Science

The black hole at the centre of galaxy M87 has been imaged at higher resolution and is now revealed in even clearer detail

Universe Today recently explored the importance of studying impact craters and what they can teach us about finding life beyond Earth. Impact craters are considered one of the many surface processes—others include volcanism, weathering, erosion, and plate tectonics—that shape surfaces on numerous planetary bodies, with all of them simultaneously occurring on Earth. Here, we will explore how and why planetary scientists study planetary surfaces, the challenges faced when studying other planetary surfaces, what planetary surfaces can teach us about finding life, and how upcoming students can pursue studying planetary surfaces, as well. So, why is it so important to study planetary surfaces throughout the solar system?

“Planetary surfaces record the history of the Solar System, a history that’s almost entirely lost to us here on Earth,” Dr. Paul Byrne, who is an Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, tells Universe Today. “Our planet is active and has processes that erode, bury, or destroy its ancient surfaces, so we have a limited understanding of the early days of our own planet. But that ancient record is (largely) preserved on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and even smaller objects such as asteroids, so by studying them we’re getting a better understanding of our own planet. And it works both ways: by applying what we know of Earth, we’re able to get a better handle on why the surfaces of other worlds look the way they do.”

While the Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old, the reason why it lacks ancient surface features is due to the surface processes mentioned above, as all of them are very active on the Earth and causing the surface to drastically change over the planet’s lifetime. However, it is plate tectonics that is arguably the biggest contributor for altering the Earth’s surface. This involves the recycling of the Earth’s surface and subsurface materials due to our planet’s seven major and eight minor tectonic plates interacting with each other over vast periods of geologic time as they spread, smash, and even slide past each other through the three types of plate boundaries known as divergent, convergent, and transform plate, respectively. While studying all these processes on the Earth are conducted through direct examination, laboratory analyses, and satellite imagery, what are some of the challenges that scientists encounter when studying planetary surfaces on other worlds?

Dr. Byrne tells Universe Today, “Studying the surfaces of other worlds is challenging for several reasons, the first (and biggest) being that we have to get there! We’re limited in what we can learn with telescopes from Earth (either on the surface or in space), because those telescopes are generally designed to study truly enormous and vastly distant features like nebulae. So, to properly ‘see’ the surfaces of bodies in the Solar System, we need to send spacecraft there—either to fly by or, preferably, orbit. In many cases, once we’re there we can image the surface and take other measurements relatively easily.”

Dr. Byrne continues by telling Universe Today, “But for worlds such as Venus and Titan, which have thick atmospheres, we need radar to see through to the surface. Then we have to make sense of what we’re actually seeing! That’s where we use ‘comparative planetology’, applying what we know of Earth (and other places we’ve visited) to piece together the story of what we’re seeing. It’s challenging, especially for a place we’ve never visited before, but also extremely exciting!”

Also called remote sensing, satellites and orbiters perform a variety of tasks during a flyby or once in orbit around a planetary body that range from direct images to scientific measurements, including spectroscopy, temperature, and surface composition, just to name a few. As its name implies, a flyby is when a spacecraft is designed to fly past a planetary body—or bodies—and conduct as much science as possible before the spacecraft passes it. Two of the most famous flyby missions in the history of space exploration are the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. These brave, robotic pioneers conducted flybys of the outer planets that greatly expanded our knowledge and understanding of not only the planets, but their many moons, as well.

They discovered volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon, Io, and a lack of craters on Europa, indicating the potential existence of a liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface. They obtained the first images of Saturn’s ravioli-like moon, Pan, to complement a few other Saturnian moons they also discovered. Additionally, they imaged several other previously discovered moons, including Titan, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, and Mimas. While Voyager 1’s trajectory took it out of the solar system, Voyager 2 continued to Uranus and Neptune, imaging their moons of Miranda and Triton, respectively, with the latter having geysers that shoot several kilometers into space. Most recently, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, imaging its surface and revealing a landscape of mountains and valleys that scientists previously hypothesized didn’t exist.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft snapped this incredible image of dwarf planet Pluto during its July 2015 flyby, revealing smooth, nitrogen plains (Sputnik Planitia; white, heart-shaped region) and massive, water-ice mountain ranges. (Scale: 35 miles = 56 kilometers) (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

For orbiters, NASA and a number of space agencies around the world have sent a plethora of spacecraft to orbit and study the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with Voyager 2 being the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune. An example of one of countless past orbiter missions includes NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that explored the Saturnian system between 2004 and 2017. This historic mission provided scientists valuable new data about the ringed planet and its many moons, including confirming the existence of lakes of liquid methane on Titan and geysers shooting from the south pole of Enceladus, which Cassini flew through and sampled for organics. Additionally, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe detached from Cassini and landed on Titan, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an outer solar system planetary body, where it imaged rounded pebbles on the surface that might have been shaped from fluid activity.

Image of water vapor plumes emanating from the south pole of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

An example of an active orbiter mission is NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which uses its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera to obtain some of the most stunning images of any planetary body ever explored. It not only provides valuable scientific data about the Red Planet but has also imaged active avalanches on the Martian surface on numerous occasions. But with all these missions and their scientific images and data, what can planetary surfaces teach us about finding life outside of Earth?

Image of an avalanche on Mars taken by NASA’s HiRISE camera in April 2008. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

“One of the biggest questions we have is why and when life emerged on Earth, and as one part in answering those questions we need to understand when and why Earth became habitable,” Dr. Byrne tells Universe Today. “So, studying other planetary surfaces can tell us about the conditions during the early part of Solar System history, and also the processes that are common to planetary bodies generally or are seemingly unique to Earth. The full answer will come from a combination of chemistry, biology, fieldwork on Earth, and planetary science observations, but certainly a key part of the puzzle involves the study of other worlds.”

Dr. Byrne proudly tells Universe Today that his favorite planetary surface he has studied during his career is Venus, which is known for its extreme surface temperatures of approximately 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit) and crushing surface pressures that are more than 90 times greater than on Earth. Radar images obtained from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s revealed striking surface features that were indicative of volcanic activity, either in the past or present. This includes massive shield volcanoes, some of which are more than 100 times larger than any lava domes on the Earth and are likely due to the extreme surface temperatures and pressures. Despite this, scientists currently hypothesize that microbial life could still exist within its clouds, which possess temperatures and pressures that are more Earth-like. Also, despite its extremely harsh conditions today, scientists also hypothesize that Venus’ surface was once more Earth-like deep in its ancient past.

“It’s an incredible world, one almost the same size as Earth but with vastly different surface conditions—for reasons we still don’t understand,” Dr. Byrne tells Universe Today. “Venus has a horde of features we can recognize on Earth, including volcanoes, lava flows, tectonic structures, impact craters, and even a couple of dune fields. But it also has landforms we don’t see obvious counterparts to on Earth, or any other world for that matter. And perhaps most intriguing are Venus’ “tessera terrains”, a type of landscape that really doesn’t look like anything else in the Solar System except, perhaps, Earth’s continents. Figuring out why Venus is so fantastically different to Earth is a really important task for planetary scientists not just for understanding Venus, but for ultimately establishing how two large rocky worlds can end up so different, with one being home to us and the other being utterly inhospitable.”

Given the plethora of worlds that have been explored throughout the Space Age, studying planetary surfaces involves a multitude of scientific backgrounds and disciplines to help piece together the very intricate puzzle of how our solar system and its many planets, moons, and asteroids came to be what they are today. Along with studying satellite images, additional research involves laboratory experiments, real-world and computer simulations, data analysis, fieldwork, countless measurements and calculations, and much more. Therefore, what advice does Dr. Byrne offer to upcoming students who wish to pursue studying planetary surfaces?

“Certainly the standard training in mathematics, physics, and chemistry will help, but a solid grounding in geology is just as (if not more) important,” Dr. Byrne tells Universe Today. “But even that training can take a myriad of forms, say as part of an environmental science degree or from an Earth science, geology, or even geophysics degree. Experience with remote-sensing software and processing techniques is a big help. But arguably the most important thing is a familiarity with the different ways landscapes can look across Earth and the Solar System, and that familiarity can start in childhood by just being interested in what your locality looks like!”

2017 video when Dr. Paul Byrne was a faculty at NC State University.

What new discoveries will scientists make about planetary surfaces throughout the solar system, and possibly elsewhere, in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post Planetary Surfaces: Why study them? Can they help us find life elsewhere? appeared first on Universe Today.

Bottom trawling, a controversial and destructive fishing technique, releases large amounts of carbon dioxide from the seabed – and much of this gas gets into the atmosphere

An innovative study explores the use of robotic-assisted joint replacement in revision knee scenarios, comparing the pre- and post-revision implant positions in a series of revision total knee arthroplasties (TKA) using a state-of-the-art robotic arm system.

There’s overwhelming evidence that Mars was once wet and warm. Rivers flowed across its surface and carved intricate channel systems revealed by our orbiters. Expansive oceans even larger than Earth’s may have covered a third of its surface. Then something happened: Mars lost its atmosphere, cooled down, and surface water disappeared.

But as our observations of Mars become more detailed, it’s looking like Mars didn’t lose its water in one cataclysmic episode. Deepening evidence shows that it lost its water gradually. The planet may have had recurring episodes of surface water that persisted intermittently over a longer period of time. If that’s true, it has implications for potential life on Mars.

New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters is bolstering the idea that Mars may have taken a long time to lose its water. The research letter is titled “New Maximum Constraints on the Era of Martian Valley Network Formation.” The author is Alexander Morgan, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who studies geomorphology.

“Mars today is a global desert, but its surface preserves extensive evidence of past flowing water, including what appear to be river valleys,” Morgan says. “The timescale over which these valleys formed has big implications for early Mars’ habitability, as long eras with stable liquid water would be more conducive to life,” he said.

This is Osuga Valles, a complex set of fluvial channels in the vicinity of Valles Marineris on Mars. Several episodes of rapidly flowing water carved the channels. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

The extensive evidence of ancient rivers on Mars is highlighted by the Perseverance Rover and the area it is exploring. It’s called Jezero Crater, and it’s the site of an ancient impact crater. At some time in the past, the crater was flooded with water, creating a massive sedimentary basin. Orbital images of Jezero show ancient river channels flooding into the gigantic crater.

This image of Jezero Crater shows the river channel that flowed into the crater. The yellow rectangle is where the Perseverance Rover landed, and the different colours represent different minerals. Image Credit: NASA/MRO/UA/CRISM

As Perseverance’s landing site shows, impact craters and rivers mingle with one another across the Martian surface. That fact is the key to Morgan’s research. By dating craters near river channels, he placed temporal constraints on when the rivers that created the channels were flowing.

“In this study, I used craters that predate and postdate valley systems to place maximum bounds of hundreds of millions of years on the era over which these systems formed,” Morgan said. “Previous work had only determined minimum timescales, so these new results provide an upper bound on the timescale over which Martian valleys were active. Given what we know about erosion rates on early Mars, longer timescales imply that conditions permitting rivers were highly intermittent, with long arid periods interspersed with brief episodes of fluvial activity.”

This figure from the study illustrates Morgan’s work. It shows some of the details of an unnamed Martian valley network. Red circles indicate craters that formed after the river valleys. Blue circles are craters that formed before the valleys. Dashed circles indicate that the timing of a crater is less certain. The dashed black lines are the valley network, the white line outlines the entire basin, and the black line outlines highland areas that have undergone less erosion. Image Credit: Morgan, 2024.

Mars’ river valleys formed over three billion years ago. They’re the strongest evidence that the planet had surface water. Research shows that it takes tens of thousands of years for flowing water to carve a valley into the surface, but nobody has figured out how many different flow events there were and how much total time it took for these valleys to form. Until now.

Our understanding of Mars has grown considerably in recent years and will keep growing. Our understanding of its climate history is undergoing a revolution. Previously, there were two opposing versions of Mars’s ancient past. One says that it was warm and wet and potentially habitable; the other says it was a frigid planet covered in ice sheets.

But things in Nature are seldom so simple, even if we’d like them to be. Growing evidence, including this work, shows that there’s more complexity to the story than either “warm and wet” or “cold and dry” can encapsulate.

“Over the past decade or so, we’ve come to realize that these descriptors are far too general, and it doesn’t really make sense to try to condense hundreds of millions of years of climate history into a two-word description,” Morgan said.

As we’ve studied Earth, we’ve come to realize that the climate oscillated wildly during its long history. During some periods, the Earth was covered with extensive glaciers several kilometres thick. At other times, the glaciers retreated to their mountain redoubts. Why wouldn’t other planets have equally as varied histories?

“Like Earth, early Mars was complex, and the conditions permitting surface water likely varied considerably. Earth has undergone massive climatic changes throughout its history – for example, 20,000 years ago, the area that is now Chicago was beneath half a mile of ice – and surface conditions permitting rivers on early Mars likewise probably waxed and waned.”

That waxing and waning means it took a long time for the rivers to erode the landscape and form channels and valleys. One possible explanation is that large boulders in the riverbeds inhibited further erosion. Another is that the rivers flowed infrequently, possibly as little as 0.001 % of the time. If that’s the case, it could be because of what we call Milankovitch cycles here on Earth.

Milankovitch cycles are changes in the Earth’s relative position and orientation to the Sun. Things like axial tilt, orbital eccentricity, and precession create changes in our planet’s climate. Earth’s axial tilt varies by about 3.5 degrees every 40,000 years or so. Mars has an even more pronounced axial tilt variation that undergoes substantial changes in hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

“Over short timescales, river flow is controlled by rainfall or upstream snow melt. Over longer timescales, Earth’s rivers are affected by climatic changes,” Morgan said. “For example, 20,000 years ago, there were large lakes and larger rivers across what is now Nevada. Martian rivers would have operated in a similar way, with short-term variability due to storms or snowmelt, and longer-term variability due to changes in the planet’s spin and orbit around the Sun.”

Or powerful volcanic activity could’ve periodically warmed the planet, melting ice sheets and spawning rivers that carved telltale channels into the planet’s surface. The Tharsis Montes region shows that volcanoes played a role in Mars’ history. Tharsis Montes is home to three massive shield volcanoes that dwarf Earth’s volcanoes. Another volcano, Olympus Mons, is just northwest of Tharsis Montes and is the largest volcano in the Solar System.

A colourized image of the surface of Mars taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The line of three volcanoes is the Tharsis Montes, with Olympus Mons to the northwest. Valles Marineris is to the east. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Arizona State University

We don’t really know what happened on Mars. Is Mars just a standard example of marginally habitable planets that become uninhabitable? Or is it a striking example of a planet that stubbornly held onto its water through multiple climatic episodes? Did simple life get started on Mars before it was snuffed out, and is that just the way things work? Or is surface water on any planet for any period of time extremely rare?

For now, we don’t have any clear answers to those big questions. Planets are big, complicated, long-lived, and dynamic objects. Understanding what happened billions of years ago on a planet is a daunting task.

The post Early Mars Climate was Complex, with Streams Flowing Intermittently for Millions of Years appeared first on Universe Today.

MEMRI is the acronym for the Middle East Media Research Institute, where I spent a bit of time when I was last in Jerusalem. (They also have a headquarters in Washington, D. C.)

They translate pretty much everything that’s put online in the Arab world (ergo requiring a big stable of translators and computers), and MEMRI puts the videos online to let the let the world know what’s going on in the Middle East. They translate stuff from social media, government bulletins, sermons from mosques, schoolbooks, school plays—anything that can give insight into the Zeitgeist in the Arab world.  The Arabic, Urdi, Farsi, Turkish, Pashto, and so on are translated into Hebrew and English, and the material they translate is put up at this site. MEMRI also translates some Russian and Chinese articles into both English and Hebrew.  (Malgorzata translates many of MEMRI’s English-language articles into Polish, and of those now number 5,022!)

MEMRI’s subscribers include many governments and intelligences services in the West, as well as colleges and universities.

When I asked Yigal why mosques would even want to film sermons full of hatred and condemnation of Jews, he replied that for some reason imams and others can’t resist being on social media.

Before we get to the WSJ article on MRMRI, I’ll retell an anecdote involving its Jerusalem head and co-founder, Yigal Carmon, who previously served for two decades in the IDF, attaining the rank of Colonel, and, well, there’s more from his Wikipedia bio:

From 1977 to 1981, [Carmon] served as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Menachem Milson was appointed to serve as head of the Civil Administration, Carmon was appointed his deputy. Carmon was appointed acting head of the Civil Administration 26 September 1982 after Milson’s 22 September resignation. He served in that position until Shlomo Ilya became the Administration’s head 29 November.

In 1988, Carmon was appointed adviser on counterterrorism for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Following the fall of the Shamir government in 1992, he served for a year as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s counterterrorism adviser before resigning in 1993 due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. From 1991 to 1992 he was also a part of the Israeli delegation to peace negotiations with Syria in Washington.

He founded MEMRI in 1998, so it’s just had its 25th anniversary.

All this is to say that Yigal knows whereof he speaks, and he’s served both left-wing (Rabin) and right-wing (Shamir) Israeli governments (Carmon’s own allegiance is on the Left), knows many Arab leaders, and when he says something about the political or military climate in the Middle East, he’s worth paying attention to. (By the way, MEMRI has almost never had any mistranslations of the Arabic, despite embarrassed speakers saying that their words weren’t properly translated.)

And that brings us to my anecdote, which is mine. Here it comes:

Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter. During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter remained sanguine.  I said “How do you know this?”  Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint.  Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.

Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.

Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices.

On October 6, I informed him that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):

From: Jerry Coyne 
Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PM
To: Yigal Carmon 

Hi Yigal, I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed. Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted? best,
Jerry And Yigal answered the same day. Here is what he said: From: Yigal Carmon
To: ​Jerry Coyne​
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them. Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….

As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.

And so it happened, and Yigal’s prediction was mentioned in the new WSJ op-ed below, which gives background and details about MEMRI. But remember, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!  Click to read, though I can’t find the article archived. I’ll give a few excerpts (indented):

From the article:

Yigal Carmon is one of the few Israelis who can claim to have predicted this war. His Aug. 31 article “Signs of Possible War in September-October” cited provocations by Hezbollah, escalating violence in the West Bank and threats from Hamas as evidence of regional coordination for something big. “Israel will likely be compelled to undertake a large-scale response,” he wrote, “even at the cost of an all-out war.”

Some details were off, but Mr. Carmon says anyone paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall. “They said it all. They said everything,” Mr. Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterterrorism adviser to two prime ministers, says in a phone interview from Jerusalem. As president and a co-founder of Memri, the Middle East Media Research Institute, he had publicized Hamas’s videos advertising its drills for an invasion of Israel, as well as its claims that total war was coming.

But Hamas is always threatening war, and most of the time it comes to naught. “If they publish it many times, then you can ignore it?” he asks in response to the point. “I say just the opposite. If they publish it many times, it suggests they mean it and you cannot ignore it. You must take it seriously.”

Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.”

Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism.

. . .Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.

Memri also documents Gazans’ indoctrination from childhood into a religious ideology that puts them on a war footing. “Their textbooks are our life,” Mr. Carmon says, “but no one paid attention.” Instead, Israeli leaders were convinced that Qatari money and past beatings would deter Hamas.

It’s MEMRI, for instance, that has brought to the attention of me and many others the Jew hatred taught to Arabic schoolchildren, making us realize that in its most virulent form it’s here to stay for at least another generation.

Here’s another reason why Western governments should be reading MEMRI:

. . .Mr. Carmon directs me to a recent article in which he writes, “Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter—those clueless Americans, who don’t even know that Qatar is spitting in their face with wild anti-U.S. incitement 24/7 . . . because they only watch the deceptive Al-Jazeera TV in English.” On the Arabic-language channel, he says, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera “is the megaphone of Hamas like it was the megaphone of al Qaeda. Every speech, every statement—everything is aired several times until everybody gets it.”

The article faults the Biden administration for “pleading with Qatar” instead of threatening it: “Just one comment by the U.S. administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home.” Instead, while hostage negotiations stall, the U.S. has quietly agreed to extend its presence at the Qatari base for another decade, according to a Jan. 2 CNN report. Mr. Carmon seems mystified by U.S. weakness. “Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without power pressure on the side?”

If intelligence officials in the West aren’t reading MEMRI on a regular basis, they’re making a mistake. As you see, even the Biden administration has been gulled by the Middle East, and this happens pretty regularly. (Anthony Blinken is an especially notable victim, and he passes his gullibility on to Biden. Only someone completely oblivious to what’s happening in the Middle East would now be speaking of a “two state solution” as a way to settle this war.)

Although the WSJ article isn’t archived, perhaps a judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.

Thanks again to Yigal and his family for their hospitality when I was in Israel.

A new study is a significant breakthrough in understanding Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) involving supermassive black holes. The new simulations accurately replicate the entire sequence of a TDE from stellar disruption to the peak luminosity of the resulting flare.

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is 'eating' its host galaxy to death.

Researchers have synthesized the first 2D heavy fermion. The material, a layered intermetallic crystal composed of cerium, silicon, and iodine (CeSiI), has electrons that are 1000x heavier and is a new platform to explore quantum phenomena.

Researchers have synthesized the first 2D heavy fermion. The material, a layered intermetallic crystal composed of cerium, silicon, and iodine (CeSiI), has electrons that are 1000x heavier and is a new platform to explore quantum phenomena.

A team has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microkelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise. Using the well-known terbium titanate as an example, the team demonstrated that the method delivers highly reliable results. The thermal Hall effect provides information about coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials, based on their interaction with lattice vibrations (phonons).

A team has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microkelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise. Using the well-known terbium titanate as an example, the team demonstrated that the method delivers highly reliable results. The thermal Hall effect provides information about coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials, based on their interaction with lattice vibrations (phonons).

Researchers have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution. It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.

Researchers have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution. It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.

A discovery from an experiment with magnetic materials and ultrafast lasers could be a boon to energy-efficient data storage.

A discovery from an experiment with magnetic materials and ultrafast lasers could be a boon to energy-efficient data storage.

Researchers have developed a bio-logger for seabirds that enables long-term observation of rare behaviors. The bio-logger employs low-power depth sensors and accelerometers to identify rare behavior using a light-weight outlier detection model and records the behavior in a 5-min video. Observations using the bio-loggers on Streaked Shearwaters revealed novel aspects of head-shaking and foraging strategies. This approach will enable a wider range of animal behaviors in various environments to be observed.

Due to the substantial clinical demand for artificial small-diameter vessels (SDVs), numerous commercial products have emerged. However, the majority of existing artificial SDVs lack an endothelial layer, leading to thrombosis. Fabricating artificial SDVs with a consistently uniform endothelial layer and adequate mechanical properties has proven exceptionally challenging. A research team has now induced spontaneous cell assembly and endothelialization through internal pores.

Researchers have achieved a successful contrast agent-free imaging of complex structure of kidney vessels.

The shape, size and optical properties of 3-dimensional nanostructures can now be simulated in advance before they are produced directly with high precision on a wide variety of surfaces. Nanoprobes or optical tweezers with sizes in the nanometre range are now within reach.