These Sounds Are Out of This World! #ASA184
Scientists can harness sound on other worlds to learn about properties that might otherwise require a lot of expensive equipment, like the chemical composition of rocks, how atmospheric temperature changes, or the roughness of the ground. Extraterrestrial sounds could also be used in the search for life. Timothy G. Leighton from the University of Southampton has designed a software program that produces extraterrestrial environmental sounds and predicts how human voices might change in distant worlds. He will demonstrate his work at the upcoming 184th ASA Meeting.
Chaos Announces Winners of 2022 Edward N. Lorenz Early Career Awards
Chaos congratulates Yuzuru Kato, Thomas Lilienkamp, and Tiemo Pedergnana for winning the journal's 2022 Edward N. Lorenz Early Career Awards. Kato was recognized for introducing a definition of a phase function for quantum rhythmic systems, Lilienkamp was commended for developing a low-energy and safer approach to defibrillation, and Pedergnana was selected for work to better understand if and how an exact potential, which greatly simplifies analysis of the Langevin equation, can be found for a given system. The winners will split a $2,000 honorarium and are invited to contribute a perspective article to the journal.
Songs of the Oceans Raise Environmental Awareness #ASA184
At the 184th ASA Meeting, Colin Malloy of Ocean Network Canada will present his method to transform ocean data into captivating, solo percussion songs. He employs sound from hydrophones and introduces elements inspired by ocean-related data such as temperature, acidity, and oxygenation. For example, in his piece, Oil & Water, Malloy represents the impact of oil production on the oceans. He plays an eerily catchy melody on steel drums and inserts noise to represent oil production over the past 120 years.
Detecting Neutrinos from Nuclear Reactors with Water
Neutrinos are subatomic particles produced in many types of radioactive decays, including in nuclear reactors. Because neutrinos interact with matter extremely weakly, they are impossible to shield. The SNO+ experiment has just shown that a detector filled with simple water can detect neutrinos from nuclear reactors, even though the neutrinos create only tiny signals in the detector.
Physicists discover 'stacked pancakes of liquid magnetism'
Physicists have discovered "stacked pancakes of liquid magnetism" that may account for the strange electronic behavior of some layered helical magnets.
APL Photonics Selects Recipient for 2022 Future Luminary Award
The University of Arizona's Husain Alqattan is the recipient of the APL Photonics 2022 Future Luminary Award for his work in utilizing pulse shaping and waveform synthesis to control electron motion and open the door for ultrafast electronics that process data at unprecedented speeds. The winning paper, "Attosecond light field synthesis," was published in the April 2022 issue of APL Photonics. The award recognizes early-career researchers with the potential to become luminaries in the field of photonics.
Listening to the Largest Tree on Earth #ASA184
Spread across 106 acres in southcentral Utah, the Pando aspen grove resembles a forest but is actually a single organism with more than 47,000 genetically identical aspen stems connected at the root. As an artist-in-residence for the nonprofit group Friends of Pando, Jeff Rice used a variety of microphones to record Pando's leaves, birds, and weather. As part of the 184th ASA Meeting, Rice and Lance Oditt will describe their work to reveal a unique acoustic portrait of this botanical wonder.
Small but Mighty: Insect-Inspired Microphones #ASA184
By understanding how insects perceive sound and using 3D-printing technology to create custom materials, it is possible to develop miniature, bio-inspired microphones.
Fighting Racial Bias in Next-Gen Breast Cancer Screening #ASA184
With optoacoustic tomography emerging as an effective breast cancer screening method, Seonyeong Park of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her team wanted to determine its reliability in patients with darker skin. They simulated a range of skin colors and tumor locations using digital breasts to make rapid and cost-effective evaluations, and the results confirmed that tumors could be harder to locate in individuals with darker skin. Park has developed a virtual framework that allows for more comprehensive investigations and can serve as a tool for evaluating and optimizing new OAT imaging systems in their early stages of development.
UAH space science faculty advances modelling of energetic neutral atoms to better understand solar flares and coronal mass ejections
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) are two of the most energetic processes in the solar system, showering the Earth's magnetic field with billions of tons of highly energetic plasma gas, potentially disrupting power grids, satellites and communications networks.
Material scientist Ashley Bielinski relied on her passion for cutting-edge research to grow her career at Argonne
Argonne fellow Ashley Bielinski developed a new approach to study atomic layer deposition, an important technique in research and industry.
Hey Siri, Can You Hear Me? #ASA184
At the 184th ASA Meeting, Georgia Zellou and Michelle Cohn of the University of California, Davis will describe experiments to investigate how speech and comprehension change when humans communicate with AI. They examined how people adjust their voice when communicating with an AI system compared to talking with another human and, on the listening side, how what a device sounds like impacts how well listeners will understand it.
Preserving Pine Forests by Understanding Beetle Flight
In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Alberta study the flight performance of the mountain pine beetle from a fluid mechanics and an entomological perspective. Understanding these aspects of the insect's flight could improve estimates of its spread through the environment and preserve pine forests. To examine insect flight, the team employed a type of model previously used for idealized airfoils. They showed that it can be successfully applied to multiple individual animals across biological sex, insect age, and body size. In doing so, the model can predict how these factors impact flight characteristics.
Extracting the Best Flavor from Coffee
In Physics of Fluids, University of Huddersfield researchers explore the role of uneven coffee extraction using a simple mathematical model. They split the coffee into two regions to examine whether uneven flow does in fact make weaker espresso. One of the regions in the model system hosted more tightly packed coffee than the other, which caused an initial disparity in flow resistance. The extraction of coffee decreased the flow resistance further. Understanding the origin of uneven extraction and avoiding or preventing it could enable better brews and substantial financial savings by using coffee more efficiently.
Rouven Essig: Then and Now / 2012 Early Career Award Winner
Rouven Essig is a theoretical particle physicist at Stony Brook University. He conceives new experiments and detection methods in the search for knowledge about dark matter.
Department of Energy Announces $45 Million for Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, at the celebration ceremony of the historic achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced a plan to provide up to $45 million to support Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) research and development.
Galactic bubbles are more complex than imagined, researchers say
Astronomers have revealed new evidence about the properties of the giant bubbles of high-energy gas that extend far above and below the Milky Way galaxy's center.
Scintillating science: FSU researchers improve materials for radiation detection and imaging technology
Professor Biwu Ma from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and his colleagues have developed a new class of materials that can act as highly efficient scintillators, which emit light after being exposed to other forms of high energy radiations, such as X-rays.
Beyond Necessity, Hearing Aids Bring Enjoyment Through Music #ASA184
At the 184th ASA Meeting, Emily Sandgren and Joshua Alexander of Purdue University will describe experiments to determine the best hearing aids for listening to music. To test and compare, they took over 200 recordings of music samples as processed by hearing aids from seven popular manufacturers. They asked study participants to rate the sound quality of these recordings and found that the hearing aids had lower ratings for music than their control stimuli. The researchers found bigger differences in music quality between hearing aid brands than between speech and music programs.
Webb Looks for Fomalhaut's Asteroid Belt and Finds Much More
A new Webb Space Telescope image of the bright, nearby star Fomalhaut reveals its planetary system with details never seen before, including nested concentric rings of dust. These belts most likely are carved by the gravitational forces produced by embedded, unseen planets. Similarly, inside our solar system Jupiter corrals the asteroid belt of leftover debris that lies between us and the giant planet. Astronomers first discovered Fomalhaut's disk in 1983. But there has never been a view as spectacular - or as revealing - as Webb's.
Leaky-wave Metasurfaces: A Perfect Interface Between Free-space and Integrated Optical Systems
Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a new class of integrated photonic devices--"leaky-wave metasurfaces"--that convert light initially confined in an optical waveguide to an arbitrary optical pattern in free space. These are the first to demonstrate simultaneous control of all four optical degrees of freedom, setting a world record. Because they're so thin, transparent, and compatible with photonic integrated circuits, they can be used to improve optical displays, LIDAR, optical communications, and quantum optics.
X-ray beams help researchers learn new tricks from old metals
From a nanoscale grain of platinum, researchers made a first step in developing a tool that enables them to characterize the materials with a new level of detail, ultimately producing the best materials for the hydrogen production and use.
RHIC Gets Ready to Smash Gold Ions for Run 23
The start of this year's physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000, a brand new detector, known as sPHENIX, will track what happens when the nuclei of gold atoms smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. RHIC's STAR detector, which has been running and evolving since 2000, will also see some firsts in Run 23.
Princeton University awards plasma physics graduate student Suying Jin a highly selective honorific fellowship
Suying Jin, who is entering her sixth and planned final year as a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, won Princeton University's honorific Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year.
Surprising Preference in Particle Spin Alignment
Some mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) that emerge from a hot soup of matter generated in collisions of atomic nuclei appear to have a preferential "global spin alignment." The spin preference cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms. A new model suggests that local fluctuations in the strong force may play a role in triggering the preference. The global spin alignment measurements may give scientists a new way to study local fluctuations in the strong force, which is the strongest and least understood of the four fundamental forces in nature.