser pulse that sidesteps the inherent symmetry of light waves could manipulate quantum information, potentially bringing us closer to room temperature quantum computing.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Regensburg and the University of Michigan, could also accelerate conventional computing.

Quantum computing has the potential to accelerate solutions to problems ...

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AI reveals unsuspected Math underlying Search for Exoplanets

chart explaining gravitational microlensing
This infographic explains the light curve astronomers detect when viewing a microlensing event, and the signature of an exoplanet: an additional uptick in brightness when the exoplanet lenses the background star. (Image Credit: NASA / ESA / K. Sahu / STScI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on real astronomical observations now outperform astronomers in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new exploding stars, identify new types of galaxies and detect the mergers of massive stars, accelerating the rate of new discovery in the world’s oldest science.

But AI, also called machine learning, can reveal something deeper, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers found: Unsuspected connections hidden in the complex mathematics arising from general relativity—...

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