This animated flyover of each of the four candidate sample collection sites on asteroid Bennu, selected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, was produced using close-range data from the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA), an instrument contributed by the Canadian Space Agency. It illustrates the location of each site on Bennu, the topography of each site, and the potential sampling regions…
Tag: laser
New Technique Can Bioprint Living Tissue In Seconds
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Bioprinting holds great potential for repairing injuries, testing drugs or replacing whole organs, but it’s currently limited in complexity, viability and speed — you can’t just create tissue on a whim. Soon, though, it might be a matter of crafting whatever you need when you need it. Scientists at EPFL and University Medical Center Utrecht have…
Watching electrons using extreme ultraviolet light
A new technique developed by a team at MIT can map the complete electronic band structure of materials at high resolution. This capability is usually exclusive to large synchrotron facilities, but now it is available as a tabletop laser-based setup at MIT. This technique, which uses extreme ultraviolet (XUV) laser pulses to measure the dynamics of electrons via angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy…
Scientists Are 99 Percent Sure They Just Detected a Black Hole Eating a Neutron Star
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a gravitational wave called S190814bv was detected by the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its Italian counterpart Virgo. Based on its known properties, scientists think there is a 99% probability that the source of the wave is a black hole that ate a neutron star. In contrast to black…
Ions clear another hurdle toward scaled-up quantum computing
Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have been steadily improving the performance of ion trap systems, a leading platform for future quantum computers. Now, a team of researchers led by JQI Fellows Norbert Linke and Christopher Monroe has performed a key experiment on five ion-based quantum bits, or qubits. They used laser pulses to simultaneously create quantum connections between different…
If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams at Us, We Now Have a Way to Detect Them
Are aliens using super powerful flashlights to get our attention? Astronomers think there’s a chance they are. Source: https://www.livescience.com/66086-are-aliens-flashing-laser-beams.html
ACEAP 2019: Cerro Pachón and Cerro Tololo
Robert Pettengill reports from the busy ACEAP (Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassador Program) annual trip, happening now in Chile. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/aceap-2019-cerro-pachon-and-cerro-tololo…
‘Talking Lasers’ That Beam Messages into Your Head Could Be Here in 5 Years, Pentagon Says
A laser beam hits the wall next to you — and suddenly, the wall talks. Source: https://www.livescience.com/66060-pentagon-tests-talking-laser.html
Travelling towards a quantum internet at light speed
A research team lead by Osaka University demonstrated how information encoded in the circular polarization of a laser beam can be translated into the spin state of an electron in a quantum dot, each being a quantum bit and a quantum computer candidate. The achievement represents a major step towards a “quantum internet,” in which future computers can rapidly and securely…
Scientists film rotating carbonyl sulphide molecules
Scientists have used precisely tuned pulses of laser light to film the ultrafast rotation of a molecule. The resulting “molecular movie” tracks one and a half revolutions of carbonyl sulphide (OCS)—a rod-shaped molecule consisting of one oxygen, one carbon and one sulphur atom—taking place within 125 trillionths of a second, at a high temporal and spatial resolution. The team headed by…