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Month: October 2018

The “slow motion” modes on modern smartphones crank up the speed of video recording so that when it’s played back at regular speed, the motion you see on the screen is slowed down. It’s a neat feature to mess around with, but slow motion capture has some very serious scientific applications as well. Capturing the microscopic world at high speeds can help researchers shed light on all kinds of interesting behaviors and phenomena that shape our reality.

Now, imaging specialists have built what is being called the fastest camera on the planet, allowing for the capture of movement at up to 10 trillion frames per second. Forget slowing down a video of a home run at your kid’s softball game, this incredible contraption can slow down light itself.

A new paper published in Light: Science & Applications explains how the camera works, and boy is it complicated. To put it in its most basic terms, the camera uses laser pulses so ultra-fast that they are measured in quadrillionths of a second and combines those frames with images captured from a second camera moving at the same speed, allowing for high-quality images generated 10 trillion times every second.

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Hard as it is to believe, for the first time the life expectancy for Americans (not counting the effect of wars) has dropped for two consecutive years. Perhaps less hard to believe is that this is not true across economic levels. The richest Americans are gaining in longevity, indeed to unprecedented levels. The poor don’t have it so well, and in the U.S., this includes the shrinking middle class, who are also dying earlier. With the widening income gap, there’s a growing discrepancy between life expectancies for the rich and poor. Depending on geography, those on the lower end of the income bracket spread can expect to live 20 years less than their better-off counterparts, a shocking finding from an in-depth study coming out of the University of Washington.

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The standard model of modern cosmology is unthinkable without dark matter, although direct detections are still missing. A broad perspective of how dark matter was postulated and became accepted is presented, from prehistory, over observations of galaxy clusters, galaxy rotation curves, the search for baryonic dark matter, possible alternative explanations via modified gravity, up to the hunt for dark matter particles. The interplay is described between observational discoveries and theoretical arguments which led finally to the adoption of this paradigm.

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If you replace classical bits with qubits, though, you go back to only needing one per spin in the system, because all the quantum stuff comes along for free. You don&s;t need extra bits to track the superposition, because the qubits themselves can be in superposition states. And you don&s;t need extra bits to track the entanglement, because the qubits themselves can be entangled with other qubits. A not-too-big quantum computer— again, 50–100 qubits— can efficiently solve problems that are simply impossible for a classical computer.

These sorts of problems pop up in useful contexts, such as the study of magnetic materials, whose magnetic nature comes from adding together the quantum spins of lots of particles, or some types of superconductors. As a general matter, any time you&s;re trying to find the state of a large quantum system, the computational overhead needed to do it will be much less if you can map it onto a system of qubits than if you&s;re stuck using a classical computer.

So, there&s;s your view-from-30,000-feet look at what quantum computing is, and what it&s;s good for. A quantum computer is a device that exploits wave nature, superposition, and entanglement to do calculations involving collective mathematical properties or the simulation of quantum systems more efficiently than you can do with any classical computer. That&s;s why these are interesting systems to study, and why heavy hitters like Google, Microsoft, and IBM are starting to invest heavily in the field.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland is said to be the largest particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator occupies a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference as deep as 175 meters beneath the French-Swiss border. The facility has helped scientists uncover the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by the Standard Model, in 2012.

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The cancer is a group of diseases characterized by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells, and in most of the cases develop into malignant masses of tissues called tumors, and it is the leading causes of mortality and a major public health challenge worldwide. In normal body, genes in the cell nucleus, containing long strings of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) regulate the controlled division and function of cells and any damage to DNA causes the mutation of genes, which in turn triggers the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells, leading to the damage of vital organs. Cancer cells can detach from the original mass of tumor and migrate to new locations through blood and lymphatic system and also cancer cells produce enzymes that are capable of breaking the normal cells. For cancer diagnostics, the conventional histopathological and radiological examinations are still used for evaluating the clinical and pathologic staging, needed for cancer treatments. Depends on the stage of cancer development, different treatment options like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, stem cell transplant, immunotherapy, hormone therapy, targeted drug therapy and surgery are advised. The major disadvantages of the available advanced treatment options include non localized invasion to other body parts, intolerable cytotoxicity, unsystematic distribution of antitumor agents, immune to chemical agents, low bioavailability and limited option to evaluate the tumor cell response to therapies4,5. In spite of the drawbacks of these advanced treatment options, cancer is curable if it is diagnosed at an early stage.

Phototherapy has been used for the treatment of jaundice, cancer, dermatological conditions, and ophthalmological disorders by simply using the light of certain selected wavelength. Photodynamic therapy, on the other hand is a method of photosensitizing the action of drugs to kill cancer cells, but the major drawback of this treatment is that most of the drugs used for photodynamic therapy remain activated for a long time, leading to overdose to damage non cancer cells. In the photo-catalytic process, no drug is used, instead the nontoxic semiconductor photo-catalyst like WO3 generates electron hole pairs, when it is exposed to the light of appropriate wavelength and these photo-generated charge carriers mediate oxidation and reduction reactions in the cancer cell to eliminate them.

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New research, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, suggests spontaneous DNA mutations that occur when a baby’s brain is growing in the womb may help explain why so many people develop dementia without having any prior family history with the disease.

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Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. This week’s contribution is from Beth Bartel and Tim Dittman, from the non-profit UNAVCO consortium in Boulder, Colorado.

About 18 miles west of the Yellowstone National Park boundary in Idaho, UNAVCO field engineer Tom Lyman surveys the damage at GPS station P361 on Sawtell Peak. This is an important site, not only because it is located close to active faults in the Yellowstone region, but also because it serves as a data relay for four additional nearby GPS stations. None of the GPS equipment is transmitting data.

UNAVCO, a member of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory consortium, is responsible for maintaining the deformation network in and around Yellowstone. In Yellowstone National Park alone this network includes 14 GPS stations and six borehole geophysics stations. All the data are free and open access.

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