Elusive planets play “hide and seek” with CHEOPS

Artist's impression of CHEOPS.
Illustration Credit: ESA / ATG medialab

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope an international team of European astronomers managed to clearly identify the existence of four new exoplanets. The four mini-Neptunes are smaller and cooler, and more difficult to find than the so-called Hot Jupiter exoplanets which have been found in abundance. Two of the four resulting papers are led by researchers from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva who are also members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS.

CHEOPS is a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, under the leadership of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva. Since its launch in December 2019, the extremely precise measurements of CHEOPS have contributed to several key discoveries in the field of exoplanets.

NCCR PlanetS members Dr. Solène Ulmer-Moll of the Universities of Bern and Geneva, and Dr. Hugh Osborn of the University of Bern, exploited the unique synergy of CHEOPS and the NASA satellite TESS, in order to detect a series of elusive exoplanets. The planets, called TOI 5678 b and HIP 9618 c respectively, are the size of Neptune or slightly smaller with 4.9 and 3.4 Earth radii. The respective papers have just been published in the journals Astronomy & Astrophysics and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Publishing in the same journals, two other members of the international team, Amy Tuson from the University of Cambridge (UK) and Dr. Zoltán Garai from the "ELTE Gothard Astrophysical Observatory (Hungary), used the same technique to identify two similar planets in other systems.

Designing the right tools to hunt for elusive axion particles

Inside the newly constructed CCM200 detector, showing the 200 photo-multiplier tube light sensors (circles) and the interior walls coated with a special material to convert the argon scintillation light into visible light that can be detected by the photo-multiplier tubes and then recorded by the data acquisition system. An outer veto region rejects events coming from the outside such as cosmic rays.
Photo Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Since axions were first predicted by theory nearly half a century ago, researchers have hunted for proof of the elusive particle, which may exist outside the visible universe, in the dark sector. But how does one find particles that can’t be seen? The first physics results from the Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills experiment at Los Alamos — just described in a publication in the journal Physical Review D — suggest that liquid-argon, accelerator-based experimentation, designed initially to look for similarly hypothetical particles such as sterile neutrinos, may also be an ideal set-up for seeking out stealthy axions.

“The confirmation of dark sector particles would have a profound impact on the understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the origin and evolution of the universe,” said physicist Richard Van de Water. “A big focus of the physics community is exploring ways to detect and confirm these particles. The Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills experiment couples existing predictions of dark matter particles such as axions with high-intensity particle accelerators capable of producing this hard-to-find dark matter.”

New research could improve performance of artificial intelligence and quantum computers

A University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team has developed a more energy-efficient, tunable superconducting diode — a promising component for future electronic devices — that could help scale up quantum computers for industry and improve artificial intelligence systems.
Photo Credit: Olivia Hultgren.

A University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team has developed a new superconducting diode, a key component in electronic devices, that could help scale up quantum computers for industry use and improve the performance of artificial intelligence systems. 

The paper is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers the natural sciences and engineering. 

A diode allows current to flow one way but not the other in an electrical circuit. It essentially serves as half of a transistor — which is the main element in computer chips. Diodes are typically made with semiconductors, substances with electrical properties that form the base for most electronics and computers, but researchers are interested in making them with superconductors, which additionally have the ability to transfer energy without losing any power along the way.

Compared to other superconducting diodes, the researchers’ device is more energy efficient, can process multiple electrical signals at a time, and contains a series of gates to control the flow of energy, a feature that has never before been integrated into a superconducting diode.

What made the brightest cosmic explosion of all time so exceptional?

The afterglow of the Brightest of All Time gamma-ray burst, captured by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory’s X-Ray Telescope.
Image Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)

Last year, telescopes registered the brightest known cosmic explosion of all recorded time. Astrophysicists can now explain what made it so dazzling.

Few cosmic explosions have attracted as much attention from space scientists as the one recorded on October 22 last year and aptly named the Brightest of All Time (BOAT). The event, produced by the collapse of a highly massive star and the subsequent birth of a black hole, was witnessed as an immensely bright flash of gamma rays followed by a slow-fading afterglow of light across frequencies.

Since picking up the BOAT signal simultaneously on their giant telescopes, astrophysicists the world over have been scrambling to account for the brightness of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) and the curiously slow fade of its afterglow.

Now an international team that includes Dr Hendrik Van Eerten from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath has formulated an explanation: the initial burst (known as GRB 221009A) was angled directly at Earth and it also dragged along an unusually large amount of stellar material in its wake.

The team’s findings are published today in the prestigious journal Science Advances. Dr Brendan O’Connor, a newly graduated doctoral student at the University of Maryland and George Washington University in Washington, DC is the study’s lead author.

New Dino, ‘Iani,’ Was Face of a Changing Planet

Illustration Credit: Jorge Gonzalez
(CC BY-NC 4.0)

A newly discovered plant-eating dinosaur may have been a species’ “last gasp” during a period when Earth’s warming climate forced massive changes to global dinosaur populations.

The specimen, named Iani smithi after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of change, was an early ornithopod, a group of dinosaurs that ultimately gave rise to the more commonly known duckbill dinosaurs such as Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus. Researchers recovered most of the juvenile dinosaur’s skeleton – including skull, vertebrae and limbs – from Utah’s Cedar Mountain Formation.

Iani smithi lived in what is now Utah during the mid-Cretaceous, approximately 99 million years ago. The dinosaur’s most striking feature is its powerful jaw, with teeth designed for chewing through tough plant material.

The mid-Cretaceous was a time of big changes, which had big effects on dinosaur populations. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide during this time caused the Earth to warm and sea levels to rise, corralling dinosaurs on smaller and smaller landmasses. It was so warm that rainforests thrived at the poles. Flowering plant life took over coastal areas and supplanted normal food sources for herbivores.

Parker Solar Probe flies into the fast solar wind and finds its source

Artist’s concept of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the sun. Launched in 2018, the probe is increasing our ability to forecast major space-weather events that impact life on Earth.
Illustration Credit: NASA

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun’s surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles.

It’s like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face.

In a paper to be published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park, report that the Parker Solar Probe has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes, which suggests that these are the regions where the so-called “fast” solar wind originates.

Coronal holes are areas where magnetic field lines emerge from the surface without looping back inward, thus forming open field lines that expand outward and fill most of the space around the sun. These holes are usually at the poles during the sun’s quiet periods, so the fast solar wind they generate doesn’t hit Earth. But when the sun becomes active every 11 years as its magnetic field flips, these holes appear all over the surface, generating bursts of solar wind aimed directly at Earth.

Calculation Shows Why Heavy Quarks Get Caught up in the Flow

Nuclear Theory Group Leader Peter Petreczky at the STAR detector of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

New results will help physicists interpret experimental data from particle collisions at RHIC and the LHC and better understand the interactions of quarks and gluons

Using some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, a group of theorists has produced a major advance in the field of nuclear physics—a calculation of the “heavy quark diffusion coefficient.” This number describes how quickly a melted soup of quarks and gluons—the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which are set free in collisions of nuclei at powerful particle colliders—transfers its momentum to heavy quarks.

The answer, it turns out, is very fast. As described in a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, the momentum transfer from the “freed up” quarks and gluons to the heavier quarks occurs at the limit of what quantum mechanics will allow. These quarks and gluons have so many short-range, strong interactions with the heavier quarks that they pull the “boulder”-like particles along with their flow.

The work was led by Peter Petreczky and Swagato Mukherjee of the nuclear theory group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and included theorists from the Bielefeld, Regensburg, and Darmstadt Universities in Germany, and the University of Stavanger in Norway.

The calculation will help explain experimental results showing heavy quarks getting caught up in the flow of matter generated in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe’s CERN laboratory. The new analysis also adds corroborating evidence that this matter, known as a “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP), is a nearly perfect liquid, with a viscosity so low that it also approaches the quantum limit.

Romantic Love in Humans May Have Evolved From Same-Sex Friendship

Two adolescent male chimpanzees, Barron, 15, and PeeWee, 9, grooming.
Photo Credit: Aaron Sandel.

Romantic heterosexual relationships in humans may have evolved from same-sex pairings in a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, according to a novel hypothesis by a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin.

The prevailing explanation of heterosexual pair bonding and romantic love in humans is that it evolved from the mother-infant bond present in many mammals. In a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, anthropology professor Aaron Sandel cites primate research — including his own decadelong studies of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda — to propose instead that this behavior evolved in humans from same-sex pair bonding already present in a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

A pair bond is a cooperative relationship between nonrelated adults that remains stable over time and includes an emotional connection, rather than being merely transactional. Chimpanzees, humans’ closest relative, do not pair bond with their mates, but adult males of the species form same-sex bonds lasting as long as 13 years.

Scientists analyze a single atom with X-rays for the first time

Left: Image of a ring-shaped molecular host that contains just one iron atom. Right: X-ray absorption spectrum of single atom detected at location B in the molecular ring. Spectrum matches that of iron.
 Image Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

In the most powerful X-ray facilities in the world, scientists can analyze samples so small they contain only 10,000 atoms. Smaller sizes have proved exceedingly difficult to achieve, but a multi-institutional team has scaled down to a single atom.

“X-ray beams are used everywhere, including security scanning, medical imaging and basic research,” said Saw Wai Hla, physicist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and professor at Ohio University. ​“But since the discovery of X-rays in 1895, scientists have not been able to detect and analyze just one atom. It has been a dream of scientists to be able to do so for decades. Now we can.”

As just announced in Nature, scientists from Argonne and several universities report being able to characterize the elemental type and chemical properties of just one atom by using X-ray beams. This new capability will impact fundamental research in numerous scientific disciplines and the development of new technologies.

Exposure to “forever chemicals” during pregnancy linked to increased risk of obesity in kids

Toxic "forever chemicals" are used in oil- and water-repellant textiles, personal care products, firefighting foams, food packaging, medical products and many other household products.
Photo Credit: Stijn Dijkstra

A federally funded study led by researchers at Brown University showed links between prenatal exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and slightly higher body mass indices in children.

The risks of exposure to “forever chemicals” start even before birth, a new study confirms, potentially setting up children for future health issues.

Exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) during pregnancy was linked to slightly higher body mass indices and an increased risk of obesity in children, according to a new Environmental Health Perspectives study led by Brown University researchers.

While this link has been suggested in previous research, the data has been inconclusive. The new study, which was funded by the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program at the National Institutes of Health, involves a much broader data set with research sites across the country, said lead author Yun “Jamie” Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health.

“The findings were based on eight research cohorts located in different parts of the U.S. as well as with different demographics,” Liu said. “This makes our study findings more generalizable to the population as a whole.”

When it comes to bumblebees, does size matter?

Why bumblebee body sizes vary so significantly is a mystery of bumble biology.
Photo Credit: Myriams-Fotos

While honeybee workers are all the same size, that’s not true for bumblebees. Scientists aren’t sure what’s behind the wide variety in bumble body sizes, but a new UC Riverside project aims to find out.

Certain crops, like greenhouse tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and blueberries, rely on bumblebees for a style of pollination that only bumblebees can perform. Among growers, the preference can be for bigger-bodied bumblebees because they’re thought to be more efficient pollinators. 

Enabled by a $750,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the research team will investigate factors suspected of influencing bumblebee biology and body size, including climate change, wildfires, and the presence of nearby honeybee colonies.

Link between cardiovascular health & disorders such as carpal tunnel

From left to right: Richard Kendall, MD, Matthew Thiese, PhD, Eric Wood, MD, Kurt Hegmann, MD, from the Rocky Mountain Center for Environmental Health.
Photo Credit: Charlie Ehlert

People with higher risks of cardiovascular disease are significantly more likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome, tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow, and rotator cuff tendinitis, according to a new study involving researchers at the University of Utah and the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.

The findings of the study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, have implications for the prevention and treatment of these common musculoskeletal disorders, which affect tens of millions of Americans each year and result in annual costs of more than $6 billion.

The lead author of the study is Kurt Hegmann, M.D., a University of Utah professor and the director of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, a partnership between the University of Utah and Weber State University. He said the strength of the associations the researchers discovered between cardiovascular disease risk factors and musculoskeletal disorders is staggering.

“It’s rare that you see 17-fold risks of diseases,” Hegmann said. “These results tell us that prioritizing cardiovascular health is a key to preventing these musculoskeletal disorders, which can have a debilitating impact on people’s quality of life. This is something we and other researchers and medical professionals need to be paying a lot of attention to.”

Nanomaterials: glass printed sintered-free in 3D

The new process can be used to create a wide variety of quartz glass structures on a nanometer scale.
Full Size Image
 Image Credit: Dr. Jens Bauer, KIT

Process developed at KIT manages with relatively low temperatures and enables high resolutions for applications in optics and semiconductor technology - publication in science

Nanometer-fine structures made of quartz glass, which can be printed directly on semiconductor chips, are produced by a process developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). A hybrid organic-inorganic polymer resin serves as the starting material for the 3D printing of silicon dioxide. Since the process does not require sintering, the temperatures required for this are significantly lower. At the same time, a higher resolution enables nanophotonics with visible light. The research team reports in the journal Science.

Printing quartz glass consisting of pure silicon dioxide in micro and nanometer-fine structures opens up new possibilities for many applications in optics, photonics and semiconductor technology. So far, however, techniques based on traditional sintering have dominated. The temperatures required for sintering silicon dioxide nanoparticles are above 1,100 degrees Celsius - far too hot for direct separation on semiconductor chips. A research team led by Dr. Jens Bauer from the KIT's Institute for Nanotechnology (INT) has now developed a new process for producing transparent quartz glass with high resolution and excellent mechanical properties at significantly lower temperatures.

Using genomics to unlock the full potential of industrial hemp

Alex Harkess, PhD
Photo Credit: Courtesy of HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Plant biologist Alex Harkess, PhD, and his lab at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology are on a mission to change the future of food and fiber crops, one flowering plant species at a time. Much of plant breeding and global food production relies on the pollination of flowers to produce fruits that are eaten and used to produce further progeny. This process might sound straightforward, but it is complicated because some flowers contain only male or female reproductive organs, others contain both (hermaphrodites), and some can even switch sexes. 

How flowers become male, female, or hermaphroditic is a complex phenomenon. Although not completely understood, it is imperative for crop breeding programs looking to create food and fiber crops better adapted to changing environmental pressures. This is especially true in crop species where one plant sex is more valuable than the other, like female hops that produce cones used in the beer industry, male asparagus plants that live longer in fields, and hermaphroditic papaya fruits that taste better than female fruits. 

While the exact mechanism of sex determination is a mystery in many species, it is widely accepted that genetics plays a major role. Dr. Harkess and the members of his lab are experts at using genomics to understand plant reproduction and the genes that control sex in flowers. Sex-determination genes have only been concretely defined in five plant species, with Harkess playing a critical role in their identification in asparagus.  

Prognosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Illustration Credit: Sisi Huang and Yun Du

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a type of cancer that occurs in the nasopharynx, which is located behind the nose and above the back of the throat. NPC has a geographically skewed distribution worldwide, with high incidence rates in East and Southeast Asia. NPC is difficult to detect early, and treatment usually involves radiation therapy, chemotherapy or a combination of the two.

Recent hospital-based studies suggest that the development of new radiotherapy techniques has contributed to improved NPC prognosis, but little population-based research on NPC patient survival is available. Similarly, little is known about potential environmental prognostic factors for NPC, such as body mass index (BMI) and body shape, pretreatment plasma Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA, and oral microbiome. Therefore, PhD student Yun Du at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics aimed her thesis to characterize population-based NPC survival patterns and identify potential prognostic factors for NPC in southern China.