Redwire says it expects to find more business opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic despite geopolitical challenges that could hamper international cooperation.

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When imagery from the Worldview Legion satellites revealed fabric over a large object near a dry dock in North Korea in September, satellite operator Maxar Intelligence knew they needed help. […]

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Many worry about retribution. But for others, speaking out is worth the risk

China has added new spacecraft to two separate classified satellite series with a pair of launches across Sunday and Monday.

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Learn more about the difference between bioluminescence and photoluminescence, and about the particular chemical compounds that give bandicoots (and other Australian mammals) their colorful glow.

Discover how an analysis of more than 700 objects reveals obsidian came into the Aztec capital from far and wide.

Learn how a trio of scientists do the math, based on a Stephen Hawking theory, and even ask how long it would take for a human and the moon to evaporate.

Learn more about fascinating lava fountains and how high they can reach during a volcano eruption.

Auria Space and Sphinx Defense will develop competing versions of what the Space Force calls a “joint antenna marketplace"

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German launch services provider Exolaunch is working with non-U.S. customers to reclaim most of the tariffs they must pay to deploy their satellites via SpaceX.

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A famous cache of wooden spear shafts and other hunting tools was once ascribed to a group of early humans that were not known for social organization.

Company finds candidates that bind to tricky proteins that deliver chemical messages in and out of cells

Largest ever study of Tenochtitlan obsidian reveals complex trade networks and ritual preferences

Discover why scientists and politicians are calling for the creation of a Coordinated Lunar Time.

The Defense Innovation Unit added more than a dozen new companies to its Hybrid Space Architecture project.

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The defense giant eyes new SRM supplier as demand surges for hypersonic and missile systems

The post Lockheed Martin increases investment in solid rocket startup X-Bow Systems appeared first on SpaceNews.

On April 17, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations of the Space Force, released his third major statement on Competitive Endurance — a strategic framework designed to guide […]

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Learn more about how researchers have discovered that chimps can combine calls in multiple ways to create new meanings, remarkably similar to the way we combine sounds and words into sentences..

Reorganizations at the EPA may get rid of the agency’s fundamental program for research around the risks of toxic chemicals.

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Last year’s release of both the Department of Defense (DoD) “Commercial Space Integration Strategy” and the United States Space Force (USSF) “Commercial Space Strategy,” marked, for the first time, the […]

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The prime contractor for Canadarm3 believes that technology could be repurposed for other uses should the Gateway be canceled.

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For decades, geostationary orbit (GEO) was the undisputed home of satellite communications. From television broadcasts to internet backhaul and voice services, GEO satellites formed the backbone of global connectivity, delivering […]

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Researchers in Germany report that they have directly measured a superconducting gap in a hydride sulphide material for the first time. The new finding represents “smoking gun” evidence for superconductivity in these materials, while also confirming that the electron pairing that causes it is mediated by phonons.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without resistance. Many materials behave this way when cooled below a certain transition temperature T_c, but in most cases this temperature is very low. For example, solid mercury, the first superconductor to be discovered, has a T_c of 4.2 K. Superconductors that operate at higher temperatures – perhaps even at room temperature – are thus highly desirable, as an ambient-temperature superconductor would dramatically increase the efficiency of electrical generators and transmission lines.

The rise of the superhydrides

The 1980s and 1990s saw considerable progress towards this goal thanks to the discovery of high-temperature copper oxide superconductors, which have T_cs between 30–133 K. Then, in 2015, the maximum known critical temperature rose even higher thanks to the discovery that a sulphide material, H₃S, has a T_c of 203 K when compressed to pressures of 150 GPa.

This result sparked a flurry of interest in solid materials containing hydrogen atoms bonded to other elements. In 2019, the record was broken again, this time by lanthanum decahydride (LaH₁₀), which was found to have a T_c of 250–260 K, again at very high pressures.

A further advance occurred in 2021 with the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in cerium hydrides. These novel phases of CeH₉ and another newly-synthesized material, CeH₁₀, are remarkable in that they are stable and display high-temperature superconductivity at lower pressures (about 80 GPa, or 0.8 million atmospheres) than the other so-called “superhydrides”.

But how does it work?

One question left unanswered amid these advances concerned the mechanism for superhydride superconductivity. According to the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory of “conventional” superconductivity, superconductivity occurs when electrons overcome their mutual electrical repulsion to form pairs. These electron pairs, which are known as Cooper pairs, can then travel unhindered through the material as a supercurrent without scattering off phonons (quasiparticles arising from vibrations of the material’s crystal lattice) or other impurities.

Cooper pairing is characterized by a tell-tale energy gap near what’s known as the Fermi level, which is the highest energy level that electrons can occupy in a solid at a temperature of absolute zero. This gap is equivalent to the maximum energy required to break up a Cooper pair of electrons, and spotting it is regarded as unambiguous proof of that material’s superconducting nature.

For the superhydrides, however, this is easier said than done, because measuring such a gap requires instruments that can withstand the extremely high pressures required for superhydrides to exist and behave as superconductors. Traditional techniques such as scanning tunnelling spectroscopy or angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy do not work, and there was little consensus on what might take their place.

Planar electron tunnelling spectroscopy

A team led by researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has now stepped in by developing a form of spectroscopy that can operate under extreme pressures. The technique, known as planar electron tunnelling spectroscopy, required the researchers to synthesize highly pure planar tunnel junctions of H₃S and its deuterated equivalent D₃S under pressures of over 100 GPa. Using a technique called laser heating, they created junctions with three parts: a metal, tantalum; a barrier made of tantalum pentoxide, Ta₂O₅; and the H₃S or D₃S superconductors. By measuring the differential conductance across the junctions, they determined the density of electron states in H₃S and D₃S near the Fermi level.

These tunnelling spectra revealed that both H₃S and D₃S have fully open superconducting gaps of 60 meV and 44 meV respectively. According to team member Feng Du, the smaller gap in D₃S confirms that the superconductivity in H₃S comes about thanks to interactions between electrons and phonons – a finding that backs up long-standing predictions.

The researchers hope their work, which they report on in Nature, will inspire more detailed studies of superhydrides. They now plan to measure the superconducting gap of other metal superhydrides and compare them with the covalent superhydrides they studied in this work. “The results from such experiments could help us understand the origin of the high T_c in these superconductors,” Du tells Physics World.

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Rocket Lab says its planned acquisition of a German optical communications supplier is key to its plans for both bidding on large constellations and eventually developing its own.

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Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

Antibody and vaccine work is slowed after the National Institutes of Health loses as many as 2200 contract workers

In a reversal, White House plans to retain the National Space Council, a move that industry officials say could serve as an advocate for space amid pressures to cut budgets.

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Learn more about the illicit use of fentanyl and other opioids in the U.S., including intentional and unintentional use.

Researchers on the AEgIS collaboration at CERN have designed an experiment that could soon boost our understanding of how antimatter falls under gravity. Created by a team led by Francesco Guatieri at the Technical University of Munich, the scheme uses modified smartphone camera sensors to improve the spatial resolution of measurements of antimatter annihilations. This approach could be used in rigorous tests of the weak equivalence principle (WEP).

The WEP is a key concept of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which underpins our understanding of gravity. It suggests that within a gravitational field, all objects of should be accelerated at the same rate, regardless of their mass or whether they are matter or antimatter. Therefore, if matter and antimatter accelerate at different rates in freefall, it would reveal serious problems with the WEP.

In 2023 the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN was the first to observe how antimatter responds to gravity. They found that it falls down, with the tantalizing possibility that antimatter’s gravitational response is weaker than matter’s. Today, there are several experiments that are seeking to improve on this observation.

Falling beam

AEgIS’ approach is to create a horizontal beam of cold antihydrogen atoms and observe how the atoms fall under gravity. The drop will be measured by a moiré deflectometer in which a beam passes through two successive and aligned grids of horizontal slits before striking a position-sensitive detector. As the beam falls under gravity between the grids, the effect is similar to a slight horizontal misalignment of the grids. This creates a moiré pattern – or superlattice – that results in the particles making a distinctive pattern on the detector. By detecting a difference in the measured moiré pattern and that predicted by WEP, the AEgIS collaboration hopes to reveal a discrepancy with general relativity.

However, as Guatieri explains, a number of innovations are required for this to work. “For AEgIS to work, we need a detector with incredibly high spatial resolution. Previously, photographic plates were the only option, but they lacked real-time capabilities.”

AEgIS physicists are addressing this by developing a new vertexing detector. Instead of focussing on the antiparticles directly, their approach detects the secondary particles produced when the antimatter annihilates on contact with the detector. Tracing the trajectories of these particles back to their vertex gives the precise location of the annihilation.

Vertexing detector

Borrowing from industry, the team has created its vertexing detector using an array of modified mobile-phone camera sensors (see figure). Gautieri had already used this approach to measure the real-time positions of low-energy positrons (anti-electrons) with unprecedented precision.

“Mobile camera sensors have pixels smaller than 1 micron,” Guatieri describes. “We had to strip away the first layers of the sensors, which are made to deal with the advanced integrated electronics of mobile phones. This required high-level electronic design and micro-engineering.”

With these modifications in place, the team measured the positions of antiproton annihilations to within just 0.62 micron: making their detector some 35 times more precise than previous designs.

Many benefits

“Our solution, demonstrated for antiprotons and directly applicable to antihydrogen, combines photographic-plate-level resolution, real-time diagnostics, self-calibration and a good particle collection surface, all in one device,” Gautieri says.

With some further improvements, the AEgIS team is confident that their vertexing detector with boost the resolution of the freefall of horizontal antihydrogen beams – allowing rigorous tests of the WEC.

AEgIS team member Ruggero Caravita of Italy’s University of Trento adds, “This game-changing technology could also find broader applications in experiments where high position resolution is crucial, or to develop high-resolution trackers”. He says, “Its extraordinary resolution enables us to distinguish between different annihilation fragments, paving the way for new research on low-energy antiparticle annihilation in materials”.

The research is described in Science Advances.

The post Smartphone sensors and antihydrogen could soon put relativity to the test appeared first on Physics World.

The agency maintains the global backbone of measurements of CO2 and other gases, but these are at risk of being curtailed if the foreshadowed cuts to NOAA are realized.

Growing rates of type 2 diabetes across the African content offer scientists hope of creating new, more inclusive treatments.

Smaller future budgets will require fewer people, NSF official tells staff

Safety issues with the only available vaccine complicates response to chikungunya

Department selected universal flu vaccine work by NIH leaders without “transparency,” some scientists say

Learn how vultures prevent the spread of disease by cleaning up the environment, and find out what would happen if they disappear.

Learn more about the new methods Iceland is using to keep lava from destroying towns.

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Learn how the unique effects of Wolbachia bacteria in female fruit flies could help us fight against deadly mosquito-borne diseases.