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NASA’s DART Kinetic Impactor Spacecraft Launches in World’s First Planetary Defense Test Mission

Lead Image: NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission. Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, DART took off Wednesday, November 24, from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Lighting up the California coastline early in the morning of November 24, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft off the planet to begin its one-way trip to crash into an asteroid. DART — a mission designed, developed, and managed…

MIT Chemists Get Quantum Dots To Stop Blinking

Lead Image: MIT chemists have come up with a way to control the unwanted blinking of quantum dots, depicted here as yellow spheres, without requiring any modification to the formulation or the manufacturing process. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers New approach solves a persistent problem of intermittency that has hindered use of the tiny light emitters for biological imaging or quantum photonics. Quantum dots, discovered in the 1990s, have a wide range of applications and are perhaps best known for producing vivid colors in some high-end televisions. But for some potential uses, such as tracking biochemical pathways of a drug…

A Fossil of a Bizarre Snake-Like Lizard Has Generated Controversy Beyond Its Identity

With four tiny legs and an extraordinarily long body, a fossil of the snake-like lizard Tetrapodophis amplectus has created controversy. Credit: Julius Csotonyi More than 120 million years ago in what is now modern Brazil, an ancient waterway was filled with all manner of strange creatures. These included dinosaurs, pterosaurs, sharks, bony fishes, a dizzying array of insects, strange plants and an oddly long and small lizard: Tetrapodophis amplectus. In 2015, the journal Science published a paper claiming that this elongate lizard was a snake with four legs. The discovery of such a specimen could tell us a great deal…

Time-Reversal Phenomenon: In the Quantum Realm, Not Even Time Flows As You Might Expect

New study shows the boundary between time moving forward and backward may blur in quantum mechanics. A team of physicists at the Universities of Bristol, Vienna, the Balearic Islands and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI-Vienna) has shown how quantum systems can simultaneously evolve along two opposite time arrows — both forward and backward in time. The study, published in the latest issue of Communications Physics, necessitates a rethink of how the flow of time is understood and represented in contexts where quantum laws play a crucial role. For centuries, philosophers and physicists have been pondering the existence…

Beyond Qubits: Cryogenic Chip Is Big Step To Scale Up Quantum Computing

Lead Image: The Cryogenic CMOS chip platform. The chip itself is just below the shining component, which houses the qubits. Credit: University of Sydney Cryogenic chip allows for control of thousands of qubits. Through the Microsoft partnership with the University, Professor David Reilly and colleagues have invented a device that operates at 40 times colder than deep space to directly control thousands of qubits, the building blocks of quantum technology. Scientists and engineers at the University of Sydney and Microsoft Corporation have opened the next chapter in quantum technology with the invention of a single chip that can generate control…