Heavens

In 1961, the Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner proposed what is now known as the Wigner's friend thought experiment as an extension of the notorious Schroedinger's cat experiment. In the latter, a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. Governed by quantum mechanical laws, the radioactive atom is in a superposition between decaying and not decaying, which also means that the cat is in a superposition between life and death. What does the cat experience when it is in the superposition?

Compared with the superresolution microscopy that bases on squeezing the point spread function in the spatial domain, the superresolution microscopy that broadens the detection range in the spatial frequency domain through the spatial-frequency-shift (SFS) effect shows intriguing advantages including large field of view, high speed, and good modularity, owing to its wide-field picture acquisition process and universal implementation without using special fluorophores labeling.

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (05/12/2021) -- In a study recently published in Nature, University of Minnesota Medical School researchers found that senescent immune cells are the most dangerous type of senescent cell.

Cells become senescent when they are damaged or stressed in the body, and they accumulate in our organs as we age. Senescent cells drive inflammation and aging as well as most age-related diseases.

Smaller, faster, more energy-efficient: future requirements to computing and data storage are hard to fulfill and alternative concepts are continuously explored. Small magnetic textures, so-called skyrmions, may become an ingredient in novel memory and logic devices. In order to be considered for technological application, however, fast and energy-efficient control of these nanometer-sized skyrmions is required.

Diamonds are sometimes described as messengers from the deep earth; scientists study them closely for insights into the otherwise inaccessible depths from which they come. But the messages are often hard to read. Now, a team has come up with a way to solve two longstanding puzzles: the ages of individual fluid-bearing diamonds, and the chemistry of their parent material. The research has allowed them to sketch out geologic events going back more than a billion years--a potential breakthrough not only in the study of diamonds, but of planetary evolution.

An international team led by researchers from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Geneva has found that flash floods may triple across the Earth's "Third Pole" in response to ongoing climate change.

Their findings were published in Nature Climate Change on May 6.

The Hindu Kush-Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges are widely known as the "Third Pole" of the Earth. It contains the largest number of glaciers outside the polar regions.

Astronomers have identified more than 4,000, and counting, confirmed exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars other than the sun -- but only a fraction have the potential to sustain life.

Now, new research from UBC's Okanagan campus is using the geology of early planet formation to help identify those that may be capable of supporting life.

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Locations and topics studied this month include the Central Anatolian Plateau; the Southern Rocky Mountain Volcanic Field; petrogenesis in the Grand Canyon; and the evolution of the Portland and Tualatin forearc basins, Oregon.

A physical and chemical sedimentary record of Laramide tectonic shifts in the Cretaceous-Paleogene San Juan Basin, New Mexico, USA

Kevin M. Hobbs; Peter J. Fawcett

Prof. YAN Yihua and his research team from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) recently released detailed results of observations by the new generation solar radio telescope--Mingantu Spectral Radio Heliograph (MUSER)--from 2014 to 2019.

The study was published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences on March 29. It may help us better understand the basic nature of solar eruptions.

Venus is an enigma. It's the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead.

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (04/28/2021) -- In a recent discovery by University of Minnesota Medical School, researchers uncovered a new way to potentially target and treat late-stage colorectal cancer - a disease that kills more than 50,000 people each year in the United States.

UPTON, NY--Scientists characterized how the electronic states in a compound containing iron, tellurium, and selenium depend on local chemical concentrations. They discovered that superconductivity (conducting electricity without resistance), along with distinct magnetic correlations, appears when the local concentration of iron is sufficiently low; a coexisting electronic state existing only at the surface (topological surface state) arises when the concentration of tellurium is sufficiently high.

The target of carbon-neutral and net-zero emissions is the development and utilization of renewable energy. High-energy-density energy storage systems are critical technologies for the integration of renewable energy.

Li metal is highly recognized as a promising alternative anode for next-generation rechargeable batteries due to its high theoretical capacity of 3860 mAh g-1 and ultralow electrode potential of -3.04 V compared to the standard hydrogen electrode.

An international collaboration of astronomers led by a researcher from the Astrobiology Center and Queen's University Belfast, and including researchers from Trinity College Dublin, has detected a new chemical signature in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun).

The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far.

At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zürich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes and curates the planet's seismicity catalog.