Wednesday, Jan 28th
Last update10:04:31 AM GMT
Science Glance
U.S. Navy researchers stumbled upon the concept of radar when they noticed that a plane flying past a radio tower reflected radio waves.
Scientists have now applied that same principle to make the first device that tracks existing Wi-Fi signals to spy on people through walls.
A team of astronomers has detected the "death cry" of a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole. The black hole had been sitting quietly -- almost lying in wait, as it were -- until its gravity reached out and shredded a passing star, pulling the star into its death grip and causing it to emit a characteristic signal.
"You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," said astronomer Jon Miller of the University of Michigan, lead author of a report appearing in Science Express.
Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.
It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.
Everyone is talking about the recent Higgs boson announcement by the scientists at CERN, but another significant scientific discovery was revealed this week as well. In a study published online in the journal
Nature on Wednesday, scientists show that they have successfully found the first dark matter filament. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light or electromagnetic radiation at a detectable level. This essentially makes it invisible.
Just four chimps remain at this controversial research facility near Interstate 270 in Rockville. Called Bioqual, the company’s 30-year run of chimpanzee research is ending, victim of a historic shift away from using apes in medical experiments.
On Monday morning, a truck hauled six chimps from Bioqual. Last week, five others were removed. The last four, including Tiffany and Torian, will depart later this summer.
Twisted light beams have opened the door for wireless communication 85,000 times faster than broadband Internet speeds. The breakthrough could allow NASA missions or military space satellites to exchange data at ultrahigh speeds.
Lab tests have shown how twisted laser beams can transmit data at speeds up to 2.56 terabits per second — roughly the equivalent of beaming 70 DVDs worth of data in a single second through free space. Such speed easily put broadband Internet's 30 megabits per second to shame.
The reigning theory of particle physics may be flawed, according to new evidence that a subatomic particle decays in a certain way more often than it should, scientists announced.
This theory, called the Standard Model, is the best handbook scientists have to describe the tiny bits of matter that make up the universe. But many physicists suspect the Standard Model has some holes in it, and findings like this may point to where those holes are hiding.
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