This week America's Department of Defense "created an office to track unidentified objects in space and air, [and] under water," reports Space.com, "or even those that appear to travel between these domains." UFOs, or as they are now known, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have been receiving newfound levels of government scrutiny not seen in decades. Multiple hearings and classified briefings have taken place in the halls of the U.S. Congress in recent months, and many lawmakers have expressed concern that America's airspace may not be as safe as we think due to the many sightings of unidentified objects military aviators and other armed forces personnel have reported.

With that in mind, the Department of Defense announced the creation of this new office in a statement published Wednesday (July 20). The office is known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, and was established within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security... The office has six primary lines of effort: surveillance, collection and reporting; system capabilities and design; intelligence operations and analysis; mitigation and defeat; governance; and science and technology.
A statement from the U.S. Department of Defense spells out its mission:

• To synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies
• To detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest
• As necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 notes the office already has its own Twitter feed, providing "updates and information relative to our examinations of unidentified anomalous phenomena across space, air, and maritime domains."

"A small space rock has proven to have a big effect on NASA's newly operational deep-space telescope," reports Space.com, causing "significant uncorrectable change" according to a new report from NASA engineers. But fortunately, "Seventeen mirror segments remain unblemished and engineers were able to realign Webb's segments to account for most of the damage." A micrometeoroid struck the James Webb Space Telescope between May 22 and 24, impacting one of the observatory's 18 hexagonal golden mirrors. NASA had disclosed the micrometeoroid strike in June and noted that the debris was more sizeable than pre-launch modeling had accounted for. Now, scientists on the mission have shared an image that drives home the severity of the blow in a report released July 12 describing what scientists on the mission learned about using the observatory during its first six months in space.

Happily, in this case the overall effect on Webb was small....

Based on fuel usage, the telescope should last 20 years in space. But scientists aren't sure how much of an effect micrometeroid strikes will have upon its operations, the report authors stated. Micrometeroids are a known danger of space operations, and facing them is by no means new to scientists; the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope are among long-running programs that are still operational despite occasional space rock strikes. However, Webb's orbit at Lagrange Point 2 about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from the Earth may change the risk profile considerably....

In this case, however, the overall impact to the mission is small "because only a small portion of the telescope area was affected...." Engineers are still modeling how frequently such events will occur....

One remedy could be minimizing the amount of time Webb points directly into its orbital direction, "which statistically has higher micrometeoroid rates and energies," the team wrote.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the physicists report July 20 in Nature. This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu.

The approach's use of an "extra" time dimension "is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter," says Dumitrescu, who worked on the project as a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City. "I've been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting." Dumitrescu spearheaded the study's theoretical component with Andrew Potter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Romain Vasseur of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ajesh Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin. The experiments were carried out on a quantum computer at Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colorado, by a team led by Brian Neyenhuis.

SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way. The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting. Space.com reports: The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday. Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast. Falcon 9's first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch. The report notes that SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service.

A 2021 eruption in Iceland gave researchers rare and illuminating access to the mantle, one of the Earth's layers. From a report: What do you do when a volcano erupts for the first time in centuries? For many people on the southern peninsula in Iceland, when the Fagradalsfjall volcano went off in 2021 after 781 years of dormancy, the answer was to take pictures. As the eruption continued over the course of six months, tourists and locals traveled closer to the volcano to take even more. Red bursts flying out of a black pyramid; the viscous creep of flame. But this documentation only went so far. Some scientists wanted to know what was going on underneath the surface, miles deep, where light does not reach. There, the flowing rock works in ways that experts still cannot describe. So on the first day of the eruption, a helicopter flew out to the site and scooped up a bit of lava. Some samples were distributed to labs, which, after testing, sent back unexpected results: The lava was full of crystals.

Recently, with the help of similar samples gathered throughout the Fagradalsfjall eruption, steps have been taken toward characterizing the dynamics under the surface of the oceanic volcano. In a paper published in June in the journal Nature Communications, researchers who observed the chemical composition of the lava crystal samples collected over a six-month period found that they contained a wide range of material from different parts of the mantle, the amalgamate layer between the Earth's crust and core. This kind of variation was unexpected, and it painted a more vivid picture of what contributes to volcanic eruptions. "We have a really detailed record of the different types of composition that we can find in the mantle now, and it must be very heterogeneous, very variable," said Frances Deegan, a volcanologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a co-author of the paper. Compositionally, the Fagradalsfjall lava was primitive, meaning it came from a deep reservoir of magma, or underground lava, not a shallow reservoir in the Earth's crust. Noticing this, researchers, including Ed Marshall, a geochemist at the University of Iceland, sprinted to gather more samples as the lava continued to spew out of vents. "We were working all hours -- you're asleep and the volcano's still erupting and you're like, 'I got to get back out there,'" said Dr. Marshall. "But it's hard to describe how rare this kind of thing is."

Fagradalsfjall exists at a confluence of fault lines along a boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, a point where they are both pulling apart and rubbing against each other. Geological records show that there has been periodic volcanic activity in the region about every thousand years, and this most recent fissure was preceded by more than a year of earthquakes. Olafur Flovenz, director of the Iceland GeoSurvey, recently published a paper with colleagues that suggests this activity was not caused by a body of magma accumulating in the crust, but from carbon dioxide released by deeper magma pooling between the mantle and the crust, in a region called the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or moho. Usually, volcanic eruptions occur when lots of small magma flows mix together. "This mixing process is an essential geologic process, but it's never been directly observed," said Dr. Marshall. It occurs so deep under the surface and many of the chemical signatures of individual flows are lost as the magma moves up through the crust. But when Fagradalsfjall erupted in 2021, the molten rock and crystals that shot up to the surface came directly from the moho.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The Moon isn't necessarily there if you don't look at it. So says quantum mechanics, which states that what exists depends on what you measure. Proving reality like that usually involves the comparison of arcane probabilities, but physicists in China have made the point in a clearer way. They performed a matching game [Mermin-Peres game] in which two players leverage quantum effects to win every time -- which they can't if measurements merely reveal reality as it already exists. [...] In each round of the game, Alice and Bob share not one, but two pairs of entangled photons on which to make any measurements they like. Each player also has a three-by-three grid and fills each square in it with a 1 or a -1 depending on the result of those measurements. In each round, a referee randomly selects one of Alice's rows and one of Bob's columns, which overlap in one square. If Alice and Bob have the same number in that square, they win the round.

Sounds easy: Alice and Bob put 1 in every square to guarantee a win. Not so fast. Additional "parity" rules require that all the entries across Alice's row must multiply to 1 and those down Bob's column must multiply to -1. If hidden variables predetermine the results of the measurements, Alice and Bob can't win every round. Each possible set of values for the hidden variables effectively specifies a grid already filled out with -1s and 1s. The results of the actual measurements just tell Alice which one to pick. The same goes for Bob. But, as is easily shown with pencil and paper, no single grid can satisfy both Alice's and Bob's parity rules. So, their grids must disagree in at least one square, and on average, they can win at most eight out of nine rounds.

Quantum mechanics lets them win every time. To do that, they must use a set of measurements devised in 1990 by David Mermin, a theorist at Cornell University, and Asher Peres, a onetime theorist at the Israel Institute of Technology. Alice makes the measurements associated with the squares in the row specified by the referee, and Bob, those for the squares in the specified column. Entanglement guarantees they agree on the number in the key square and that their measurements also obey the parity rules. The whole scheme works because the values emerge only as the measurements are made. The rest of the grid is irrelevant, as values don't exist for measurements that Alice and Bob never make. Generating two pairs of entangled photons simultaneously is impractical, Xi-Lin Wang says. So instead, the experimenters used a single pair of photons that are entangled two ways -- through polarization and so-called orbital angular momentum, which determines whether a wavelike photon corkscrews to the right or to the left. The experiment isn't perfect, but Alice and Bob won 93.84% of 1,075,930 rounds, exceeding the 88.89% maximum with hidden variables, the team reports in a study in press at Physical Review Letters. The researchers have a real-world use in mind for the demonstration: verifying the work of a quantum computer.

"That task is essential but difficult because a quantum computer is supposed to do things an ordinary computer cannot," reports Science Magazine. "[I]f the game were woven into a program, monitoring it could confirm that the quantum computer is manipulating entangled states as it should."

An unvaccinated young adult from New York recently contracted polio, the first U.S. case in nearly a decade, health officials said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: Officials said the patient, who lives in Rockland County, had developed paralysis. The person developed symptoms a month ago and did not recently travel outside the country, county health officials said. It appears the patient had a vaccine-derived strain of the virus, perhaps from someone who got live vaccine -- available in other countries, but not the U.S. -- and spread it, officials said. The person is no longer deemed contagious, but investigators are trying to figure out how the infection occurred and whether other people may have been exposed to the virus. The report notes that polio was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 1979, "meaning there was no longer routine spread."

Amazon is acquiring One Medical for $18 a share, an all-cash deal that values the primary health care provider at roughly $3.9 billion, the companies said Thursday. From a report: The deal deepens Amazon's presence in health care, which Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said is "high on the list of experiences that need reinvention."

The e-commerce giant hopes to improve how people book appointments and the experience of being seen by a physician, Lindsay said in a statement. "We love inventing to make what should be easy easier and we want to be one of the companies that helps dramatically improve the healthcare experience over the next several years," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Technology used to develop Covid-19 vaccines may also help combat a honeybee-killing pest. GreenLight Biosciences is developing an RNA-based syrup to attack varroa mites, a parasite that attaches itself to honeybees and feeds off them while spreading diseases. [Varroa mites are thought to be one of the reasons behind the staggeringly high death rates that have become so common among honeybees.] The RNA acts as an "off switch" that interferes with the mites, disrupting their ability to lay offspring that attach to bees, said Mark Singleton, chief commercial officer and general manager of plant health at the Boston-based firm. "We are really putting a dent in the ability of mites to reproduce," he said. Anecdotal feedback shows that hives using his company's treatment are healthier and have a higher survival rate, according to Singleton, whose biotech firm worked with large-scale US beekeepers to test the technology.

Moderna and Pfizer used experimental messenger RNA technology to develop Covid-19 vaccines that instruct the body to make the spike protein the coronavirus uses to enter cells, which in turn stimulates production of antibodies. GreenLight Biosciences acquired the RNA technology from Bayer in 2020 and it is the first RNA regulation that directly targets the mites, which reproduce in the same cells as bee larvae. Unlike chemical options that exist to control the mites, RNA is naturally occurring and degrades without causing any harm to the bees, Singleton said. The product is placed in an envelope with holes that beekeepers put in a hive. The bees do the rest -- ultimately delivering it to where mites produce. GreenLight plans to submit its product for approval to the US Environmental Protection Agency by year end and, if approved, it could be commercially available by 2024.

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. The Verge reports: NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket's debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then. NASA officials stressed that they are not committing to any of these dates at the moment, but the announcement puts the rocket closer than it's ever been to its launch. The SLS has been in development for roughly a decade, and its inaugural launch date has been an ever-moving target. NASA originally planned to launch as early as 2017, but schedule delays, development mishaps, and poor management have caused the rocket's debut to slip again and again.

But after conducting a mostly full dress rehearsal with the rocket back in June, NASA is in the development end game, and an actual launch looms on the horizon. A more solid launch date should come closer to actual liftoff. "We'll make the agency commitment at the flight readiness review, just a little over a week before launch," NASA's Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a press conference. "But these are the dates that the team is working to and have a plan to."

If NASA rolls out SLS to the launchpad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout, or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October.

Apple published a nearly 60-page report Wednesday outlining all its health features and partnerships with medical institutions, arguing that such offerings are key to the tech giant's future. From a report: The company pointed to its breadth of existing services -- from sleep monitoring and fitness classes to atrial-fibrillation detection and cycle tracking -- and promised to build on that foundation. Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who oversees Apple's health endeavors, said in a statement attached to the report that the company will continue to innovate in "science-based technology."

"The health innovations we've pioneered have aimed to help break down barriers between users and their own everyday health data, between health-care providers and patients, and between researchers and study participants," he said. The report serves as a response to Apple critics, who have knocked the company for not doing as much as rivals in health care. Though the Apple Watch dominates the market, the device hasn't always gotten novel health features as quickly as competitors' products. And fellow tech titans such as Amazon.com and Google have made ambitious forays into the medical field -- with mixed results. Apple is arguing that it's a pioneer in health technology and positioned to use it as a growth driver in the years ahead.

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected two new extrasolar planets. Phys.Org reports: The newfound alien worlds, designated TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b, are the size of Jupiter but about three times more massive than the solar system's biggest planet. [...] TOI-5152 b has a radius of about 1.07 Jupiter radii and is approximately three times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits its parent star every 54.19 days, at a distance of some 0.31 AU from it. The planet's equilibrium temperature was measured to be 688 K. The host TOI-5152 is a G1-type star nearly two times larger than the sun, located about 1,200 light years away from the Earth. Its age is estimated to be between 1.4 and 6.8 billion years.

TOI-5153 b has a mass of 3.26 Jupiter masses, while its radius was estimated to be 1.06 Jupiter radii. The orbital period of this exoplanet was measured to be 20.33 days and its distance to the host is nearly 0.16 AU. The astronomers calculated that the equilibrium temperature of TOI-5153 b is at a level of 906 K. The parent star is of spectral type F8. It is about 40% larger than the sun and is assumed to be 5.4 billion years old. The distance to this planetary system is about 1,270 light years. Therefore, TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b are warm and massive Jupiter-sized alien worlds. The astronomers noted that they are both metal-enriched and their heavy element content is consistent with the mass-metallicity relation of gas giants. Given that the two planets orbit moderately bright stars, the authors of the paper added that they are ideal targets for additional observations. The findings have been reported on the arXiv pre-print repository.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team consisting of scientists from some of the top institutes in the U.S. have demonstrated a wireless technology that allows neurons in a fly brain to be controlled in less than a second, an institutional press release said. [...] Called Magnetic, Optical, Acoustic Neural Access (MOANA), the program aims to develop a wireless headset that can facilitate brain-to-brain communication in a nonsurgical manner. Jacob Robinson, an associate professor at Rice University is among the researchers working on the project, and his team has developed a method to hack fly brains wirelessly.

The research team used genetic engineering to express a special ion channel in flies' neuronal cells, which can be activated using heat. When the ion channel is activated, the flies spread out their wings, as they would do as part of their mating gesture. To activate the channel at will, the researchers then injected the experimental flies with nanoparticles that could be heated by applying a magnetic field. The genetically modified flies were then introduced into an enclosure that had an electromagnet on top and a camera to capture the movements of the flies. When the researchers activated the electromagnet, the electric field heated the nanoparticles, which activated the neurons, resulting in the flies spreading their wings, as seen in the short video [here]. Analyzing the video from the experiments, the researchers also found that the time lapse between the activation of the electromagnet and the spreading of wings was less than half a second.

Robinson is confident that this ability to precisely activate cells will be helpful in studying the brain, developing brain communication technology as well as treating brain-related disorders. The team is focused on developing technology that will help restore vision in people even if their eyes do not work. They aim to achieve this by stimulating parts of the brain that are associated with a vision to give a sense of vision in the absence of functional eyes. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Materials.

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a "very exciting discovery." The Guardian reports: Though it is not the first contender, a researcher from the University of Sheffield says this black hole is "the first to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy." The researchers had been looking for black hole binary systems for more than two years before finding what has become known as VFTS243. Stellar-mass black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. In a system of two stars revolving around each other, this process leaves behind a black hole in orbit with a luminous companion star.

The newly discovered dormant black hole is at least nine times the mass of the Earth's Sun, and orbits a hot blue star weighing 25 times as much as the Sun. It has been observed in a neighboring galaxy by a team of international scientists; their study -- published in Nature Astronomy -- suggests that the star that gave rise to VFTS243 vanished without any sign of an associated supernova explosion. Confirming the likelihood of what he termed a "direct-collapse scenario," Paul Crowther, professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, believes this has "enormous implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the cosmos."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Synchron, a brain-computer interface startup, reportedly implanted its first device in a US patient earlier this month. The startup implanted a 1.5-inch device into the brain of an ALS patient at Mount Sinai West medical center in New York on July 6, Bloomberg first reported. The purpose of the device is to allow the patient to communicate -- even after they have lost the ability to move -- by using their thoughts to send emails and texts. Bloomberg reported that Synchron has already implanted the device in four patients in Australia who have been able to use the brain implant to send messages on WhatsApp and shop online. Elon Musk's Neuralink has a similar mission, but is still waiting for FDA approval. "Neuralink and Synchron's products have several key differences: namely, size and installation," notes the report. "The Australian startup's product can be inserted into a human skull without cutting into it using a catheter that feeds the device through the jugular vein into a blood vessel in the brain. The process requires two separate surgeries."

"In contrast, Neuralink plans to make a much smaller and more powerful device that would require a portion of the individual's skull to be removed and would be performed using a robot." Neuralink also appears to be slightly more ambitious, with Musk referring to the device as "a Fitbit in your skull."

Two cases of the deadly Marburg virus have been identified in Ghana, the first time the Ebola-like disease has been found in the west African nation. From a report: Earlier in the month, blood samples taken from two people in the southern Ashanti region suggested they had the Marburg virus. The samples were sent to the Pasteur Institute in Senegal, which confirmed the diagnosis, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) said. "This is the first time Ghana has confirmed Marburg virus disease," said the GHS head, Patrick Kuma-Aboagye. No treatment or vaccine exists for Marburg, which is almost as deadly as Ebola. Its symptoms include high fever as well as internal and external bleeding. Ninety-eight people identified as contact cases were under quarantine, the GHS statement said, noting that no other cases of Marburg had yet been detected in Ghana. The World Health Organization declared Ghana's first outbreak. "Health authorities have responded swiftly, getting a headstart preparing for a possible outbreak," said the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti.

Black Parrot (Slashdot reader #19,622) shared this report from ScienceInsider: When the U.S. government released a much-anticipated report on UFOs a year ago, many were perplexed that it couldn't explain 143 of the 144 sightings it examined. (In the single closed case, the report concluded the mystery object was a large, deflating balloon.) "Where are the aliens?" cracked one headline.

The truth was still out there. So was any sense of who had conducted the analysis, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the study, provided no details about who had investigated the cases. Last week, however, a former Department of Defense astrophysicist and reality TV personality named Travis Taylor asserted that he was the 'chief scientist' for the congressionally mandated study. The revelation shocked UFO skeptics in the science community. They note that Taylor has made extraordinary claims during TV appearances, including to have "seen more UFOs than I can count," and that he's been tracked by supernatural entities that caused his car and appliances to malfunction....

In fact, Taylor did serve in a lead role with the government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, which produced 2021's fuzzy UFO report, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough confirmed to ScienceInsider. But Taylor was "informally referred to ... as the chief scientist as efforts to assemble a larger team were underway," and it was not a full-time position. (Taylor did not respond to requests for comment....)

Taylor's critics are simply astonished by what they call his antiscientific embrace of the supernatural — and the Pentagon's willingness to work with him. "I'm starting to see why [the government's] task force was so unsuccessful in identifying its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena!" wrote Robert Sheaffer, a UFO skeptic and author, on his blog.

MIT News has an announcement: The boiling of water or other fluids is an energy-intensive step at the heart of a wide range of industrial processes, including most electricity generating plants, many chemical production systems, and even cooling systems for electronics. Improving the efficiency of systems that heat and evaporate water could significantly reduce their energy use. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to do just that, with a specially tailored surface treatment for the materials used in these systems. The improved efficiency comes from a combination of three different kinds of surface modifications, at different size scales. The new findings are described in the journal Advanced Materials in a paper by recent MIT graduate Youngsup Song PhD '21, Ford Professor of Engineering Evelyn Wang, and four others at MIT..... "If we have lots of bubbles on the boiling surface, that means boiling is very efficient, but if we have too many bubbles on the surface, they can coalesce together, which can form a vapor film over the boiling surface," Song says. That film introduces resistance to the heat transfer from the hot surface to the water. "If we have vapor in between the surface and water, that prevents the heat transfer efficiency and lowers the critical heat flux value," he says.... Adding a series of microscale cavities, or dents, to a surface is a way of controlling the way bubbles form on that surface, keeping them effectively pinned to the locations of the dents and preventing them from spreading out into a heat-resisting film... In these experiments, the cavities were made in the centers of a series of pillars on the material's surface. These pillars, combined with nanostructures, promote wicking of liquid from the base to their tops, and this enhances the boiling process by providing more surface area exposed to the water. In combination, the three "tiers" of the surface texture — the cavity separation, the posts, and the nanoscale texturing — provide a greatly enhanced efficiency for the boiling process, Song says... The nanostructures promote evaporation under the bubbles, and the capillary action induced by the pillars supplies liquid to the bubble base. That maintains a layer of liquid water between the boiling surface and the bubbles of vapor, which enhances the maximum heat flux.
While the article stresses it's still a laboratory-scale process (needing more work to become a practical "industry-scale" process), "There may be some significant small-scale applications that could use this process in its present form, such as the thermal management of electronic devices, an area that is becoming more important as semiconductor devices get smaller and managing their heat output becomes ever more important." Wang says in the announcement, "There's definitely a space there where this is really important." The article includes a bizarre-looking video showing how water now boils on their specially treated surface.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link!

"NASA astronauts will go back to riding Russian rockets under an agreement announced Friday," reports the Associated Press, "and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the International Space Station with SpaceX beginning this fall." The agreement ensures that the space station will always have at least one American and Russian on board to keep both sides of the orbiting outpost running smoothly, according to NASA and Russian officials. The swap had long been in the works and was finalized despite tensions over Moscow's war in Ukraine, a sign of continuing Russia-U.S. cooperation in space....

No money will exchange hands under the agreement, according to NASA....

Friday's news came just hours after the blustery chief of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, was replaced by President Vladimir Putin, although the move did not appear to have any connection to the crew swap. Rogozin was expected to be given a new post.
CBS News explains the NASA-Roscosmos agreement: "The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function," the NASA statement said. "No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others..."

Russia provides the propellant and thrusters, either on the station or visiting Progress cargo ships, to change the station's orbit and offset the effects of atmospheric drag. NASA provides the bulk of the lab's electrical power, the massive gyroscopes that help maintain the station's orientation and a station-wide computer and communications network.

Russian cosmonauts are not trained to operate U.S. systems and vice versa, meaning at least one astronaut and one cosmonaut must be aboard at all times. If either side pulled out, the other likely would have to depart as well, or quickly come up with alternative systems.
"NASA wants to operate the space station through 2030," adds CBS, "but Russian cooperation is required. And it's not yet known whether Russia will go along."

A new kind of laser uses tiny moving particles to produce beams of light. The laser is more programmable than standard lasers and the approach could be used to create visual displays that are sharp from all angles. New Scientist reports: Conventional lasers repeatedly bounce light between two mirrors until it becomes bright and focused. Riccardo Sapienza at Imperial College London and his colleagues have built a laser that uses particles that can arrange themselves to carry out a similar process. The new type of laser first requires the use of green light from a traditional laser. The researchers shine this light into a small glass box filled with a liquid solution containing particles of titanium oxide and silicon oxide. This warms up the silicon oxide particles and causes the titanium oxide particles to clump around them.

The green light then bounces between particles in the clump -- similarly to how light bounces between mirrors in conventional lasers -- until the clump itself starts to emit a laser beam, now in the color red. By nudging the particles into different positions with the green light, the team can program the properties of the light emitted by the laser, such as where in the device it originates from and how pure its color is. By comparison, conventional lasers can't be adjusted after manufacturing. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Physics.