Researchers are investigating symmetry violations in an effort to shed light on new physics. A recent paper reports progress on synthesizing and detecting ions that are among the most sensitive measures for time (T) symmetry violations. Physics has conservation laws and symmetries. For instance, the law of conservation of energy — which holds that energy…

Scientists have discovered that a new form of ant society spread across species. They found that after the new form of society evolved in one species, a ‘social supergene’ carrying the instruction-set for the new social form spread into other species. This spread occurred through hybridization, i.e., breeding between ants of different species. This unlikely…

Astronomers have now directly measured winds in Jupiter’s middle atmosphere. By analyzing the aftermath of a comet collision from the 1990s, the researchers have revealed incredibly powerful winds, with speeds of up to 1450 kilometers an hour, near Jupiter’s poles. They could represent a ‘unique meteorological beast in our Solar System’. Jupiter is famous for…

Physicists have unlocked the secret that explains how large groups of individual ‘oscillators’ — from flashing fireflies to cheering crowds, and from ticking clocks to clicking metronomes — tend to synchronize when in each other’s company. This new discovery has a suite of potential applications, including developing new types of computer technology that uses light…

A new study provides deep insights into how the brain’s hippocampus works, involving networks of millions of neurons. That knowledge could be an important step toward the development of treatments for neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and epilepsy, all of which are related to dysfunction in the hippocampus. Now, scientists in a UCLA…

Researchers have created a device that can integrate and interact with neuron-like cells. This could be an early step toward an artificial synapse for use in brain-computer interfaces. Now, in a paper published June 15 in Nature Materials, they have tested the first biohybrid version of their artificial synapse and demonstrated that it can communicate…

Scientists have made observations of a molecular cloud that is collapsing to form two massive protostars that will eventually become a binary star system. The observations showed that already at this early stage, the cloud contains two objects, a massive ‘primary’ central star and another ‘secondary’ forming star, also of high mass. While it is…

Physicists take a step toward building a fault-tolerant quantum computer. They have realized a novel type of QEC where the quantum errors are spontaneously corrected. Published by the journal Nature, research co-authored by University of Massachusetts Amherst physicist Chen Wang, graduate students Jeffrey Gertler and Shruti Shirol, and postdoctoral researcher Juliang Li takes a step…

The Earth-Moon system’s history remains mysterious. Scientists believe the two formed when a Mars-sized body collided with the proto-Earth. Earth ended up being the larger daughter of this collision and retained enough heat to become tectonically active. The Moon, being smaller, likely cooled down faster and geologically ‘froze’. The apparent dynamism of the Moon challenges…

Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Astronomers have estimated that sea to be at least 1,000-feet deep near its center — enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore. After sifting through data from one of the final Titan flybys of…