Delta_V

A bewilderingly powerful mystery object found in a nearby galaxy and only visible so far in millimeter radio wavelengths could be a brand new astrophysical object unlike anything astronomers have seen before...

...What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization.

Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar, the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar. However, while a magnetar's ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is.

Supernova remnants such as the Crab Nebula, which is the messy innards blasted into space of a star that exploded in 1054AD, are bright at millimeter wavelengths. The trouble is that supernova remnants are quite large — the Crab Nebula itself is about 11 light-years across — whereas Punctum is clearly a much smaller, compact object...

Researchers at European XFEL in Germany have tracked in real time the movement of individual atoms during a chemical reaction in the gas phase. Using extremely short X-ray flashes, they were able to observe the formation of an iodine molecule (I₂) after irradiating diiodomethane (CH₂I₂) molecules by infrared light, which involves breaking two bonds and forming a new one.

At the same time, they were able to distinguish this reaction from two other reaction pathways, namely the separation of a single iodine atom from the diiodomethane, or the excitation of bending vibrations in the bound molecule. The results, published in Nature Communications, provide new insights into fundamental reaction mechanisms that have so far been very difficult to distinguish experimentally.

Connection: City . . . Night City.

Fuel cells are energy solutions that can convert the chemical energy in fuels into electricity via specific chemical reactions, instead of relying on combustion. Promising types of fuel cells are direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), devices specifically designed to convert the energy in methyl alcohol (i.e., methanol) into electrical energy.

Despite their potential for powering large electronics, vehicles and other systems requiring portable power, these methanol-based fuel cells still have significant limitations. Most notably, studies found that their performance tends to significantly degrade over time, because the materials used to catalyze reactions in the cells (i.e., electrocatalytic surfaces) gradually become less effective.

One approach to cleaning these surfaces and preventing the accumulation of poisoning products produced during chemical reactions entails the modulation of the voltage applied to the fuel cells. However, manually adjusting the voltage applied to the surfaces in effective ways, while also accounting for physical and chemical processes in the fuel cells, is impractical for real-world applications.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently developed Alpha-Fuel-Cell, a new machine learning-based tool that can monitor the state of a catalyst and adjust the voltage applied to it accordingly. The new computational tool, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, was found to improve the average power produced by direct methanol fuel cells by 153% compared to conventional manual voltage operation strategies...

..."This system is the first demonstration of a combination of AI and energy devices, maintaining maximum fuel cell power with automatic catalyst self-healing. The system figures out when short rests actually help the cell to recover, instead of wasting time . . . We're now scaling our approach from a single lab cell to larger, real-world stacks, adding safety and lifetime limits directly into the controller, and testing the same idea on batteries and other electrochemical systems to generalize it," added [Ju Li, senior author of the paper].

...The proposed Texas map is designed to net the GOP up to five House seats — potentially enough to decide the majority...

Outside Texas, key Democratic governors have launched an aggressive counteroffensive to try to neutralize the GOP's redistricting push.

...Newsom, who's made no secret of his presidential ambitions, has openly accused Trump of "rigging" the midterms and suggested California could redraw its map to eliminate all nine GOP-held seats.

[New York Gov. Kathy Hochul] called Monday for disbanding New York's independent redistricting commission and embracing partisan hardball, telling reporters that she's "tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back...I cannot ignore that the playing field has changed dramatically, and shame on us if we ignore that fact and cling tight to the vestiges of the past," Hochul said.

...Exotic matter is a hypothetical form of matter theorized to contain unusual properties often characterized by a negative energy density, meaning it would have a negative mass or exert a repulsive gravitational force. Wormholes would require a shell of exotic matter, but just like wormholes, exotic matter has never been observed and is considered hypothetical.

“If you could somehow create that state of matter, then, according to general relativity, you could have a wormhole. But if you ask me whether that kind of matter is possible, I doubt it,”...

As of now, scientists don’t know enough about the characteristics of wormholes to confidently identify them, such as the types of situations that would create a wormhole, the properties of a wormhole, and how to detect said properties...

One key feature is that a wormhole would look like a sphere, not a hole, says Lupsasca, adding that to travel through a wormhole would be like “getting sucked into a ball and then expelled from another ball.”...

Imagine living in a two-dimensional world, like a sheet of paper. When that sheet of paper is folded over . . . these separate locations in “space-time” are joined together in much the same way a wormhole might do. Similarly, if a person were to go through a wormhole, it would change their location in both space and time.

Ghosts, bear or otherwise, have completed their art.

Lack of communication taints love.

The director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center announced her resignation Monday, marking yet another high-profile departure as questions loom about the agency’s budget and future.

Makenzie Lystrup, who has served as director of the center in Maryland since April 2023, will leave the agency on Aug. 1, according to a NASA statement.

Lystrup’s resignation comes less than two months after Laurie Leshin stepped down as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

...more than 280 current and former NASA employees signed a letter to Sean Duffy, NASA’s interim administrator, stating that the Trump administration’s recent policies “have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”

The agency did not provide a reason for Lystrup’s resignation.

NASA said Monday that Cynthia Simmons, Goddard's deputy director, will take over as acting center director in August.

For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.

...For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer.

...“US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”

...But as difficult and expensive as it will be for US allies to escape the enshittification of American power—it will be much harder for Americans to do so, as that power is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has weaponized federal payments systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, businesses, and even US states. Contractors such as Palantir are merging disparate federal databases, potentially creating radical new surveillance capabilities that can be exploited at the touch of a button.

In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.