news 2024

The missing ingredient for cooking up stars has been spotted for the first time by an international team led by astronomers at Imperial College. Much like a pressure cooker has a weight on top of its lid to keep the pressure in and get your festive dessert dense, moist and ready to eat, merging galaxies may need magnetic fields to create the ideal conditions for star formation.

This year, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) led research that pushes the boundaries of science and technology. From advancing our understanding of the universe to innovations in microelectronics, artificial intelligence, quantum science, and biomanufacturing, the lab's teams have achieved remarkable milestones across diverse fields.

New observations with the James Webb Space Telescope no longer rule out the presence of an atmosphere around the Earth-sized rocky planet. However, a geologically active planet also explains the data. Recent measurements with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cast doubt on the current understanding of the exoplanet Trappist-1 b-s nature.

A high-energy gamma-ray flare from the super-massive black hole in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy was observed in 2018 for the first time in nearly a decade, thanks to an international effort involving McGill researchers. This discovery has yielded important insights into the physics of black hole jets, which are among the most efficient engines for distributing energy from the inside of a galaxy to the expanse of the Universe.

Researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and CSIC have developed an innovative technique that combines ion implantation and femtosecond lasers to create advanced optical nanocomposites. The work, published in Materials Today Nano , lays the groundwork for a new generation of customizable materials with applications in optics, sensors and photonics.

Key Takeaways Laser-plasma accelerators could someday significantly reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators used in high-energy physics, medicine, materials science, and beyond. BELLA researchers used a petawatt laser to reach a key laser-plasma accelerator milestone: accelerating a high-quality 10-GeV electron beam in 30 centimeters, a significant improvement in both energy and quality compared to previous efforts.

Bonn researchers decipher structure of coagulation factor XIII using cryo-electron microscopy A deficiency in blood plasma coagulation factor XIII leads to a disruption in the cross-linking of fibrin, the "glue" in blood coagulation. The enzyme therefore plays an essential role in blood clotting. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn, together with Thermo Fisher Scientific in the Netherlands, deciphered the previously unknown structure of the Factor XIII complex using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), even at the atomic level.

Space mission "BepiColombo" delivers data from the innermost planet in our solar system for the first time On December 1, 2024, the BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the fifth time and has now become the first spacecraft to observe the surface in the mid-infrared using the MERTIS ("Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer") infrared spectrometer.

A Spanish team led from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) has observed the formation of a new quantum state in ultrathin materials by cooling a Mott insulator below 11 Kelvin. This finding, published in Nature Communications , could revolutionize the development of superconductors and next-generation electronic devices, marking a milestone in materials science.

Identifying optimal catalyst materials for specific reactions is crucial to advance energy storage technologies and sustainable chemical processes. To screen catalysts, scientists must understand systems' adsorption energy, something that machine learning (ML) models, particularly graph neural networks (GNNs), have been successful at predicting.

Webb telescope's largest study of universe expansion confirms challenge to cosmic theory The findings offer a crucial cross-check for previous Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the universe's mysterious expansion New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe-not a flaw in telescope measurements-may be behind the decadelong mystery of why the universe is expanding faster today than it did in its infancy billions of years ago.

Experiment reveals new blind spot in our physical reasoning: Most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, new Johns Hopkins University research finds.

The team's detection method, which identified 138 space rocks ranging from busto stadium-sized, could aid in tracking potential asteroid impactors. The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10 kilometers across. That's about as wide as Brooklyn, New York. Such a massive impactor is predicted to hit Earth rarely, once every 100 million to 500 million years.

Many animals orient themselves using their sense of magnetism. However, this can be based on different physical mechanisms. A research team from Oldenburg and Würzburg has now investigated the navigation of the desert ant. Desert ants of the Cataglyphis nodus species use the Earth's magnetic field for spatial orientation, but these tiny insects rely on a different component of the field than other insects, a research team led by Dr Pauline Fleischmann from the University of Oldenburg reports in the journal Current Biology.

Earthworms are the "master builders" of the soil. They make nutrients available and sequester the greenhouse gas CO2 in the form of leaves in deep soil layers. A Swiss-German research team is investigating their work in Rendzina soils, the Swiss soil of the year 2025, which was chosen by the Swiss Soil Science Society on Soil Day, December 5.

Scientists at the University of Würzburg and the German national metrology institute (PTB) have carried out an experiment that realizes a new kind of quantum standard of resistance. It's based on the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect. The precise measurement of electrical resistance is essential in industrial production or electronics - for example, in the manufacture of high-tech sensors, microchips and flight controls.

From smart textiles to self-driving cars: researchers are developing new types of detectors for infrared radiation that are more sustainable, flexible and cost-effective than conventional technologies. The key to success is not (only) the composition of the material, but also its size. The ubiquity of infrared detectors What do motion detectors, self-driving cars, chemical analyzers and satellites have in common' They all contain detectors for infrared (IR) light.

Physicists are getting closer to controlling single-molecule chemical reactions - could this shape the future of pharmaceutical research? Controlling matter at the atomic level has taken a major step forward, thanks to groundbreaking nanotechnology research by an international team of scientists led by physicists at the University of Bath.

In the effort to develop new quantum technologies of the future, scientists are pursuing several different approaches. One avenue seeks to use molecules as the fundamental building blocks of quantum technologies. Now scientists at Caltech have figured out a new way to use ultrafast laser pulses to realize an important quantum mechanical property known as superposition, turning a relatively simple molecule into a quantum sensor-a tool that can measure chemical phenomena in its surroundings through inherently quantum means.

Scientists are calling for changes to chemistry textbooks after discovering a fundamental aspect of structural organic chemistry has been incorrectly described for almost 100 years. The team from Cardiff University's School of Chemistry, dispute the long-held belief that alkyl groups - a chemical group consisting of carbon and hydrogen atoms arranged in a chain - donate electrons to other parts of a molecule.