337 articles from WEDNESDAY 5.5.2021

Media Invited to Virtual Briefing as NASA’s Webb Prepares for Launch

Portal origin URL: Media Invited to Virtual Briefing as NASA’s Webb Prepares for LaunchPortal origin nid: 470792Published: Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - 16:51Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Media will have the opportunity to see the iconic golden mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope open for the last time on Earth during a virtual briefing...

Tweaked Moderna vaccine ‘neutralises Covid variants in trials’

Limited data from small test trial shows positive results against South Africa and Brazil strainsCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageThe first “tweaked” vaccine against the worrying coronavirus variants that emerged in South Africa and Brazil has successfully neutralised them in laboratory trials, the US company Moderna has said.The results of the small trial suggest...

Rapid rovers, speedy sands: Fast-tracking terrain interaction modeling

Granular materials, such as sand and gravel, are an interesting class of materials. They can display solid, liquid, and gas-like properties, depending on the scenario. But things can get complicated in cases of high-speed vehicle locomotion, which cause these materials to enter a "triple-phase" nature, acting like all three fundamental phases of matter at the same time.

New, almost non-destructive archaeogenetic sampling method developed

An Austrian-American research team (University of Vienna, Department Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics), in collaboration of Hungarian experts from Eötvös Loránd University, has developed a new method that allows the almost non-destructive extraction of genetic material from archeological human remains. The method allows anthropologists, archeologists...

Magnetic material breaks super-fast switching record

Researchers at CRANN (The Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices), and the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, today announced that a magnetic material developed at the Centre demonstrates the fastest magnetic switching ever recorded.

Research confirms trawl ban substantially increases the abundance of marine organisms

Biodiversity is of crucial importance to the marine ecosystem. The prohibition of trawling activities in the Hong Kong marine environment for two and a half years has significantly improved biodiversity, an inter-university study led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has found. Research results showed that the trawl ban could restore and conserve biodiversity in tropical coastal waters.

Searching for the supersymmetric bottom quark (and its friends)

When it comes to quarks, those of the third generation (the top and bottom) are certainly the most fascinating and intriguing. Metaphorically, we would classify their social life as quite secluded, as they do not mix much with their relatives of the first and second generation. However, as the proper aristocrats of the particle physics world, they enjoy privileged and intense interactions with the...

How to stop AI from recognizing your face in selfies

Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with them—and which machine-learning algorithms will they help train? The company Clearview has already supplied US law enforcement agencies with a facial recognition tool trained on photos of millions of people scraped from the public web. But that was likely just the...

Supersymmetry-inspired microlaser arrays pave way for powering chip-sized optical systems

Ring microlasers are eyed as potential light sources for photonic applications, but they first must be made more powerful. Combining multiple microlasers into an array solves only half of the problem, as this adds noisy 'modes' to the resulting laser light. Now, thanks to the math behind supersymmetry theory, engineers have achieved single-mode lasing from such an array. By calculating the...

Repurposing tabletop sensors to search for dark matter

Researchers across the dark matter community that have begun to wonder if they are looking for the right type of dark matter. They have proposed a new way to look for the particles that might make up dark matter by repurposing existing tabletop sensor technology.