Not a moonshot: Astronomers explore possibility of lunar observatory to better understand fundamental physics, astronomy and cosmology. «By tapping into the natural conditions on the moon, we showed that one of the most challenging spectrum of gravitational waves can be measured better from the lunar surface, which so far seems impossible from Earth or space,»…

Scientists have measured the masses of the giant planets of the V1298 Tau system, just 20 million year old. Masses for such young giant planets had not been obtained previously, and this is the first evidence that these objects have already reached their final size at very early stages of their evolution. The study, led…

Researchers developed a protocol to efficiently purify palladium and silver ions from industrial waste, and convert the ions into pure metallic elements. This will help increase global stock of valuable elements that are widely needed yet in scarce supply. In an upcoming study in Chemical Engineering Journal, researchers from Kanazawa University report a major improvement…

Researchers created a new approach to VR that will allow multiple players to interact with the same VR app on smartphones and provide new opportunities for education, health care and entertainment. Now, Purdue University researchers have created a new approach to VR that allows multiple players to interact with the same VR game on smartphones…

New mirror coatings will increase the volume of space LIGO can probe in its next run. In the future, as more and more upgrades are made to the National Science Foundation-funded LIGO observatories — one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana — the facilities are expected to detect increasingly large numbers of…

Researchers have developed a new chemical separation method that is vastly more efficient than conventional processes, opening the door to faster discovery of new elements, easier nuclear fuel reprocessing, and, most tantalizing, a better way to attain actinium-225, a promising therapeutic isotope for cancer treatment. Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National…

Using a novel probe for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), biological engineers have devised a way to monitor individual populations of neurons and reveal how they interact with each other. Similar to how the gears of a clock interact in specific ways to turn the clock’s hands, different parts of the brain interact to perform…

Scientists leveraged LISA Pathfinder’s record-setting sensitivity (designed to ripples in space-time produced by, among other things, merging black holes) for a different purpose much closer to home — mapping microscopic dust shed by comets and asteroids. Most of these particles, known as micrometeroids, have masses measured in micrograms, similar to a small grain of sand.…

Fifty potential planets have had their existence confirmed by a new machine learning algorithm. For the first time, astronomers have used a process based on machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyse a sample of potential planets and determine which ones are real and which are ‘fakes’, or false positives, calculating the probability…

A team of researchers assembled a sulfonated polyaniline (SPAN) organic electrochemical network device (OEND) for use in reservoir computing. SPAN was deposited on gold electrodes which formed a disordered network providing humidity-dependent electrical properties. The SPAN OEND was tested for reservoir computing using benchmark tasks and spoken-digit classification, which showed 70% accuracy. The device has…