Tag: probes

FBI Probes Use of Israeli Firm’s Spyware In Personal and Government Hacks

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Reuters: The FBI is investigating the role of Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group Technologies in possible hacks on American residents and companies as well as suspected intelligence gathering on governments, according to four people familiar with the inquiry. The probe was underway by 2017, when Federal Bureau of Investigation officials were trying to learn whether NSO…

Underwater Robot Reveals Hidden Base of Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday’ Glacier

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Using a robot dropped through a 700-meter hole in the ice, scientists stationed on Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier have captured the first video of the glacier’s grounding line, the mysterious boundary where ice meets land and where warm ocean water could be slowly melting the glacier’s base — putting it at risk of collapse (above)….

High-precision distributed sensing using an entangled quantum network

Quantum-enhanced metrology has been an active area of research for several years now due to its many possible applications, ranging from atomic clocks to biological imaging. Past physics research established that having a non-classical probe, such as squeezed light or an entangled spin state, can have significant benefits compared to classical probes. This idea was explored further in several recent works,…

After Mishap with Boeing Spacecraft, NASA Faces a Dilemma

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As it probes why Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight, or allow the next flight to…

Study probes the origin of the very high energy gamma-ray source VER J1907+062

A new study based on high-quality radio observations with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) has investigated the origin of a very high-energy gamma-ray source known as VER J1907+062. Results of the study, published December 27 on arXiv.org, suggest that VER J1907+062 consists of two separate gamma-ray sources. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-probes-high-energy-gamma-ray-source.html…

Astronomer probes ‘DNA’ of twin stars to reveal family history of the Milky Way

Twin stars appear to share chemical “DNA” that could help scientists map the history of the Milky Way galaxy, according to new research by astronomer Keith Hawkins of The University of Texas at Austin accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-12-astronomer-probes-dna-twin-stars.html…

Laser-based prototype probes cold atom dynamics

By tracking the motions of cold atom clouds, astronomers can learn much about the physical processes which play out in the depths of space. To make these measurements, researchers currently use instruments named ‘cold atom inertial sensors’ which, so far, have largely been operated inside the lab. In new work published in EPJ D, a team of physicists at Muquans and…

ATLAS Experiment probes the quark-gluon plasma in a new study of photo-produced muon pairs

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the electromagnetic fields of Lorentz-contracted lead nuclei in heavy-ion collisions act as intense sources of high-energy photons, or particles of light. This environment allows particle physicists to study photon-induced scattering processes, which can not be studied elsewhere. …