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Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity

The largest collection yet of detailed medical data and tissue samples from astronauts should help researchers better understand the impacts of space flight on health

Earth is lagging behind other worlds with its single moon, so on this episode of Dead Planets Society we are giving it more – and giving those moons moonmoons to orbit them

My co-deplatformee Maarten Boudry has announced in Quillette that he’s written an open letter (with coauthor Prof. Mark Elchardus) against the growing worldwide call to boycott Israeli universities. Although it’s called a “faculty open letter”, you don’t have to be an academic to sign it, though the signatures will be vetted to keep out trolls. You can read about the letter at the first link (it presents an earlier version of the letter), and then click the second headline to actually sign the latest and most comprehensive letter if you agree with its sentiments.

From Maarten’s introduction in Quillette (I won’t reproduce the whole thing):

Universities across the world are facing pressure—from students but also from academic staff—to cut ties with Israeli institutions over the war in Gaza. In the US, a dozen universities have struck agreements with activists and partly conceded to their demands, including divestment from Israeli companies. In Europe, dozens of Spanish universities and five Norwegian universities have resolved to sever all ties with Israeli partners deemed “complicit” in the war in Gaza. Several Belgian universities have now suspended all collaborations with Israeli universities because of their collaborations with the IDF. Even without a formal boycott, pressure from anti-Israel protests and the BDS movement has already led to pervasive exclusion of Israeli scientists and students. In the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, over 60 academics have testified what this amounts to: cancelled invitations to lectures and committees, desk rejections of papers on political grounds, freezing of ongoing collaborations, disrupted guest lectures, and withdrawn co-authorships.

And then, since Maarten is a philosopher, he goes into the arguments for and against such a boycott.

On the “con” side he criticizes the Netanyahu government and its policy of settlement on the West Bank, but in the end, as you must have guessed, he concludes that a blanket boycott of Israeli universities is counterproductive, not just for Israel but for the liberal Western values that universities are supposed to represent.

In liberal democracies such as Israel, universities are indispensable parts of civil society, which facilitate the critical examination and questioning of government policies. Despite the country’s flaws, such criticism is still very much possible in Israel. Those who oppose the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners will find numerous allies among Israeli academics. Many of them took the lead in the protests against Netanyahu’s dangerous judicial reforms of 2023, which threatened Israel’s democratic character. Finally, Israeli universities enrol tens of thousands of Palestinian and Arab students, often supported by government programs. They too will be targeted by a blanket boycott of Israeli universities, which will in no way contribute to peace, but will instead further weaken the constructive and liberal forces in Israeli society.

Let me add that Bob Zimmer, the late President of the University of Chicago, was pressured to divest from Israel and also engage in an academic boycott against its country’s universities He responded in 2016 by issuing this statement:

The University of Chicago will not divest from companies for doing business in Israel and opposes academic boycotts aimed at specific nations, including Israel. The University is restating its policy to address questions regarding its institutional position.

The University does not take social or political stances on issues outside its core mission. Using investments or other means to advance a social or political position held by some segment of the University community would only diminish the University’s distinctive contribution – providing a home and environment for faculty and students to engage freely and openly on the widest range of issues. The Kalven Report outlines this approach and the values behind it, concluding that preserving the freedom of individual scholars to argue for or against any issue of political controversy requires “a heavy presumption against” collective political action by the University itself.

The University has been consistent in its opposition to proposed academic boycotts, issuing statements in 2007 and again in 2013. The University has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of knowledge. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world, and to form collaborations both inside and outside the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, the University continues to strongly oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, including recent actions to boycott Israeli institutions.

QED.  Now click below to go to the letter itself, and then, if you want to append your name, click again on the “sign the open letter” boxes at top right or bottom—or just click here.

Of course I asked Maarten what would become of the letter so that readers who sign it aren’t simply engaging in a performative gesture. Maarten said this:

What will become of it? Obviously we want to send a signal to universities across the world that plenty of academics firmly oppose any form of boycott, so that the cowards won’t follow the path of least resistance and cave into the loudest protestors (as my uni had done already). I like to think that our well-publicized letter in Dutch (in two newspapers) played some role in the public announcement by the Dutch rectors that they reject a boycott, two weeks later. The more people sign, especially academics, the stronger the signal. JAC: Note that the anti-boycott announcement in the Netherlands involved 15 Dutch universities, including the University of Amsterdam.  These comprise the totality of the Association of Universities of the Netherlands, so it’s a very strong signal of opposition to boycotts. But this is only one country, not the world, and, as Maarten notes in his Quillette piece, calls for academic boycotts of Israel are numerous and ubiquitous.

The plastic-digesting capabilities of the fungus Parengyodontium album could be harnessed to degrade polyethylene, the most abundant type of plastic in the ocean

Reader Divy, who runs a Florida vet operation with her husband Ivan (Mobile Veterinary Services; Instagram page here), produced this wonderful collage of animal eyes. Your job: guess the animals.  Divy’s notes:

All these animals have been seen by us in one capacity or another, either as patients, or part of a collection check.

The answers are below the fold.

Click “continue reading” to see the answers:

Starting from top, left to right: Albino gator Eclectus parrot (female) Snail eating turtle Macklot’s python Water monitor (juvenile) Moluccan cockatoo Catalina Macaw Albino water monitor (adult) Australian freshwater crocodile (juvenile) Dwarf rabbit Crested gecko Ring-tailed lemur Aldabra giant tortoise Eclectus parrot (male) Scarlett Macaw Keel-billed Toucan African-crowned crane Eurasian eagle-owl African grey parrot Panther chameleon

Would anyone like a tour of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, the general purpose particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider that were used to discover the particle known as the Higgs boson? A live, virtual tour is being given today (Tuesday June 11) on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=askq7-9CzrU, at 1700 CERN time — that’s 1600 London time, 11:00 New York time, 8:00 San Francisco time. Find out how these enormous, complex, magnificent devices are constructed, and learn how their various parts work together, 25 million times every second, to allow scientists to track the tiniest objects in the universe. Includes a Q&A at the end for participants.

Commenter Lal asks in the topic suggestions:

“Media reports that light has been travelling from that distant galaxy for 13 and a half billion years, which I assume is true, but this neither represents the original nor the current distance to that galaxy in terms of light years. I would be interested to know where we lie in the expanding universe compared to these distant galaxies.”

This is a good question, and is challenging to grasp. We need experts who have been thinking about this for decades and who actually understand what’s happening and who can explain it well. Here, I think, is an excellent discussion of this very question. I’ll give a quick summary, but for those interested, you may want to read the full article.

The basic background is that, according to modern cosmological theory, which includes the Big Bang, the universe was a singularity – one point that contained all of spacetime and all matter and energy – about 13.7 billion years ago. This point underwent rapid expansion, at first very rapid, called the inflationary period. Then it continued to rapidly expand, although at a much slower pace, although this rate of expansion has been increasing over time due to dark energy. What happens to the universe when it expands? It’s important to note first that the universe is not expanding into space – space-time itself is expanding.

Matter in the universe gets less dense and hot as the universe expands. At first matter was too hot for particles to exist. Once it cooled enough for protons and neutrons to exist, they mostly formed into hydrogen, but that was still too hot to hold onto electrons so the matter was all plasma. That eventually cooled enough for hydrogen (and some helium and a tiny bit of lithium) atoms to exist – at about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Since then the matter in the universe has continued to cool and become less dense. However, it was also able to form stars, galaxies, heavier elements, and then lots of interesting things like people.

Radiation, including light, in the universe also became less dense as the universe expanded. However, something else interesting happens to radiation when spacetime itself expands – it’s wavelength also expands. In terms of light, this means it becomes red shifted. This further means that distant objects become fainter than they would purely because of distance. According to the inverse square law, when something is twice as far away any light or waves emanating from it will be 2 squared or one fourth as intense. Sound will be one quarter the volume and light will be one quarter the brightness. But in the universe distant object are more dim than can be accounted for by mere distance, because of light’s redshift.

Energy density in the universe, however, remains constant even when the universe expands. This is because the universe is not expanding into empty space – space itself is expanding. In a sense more space is being created, keeping the energy density of space constant.

This brings us to the core question above – how do we account for all this when measuring the distance to a distant object. If we think about two galaxies in the early universe, about 500 million years after the Big Bang – as the universe expanded these two galaxies would become farther and farther apart. Light leaving one galaxy would have to catch up with the other galaxy as it moves away with the expansion of space. So it takes longer than the original distance of the galaxies, the distance apart at the moment that light leaves one headed for the other, would indicate. The farther apart the galaxies were initially, the longer it will take to catch up.

The time the light has been traveling to get from one galaxy to the other is called the “lookback time”. This is not the same as the actual current distance, which is much greater. For a lookback time of about 13 billion years, that would correspond to a current distance of about 40 billion light years. This also means that if there has not been enough time yet in the age of the universe for light from an object to catch up to an observer, that object is outside the visible universe for that observer. Our visible universe, therefore, corresponds to the age of the universe, 13.78 billion years, which equals a current distance of 41.6 billion light years. Actually I think it’s a bit less than this, the age at which it became transparent to light.

Beyond 41 billion light years, or a look back time of 13.7 billion years, there is more universe but it is outside our visible universe. Interestingly, as the universe expands the percentage of the total universe that is within the visible range of any observer will decrease. Eventually future astronomers will only be able to see our local group of galaxies and that’s it. This will happen in about 100 billion years. What is the percentage of the total universe that is currently visible? We have to make some cosmological assumptions to give a precise answer, but according to some estimates only about 1.5%.

There is a lot more complexity to this question, but this is a quick summary to at least give a basic idea of the structure of the universe over time. The currently view is also evolving as we gather more information. It was only relatively recently that astronomers realized the expansion of the universe is accelerating, for example. So the precise numbers are likely to change, but these basics are fairly reliable.

 

The post Light and Distance in an Expanding Universe first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

People taking semaglutide, also called Ozempic and Wegovy, either for weight loss or type 2 diabetes, were less likely to become addicted to alcohol

Huge stars might have formed in the first million years of the universe if there was enough matter clumped together, according to a computer model

This modern UFO case has been declared to be one of the most compelling ever.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to make amazing discoveries. This time in the constellation of Pictor where, in the Beta Pictoris system a massive collision of asteroids. The system is young and only just beginning its evolutionary journey with planets only now starting to form. Just recently, observations from JWST have shown significant energy changes emitted by dust grains in the system compared to observations made 20 years ago. Dust production was thought to be ongoing but the results showed the data captured 20 years ago may have been a one-off event that has since faded suggesting perhaps, an asteroid strike!

Beta Pictoris is a young star located 63 light years away in the constellation Pictor. It has become well known for its fabulous circumstellar disk of gas and dust out of which a new system of planets is forming. It has been the subject of many a study because not only does it provide an ideal opportunity to study planetary formation but one of those planets Beta Pictoris b has already been detected. 

Beta Pictoris is located about 60 light-years away towards the constellation of Pictor (the Painter’s Easel) and is one of the best-known examples of a star surrounded by a dusty debris disc. Earlier observations showed a warp of the disc, a secondary inclined disc and comets falling onto the star, all indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggested the presence of a massive planet. Observations done with the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in 2003, 2008 and 2009, have proven the presence of a planet around Beta Pictoris. It is located at a distance between 8 and 15 times the Earth-Sun separation — or Astronomical Units — which is about the distance Saturn is from the Sun. The planet has a mass of about nine Jupiter masses and the right mass and location to explain the observed warp in the inner parts of the disc. This image, based on data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2, shows a region of approximately 1.7 x 2.3 degrees around Beta Pictoris. Credit: ESO/Sky Survey II

Wind the clock back 20 years and the Spitzer infra-red observatory was observing Beta Pictoris. It was looking for heat being emitted by crystalline silicate minerals which are often found around young stars and on celestial bodies. Back in 2004-2005 no traces were seen suggesting a collision occurred among asteroids destroying them and turning their bodies into find dust particles, smaller even than grains of sand and even powdered sugar. 

Radiation was detected at the 17 and 24 micron wavelengths by Spitzer, the result of significant amounts of dust. Using JWST, the team studied radiation from dust particles around Beta Pictoris and were able to compare with these Spitzer findings. They were able to identify the composition and size of particles in the same area around Beta Pictoris  that was studied by Spitzer. They found a significant reduction in radiation at the same wavelengths from 20 years ago. 

The Spitzer Space Telescope observatory trails behind Earth as it orbits the Sun. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

According to Christine Chen, lead astronomer from the John Hopkins University ‘With Webb’s new data, the explanation we have is that, in fact, we witnessed the aftermath of an infrequent, cataclysmic event between large asteroid-sized bodies, marking a complete change in our understanding of this star system.’

By tracking the distribution of particles across the circumstellar disk, the team found that the dust seems to have been dispersed outward by radiation from the hot young star. Previously with observations from Spitzer, dust surrounded the star which was heated up by its thermal radiation making it a strong thermal emitter. This is no longer the case as that dust has moved, cooled and no longer emits those thermal features. 

The discovery has adjusted our view of planetary system formation. Previous theories suggested that small bodies would accumulate and replenish the dust steadily over time. Instead, JWST has shown that the dust is not always replenished with time but that it takes a cataclysmic asteroid impact to seed new planetary systems with new dust. The team estimate the asteroid that was pulverised was about 100,000 times the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs!

Source : WEBB TELESCOPE REVEALS ASTEROID COLLISION IN NEIGHBORING STAR SYSTEM

The post Webb Sees Asteroids Collide in Another Star System appeared first on Universe Today.

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We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs―that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neuroscientist and philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe play.

Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief―which he terms religious “credence”―is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance.

It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

Neil Van Leeuwen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at Georgia State University and a recipient of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Fellowship. His research has been featured in The New York Times and The Atlantic and on NPR. His new book is Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination and Group Identity.

Shermer and Van Leeuwen discuss:

• His own personal religious journey (or lack thereof)
• What is “make-believe” and “pretend play”?
• Believe vs. make-believe
• “I think” vs. “I believe”
• Beliefs and imagination: “many religious beliefs are imaginings of the sort that guide make-believe play, though they are imaginings that become central to the religious actor’s identity and guide symbolic actions that express sacred values.”
• Factual belief vs. religious credence
• Four principles of factual belief:
  • If you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it.
  • Factual beliefs guide actin across the bard.
  • Factual beliefs guide inferences in imagination
  • Factual beliefs respond to evidence.
• Tanya Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others
• Ben Alderson-Day: Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other
• What does it mean to “take God seriously”?
• General religious credences vs. personal religious credences
• Willing suspension of disbelief
• Group identity
• Sacred values
• The Puzzle of Religious Rationality:
  • Solution 1: Religious belief as delusion
  • Solution 2: People are gullible
  • Solution 3: Religious belief as rational
  • Solution 4: Displaced content (Gould’s NMA)
  • Solution 5: Murky contents (God is 3 persons in 1)
  • Solution 6: No content
  • Solution 7: Belief in belief (Dennett)
  • Solution 8: Weak belief
  • Solution 9: A distinct cognitive attitude
• What is “that still small voice” we all hear in our heads?
• When people say they “hear the voice of God” what does that mean?
• Normal “voices within” vs. hallucinations and psychoses
• Psychiatrist Milton Rokeach’s book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
• Anomalous psychological experiences
• Sleep paralysis and other cognitive anomalies
• Belief in angels and demons
• Sensed presences
• Empirical truths, religious truths, mythic truths
• How people come to religious belief vs. how they leave religion
• Witches and witchcraft.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Scientists have grown 'mini-guts' in the lab to help understand Crohn's disease, showing that 'switches' that modify DNA in gut cells play an important role in the disease and how it presents in patients. The researchers say these mini-guts could in future be used to identify the best treatment for an individual patient, allowing for more precise and personalized treatments.

Dark Matter is Nature’s poltergeist. We can see its effects, but we can’t see it, and we don’t know what it is. It’s as if Nature is playing tricks on us, hiding most of its mass and confounding our efforts to determine what it is.

It’s all part of the Universe’s “missing mass” problem. Actually, it’s our problem. The Universe is what it is. It’s our understanding of the Universe, mass, and gravity that’s the problem. And a solution is proving to be elusive.

Whatever the missing mass is or whatever causes the effects we observe, we have a placeholder name for it: dark matter. And it makes up 85% of the matter in the Universe.

Could dark matter be primordial black holes? Could it be axions? How about WIMPS? Are dark photons its force carrier? There’s lots of theoretical thought but no conclusion.

New research in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society says that our hunt for dark matter may be off-track. Instead of looking for a type of particle, the solution might lie in a type of topological defect found throughout the Universe that has its roots in the Universe’s early stages.

The new research is in a paper titled “The binding of cosmological structures by massless topological defects.” The author is Richard Lieu, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

“There is then no need to perpetuate this seemingly endless search for dark matter.”

Dr. Richard Lieu, Professor, University of Alabama, Huntsville

As the paper’s title makes clear, dark matter has a binding effect on structures like galaxies. Astronomers know that galaxies don’t have enough measurable mass to hold themselves together. By measuring the mass of the stars and gas in galaxies, it became clear that the visible components of the galaxies don’t provide enough mass to hold themselves together. They should simply dissipate into their constituent stars and clouds of gas.

But galaxies don’t dissipate, and scientists have concluded that something is missing. Professor Lieu has another idea.

“My own inspiration came from my pursuit for another solution to the gravitational field equations of general relativity — the simplified version of which, applicable to the conditions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, is known as the Poisson equation — which gives a finite gravitation force in the absence of any detectable mass,” said Lieu. “This initiative is in turn driven by my frustration with the status quo, namely the notion of dark matter’s existence despite the lack of any direct evidence for a whole century.”

An entire century is a long time in the age of modern science. It’s not surprising that Nature has the power to confound us, but it is somewhat surprising that very little progress has been made on the problem. Scientists have made great progress in understanding how dark matter influences the Universe’s large-scale structure, an impressive feat, but haven’t figured out what it is.

“The nature of dark matter (DM), defined specifically in this letter as an unknown component of the cosmic substratum responsible for the extra gravitational field that binds galaxies and clusters of galaxies, has been an enigma for more than a century,” Dr. Lieu writes in his paper.

Lieu’s work leans on phase transitions in the Universe. These are episodes when the state of matter in the Universe changes. Not locally but across the entire cosmos. One example is when the Universe cooled enough to allow the strong force to bind quarks into protons and neutrons.

Dr. Lieu contends that topological defects could have formed during one of these phase transitions. These defects can take the shape of shell-like compact regions where matter density is much higher. When arranged in concentric rings, these defects behave like gravity but don’t have mass.

“It is unclear presently what precise form of phase transition in the universe could give rise to topological defects of this sort,” Lieu says. “Topological effects are very compact regions of space with a very high density of matter, usually in the form of linear structures known as cosmic strings, although 2-D structures such as spherical shells are also possible. The shells in my paper consist of a thin inner layer of positive mass and a thin outer layer of negative mass; the total mass of both layers — which is all one could measure, mass-wise — is exactly zero, but when a star lies on this shell it experiences a large gravitational force pulling it towards the center of the shell.”

So, despite our inability to measure the mass, it’s there, and other objects respond to it. Mass warps space-time and affects even massless photons. That fact underlies our ability to use gravitational lensing. We use the mass of galaxy clusters in gravitational lensing. A set of spherical shells, as Lieu talks about, could cause the same effect.

This illustration shows the gravitational lensing phenomenon. Astronomers use it to study very distant and very faint objects. Note that the scale has been greatly exaggerated in this diagram. In reality, the distant galaxy is much further away and much smaller. Image Credit: NASA, ESA & L. Calcada

“Gravitational bending of light by a set of concentric singular shells comprising a galaxy or cluster is due to a ray of light being deflected slightly inwards — that is, towards the center of the large-scale structure, or the set of shells — as it passes through one shell,” Lieu notes. “The sum total effect of passage through many shells is a finite and measurable total deflection which mimics the presence of a large amount of dark matter in much the same way as the velocity of stellar orbits.”

Since astronomers measure galaxy and galaxy cluster masses by measuring the light they deflect and the way they affect the orbit of stars, astronomers could be measuring topological defects rather than particles that comprise dark matter.

“Both the deflection of light and stellar orbital velocities is the only means by which one gauges the strength of the gravitational field in a large-scale structure, be it a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies,” Dr. Lieu says. “The contention of my paper is that at least the shells it posits are massless. There is then no need to perpetuate this seemingly endless search for dark matter.”

In 2022, researchers discovered a giant arc in the sky. It spans 1 Gigaparsec and is nearly symmetrical. It’s one of several large-scale structures that seems to go against the Standard Model and the Cosmological Principle it’s based on.

These are three separate data images of the Giant Arc discovered in 2022. The paper provides details. Image Credit: Lopez et al. 2022, 10.1093/mnras/stac2204

“The observation of giant arcs and rings could lend further support to the proposed alternative to the DM model,” Lieu writes in his paper. He also points out that the shells he proposes needn’t be a complete sphere.

If these shells exist, their alignment would also govern the formation and shape of galaxies and clusters. Future research will determine exactly how these shells form. “This paper does not attempt to tackle the problem of structure formation,” Lieu says. In fact, Lieu acknowledges that there’s currently no way to even observe how they might form.

“A contentious point is whether the shells were initially planes or even straight strings, but angular momentum winds them up. There is also the question of how to confirm or refute the proposed shells by dedicated observations,” Lieu says.

An experienced scientist, Lieu knows the limits of what he’s proposing.

“Of course, the availability of a second solution, even if it is highly suggestive, is not by itself sufficient to discredit the dark matter hypothesis — it could be an interesting mathematical exercise at best,” Lieu concludes. “But it is the first proof that gravity can exist without mass.”

The post If Gravity Can Exist Without Mass, That Could Explain Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

Astronomers have discovered a rare hypervelocity L subdwarf star racing through the Milky Way. More remarkably, this star may be on a trajectory that causes it to leave the Milky Way altogether.

Peering deeply into the cosmos, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of supernovae from a time when our universe was just a small fraction of its current age. A team using Webb data has identified 10 times more supernovae in the early universe than were previously known. A few of the newfound exploding stars are the most distant examples of their type, including those used to measure the universe's expansion rate.

If a material absorbs light, it will heat up. That heat must go somewhere, and the ability to control where and how much heat is emitted can protect or even hide such devices as satellites. An international team of researchers has published a novel method for controlling this thermal emission in Science.

If a material absorbs light, it will heat up. That heat must go somewhere, and the ability to control where and how much heat is emitted can protect or even hide such devices as satellites. An international team of researchers has published a novel method for controlling this thermal emission in Science.

A newly developed radiotracer can generate high quality and readily interpretable images of cardiac amyloidosis, a condition referred to as the 'Alzheimer's disease of the heart.' As the first amyloid-specific and pan-amyloid binding radiotracer designed for planar and SPECT/CT imaging, 99mTc-p5+14 could play an important role in early detection and treatment of cardiac amyloidosis.