07 Nov Nuclear clocks are a tick closer to reality: physicists measure energy of lowest nuclear excited state

Nuclear clocks are a tick closer to reality thanks to experiments that measured the energy of the lowest excited state of a thorium-229 nucleus to the highest precision ever. A clock based on transitions between such nuclear states would be much more accurate than existing atomic clocks and would therefore place tighter constraints on the Standard Model of particle physics.

Atomic clocks “tick” at frequencies set by the regular transitions of electrons within atoms or ions, as measured by a laser kept in resonance with these transitions. Today’s best atomic clocks are accurate to within one part in 1018, which means they would slow down by less than one second if left running for 13 billion years (the age of the universe). However, a clock that relied on nuclear transitions would be more accurate still, because the small size of an atomic nucleus relative to an atom’s electron shell means that the behavior of the former is less affected by external electromagnetic fields.

30 Oct Artificial intelligence dives into thousands of WW2 photographs to identify photographers and objects

In a new international cross disciplinary study, researchers have used artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of historical photos from WW2. Among other things, the study shows that artificial intelligence can recognize the identity of photographers based on the content of photos taken by them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally able to identify photographers based on the content of images they’ve taken. This is the conclusion of a new study at AU Engineering, Aarhus University, where, in collaboration with Tampere University and the Finnish Environment Institute, researchers have used state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to trawl through photographs taken by 23 well-known Finnish photographers during the Second World War.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.eurekalert.org

30 Oct News | Impact Craters Reveal Details of Titan’s Dynamic Surface Weathering

New research on nine craters of Saturn’s largest moon provides more details about how weathering affects the evolution of the surface – and what lies beneath.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.jpl.nasa.gov

24 Oct NASA’s OSIRIS-REX Spacecraft Completes Touch-Down on Bennu Asteroid

The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity’s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth.

[How much of Bennu did NASA’s OSIRIS-REX collect? We’re waiting to find out.]

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nytimes.com

24 Oct A potential therapy for treating COVID-19 by blocking the virus from the neuropilin-1 (NRP1) receptor and inhibiting it from entering cells

An international team has found a way to potentially prevent the novel coronavirus from infecting cells, as well as clues as to why it is more infectious than similar viruses.

University of Bristol researchers Dr Yohei Yamauchi and Professor Peter Cullen identified where the virus binds when it is infecting host cells and then joined forces with Dr Kai-En (Kevin) Chen and Professor Brett Collins from IMB to find out more.

Putting more pieces of the puzzle together, Dr Chen and Professor Collins were able to show exactly how the virus binds to a host cell by modelling the site where they interact. “The SARS-CoV-2 virus uses a protein called Spike to bind and enter host cells, and we now know that in addition to the already known ACE2 receptor, the Spike binds to a second receptor on the host cells called neuropilin,” Professor Collins said. “We used X-ray crystallography to see the structure of proteins at the atomic level and visualize the binding sites at a spectacular level of detail.”

The University of Bristol team then looked at the effect of disrupting the binding between the virus and the second receptor.

"We discovered that by blocking the virus protein from binding neurophilin on the cells, it was possible to reduce the infection rate of the virus," Dr Yamauchi said. “If we can make a drug that blocks the virus from binding to cells, this has potential as a new therapy for treating COVID-19."

Sourced through Scoop.it from: imb.uq.edu.au

24 Oct Famous shadow of black hole provides novel test for new theories of gravity

Outwitting Albert Einstein just got even tougher. More than 100 years ago, the famous physicist published his explanation of gravity, known as general relativity (GR), which successfully explains everything from the orbits of planets to the bending of starlight. Still, some physicists have been trying to invent theories that can solve puzzles GR cannot—for example, by explaining away the need for invisible dark matter, whose gravity appears to bind the galaxies. But the first direct image of a black hole, revealed last year, has now provided a tough new test for theories of gravity. Fail it and your theory is dead. “It’s a new hoop to jump through and a fairly narrow one,” says Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona who helped devise the new test.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencemag.org

19 Oct A Billion Tiny Pendulums Could Detect the Universe’s Dark Matter

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have proposed a novel method for finding dark matter, the cosmos’s mystery material that has eluded detection for decades. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe; ordinary matter, such as the stuff that builds stars and planets, accounts for just 5% of the cosmos. A mysterious entity called dark energy, accounts for the other 68%.

According to cosmologists, all the visible material in the universe is merely floating in a vast sea of dark matter — particles that are invisible but nonetheless have mass and exert a gravitational force. Dark matter’s gravity would provide the missing glue that keeps galaxies from falling apart and account for how matter clumped together to form the universe’s rich galactic tapestry. 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nist.gov

15 Oct World’s smallest camera is the size of a grain of sand

OmniVision OV6948 enters the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest camera.

OmniVision OV6948 measures in super-small at just 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232mm and is good for 40,000-pixel color images using an RGB Bayer back-side-illuminating chip. This new camera is ridiculosuly small, but it’s for specific use cases in surgery.

With the OmniVision OV6948 surgeons can have a camera so small it will fit into the smallest veins inside of the human body.

This technology provides surgeons and doctors that have the OmniVision OV6948 with next-gen camera access for future surgeries. Until now, surgeons do this without any camera — acting blind. The only cameras capable of anything close to this are very few, but they also have a much lower resolution fiber optic feed. The new OmniVision OV6948 captures images at 30FPS, and can have analog output at over 4mm away with minimal noise.

The OmniVision OV6948 has a 120-degree super-side angle field of view, something that on a regular camera would come up as 14nm on a full-frame sensor. The depth of field for the OmniVision OV6948 spans between 3mm and 30mm.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.tweaktown.com