Imagine Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airplanes. Steam robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in hats and cloaks. This kind of retrofuturistic mash-up is the fantasy realm of steampunk, a genre of literature, film, and other creative media. Theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern sees her specialty, the field of quantum thermodynamics, … Read more
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion. Two independent studies found evidence of a star the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days. “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, … Read more
The word “bionic” conjures up sci-fi visions of humans grown to superhuman levels. It is true that engineering advances such as better motors and batteries, along with modern computing, mean that the necessary mechanical and electronic systems are no longer a barrier to advanced prostheses. But the field has struggled to integrate these powerful machines … Read more
An asteroid heading toward Earth can be deflected without ever touching a spacecraft. The trick is to use X-rays to deflect the space rock, researchers report Sept. 23 Nature Physics. In laboratory experiments, scientists heated the surfaces of free-falling artificial asteroids with X-ray radiation, producing steam plumes that blew the objects away. Later computer simulations … Read more
Clostridioides difficile is an extremely nasty intestinal bug, with few effective treatments and no approved vaccines. But the same technology that enabled the first COVID-19 vaccines has shown early promise in mouse experiments against the deadly infection, which kills 30,000 people in the United States each year. An mRNA vaccine designed to target C. difficile … Read more
Above the cloud tops, storms blow with a complex and frenetic light show of high-energy radiation. A view from a refurbished spy plane flying 20 kilometers up revealed storms glowing and flickering in gamma rays, high-energy light invisible to the eye. Ten flybys of the aircraft, NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, captured the flickering of gamma-ray bursts … Read more