Lifeboat Foundation

To better treat and prevent depression, we need to understand more about the brains and bodies in which it occurs.

Curiously, a handful of studies have identified links between depressive symptoms and body temperature, yet their small sample sizes have left too much room for doubt.

In a more recent study published in February, researchers led by a team from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) analyzed data from 20,880 individuals collected over seven months, confirming that those with depression tend to have higher body temperatures.

According to astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson’s computer model, there could be about 70 quintillion planets in the universe. However, most of these planets are vastly different from Earth — they tend to be larger, older, and not suited for life. Only around 63 exoplanets have been found in their stars’ habitable zones, making Earth potentially one of the few life-sustaining planets. This could explain Fermi’s paradox — the puzzling lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life. While we continue searching, Earth might be truly special.

After reading the article, Harry gained more than 55 upvotes with this comment: “If life developing on Earth the way it has is 1 in a billion, then this would imply that there is life on at least a billion other planets (?)”

The prevailing belief among astronomers is that the number of planets should at least match the number of stars. With 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing about a billion trillion stars, there should be an equally vast number of exoplanets, including Earth-like worlds — in theory.

The order of the planets is something most of us learn in school: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and (until 2006) Pluto.

So, you would be forgiven for thinking that as Earthlings, our closest planetary neighbor is Venus. And in a way, you would be right – at its nearest, Venus approaches Earth closer than any other planet in the Solar System. Likewise, its orbit is closer to our orbit than any other. However, in another sense, you would be wrong. At least, that is the argument put forward in an article published in PhysicsToday.

Continue reading “A New Planet Is Now Our Closest Neighbor” »

The standard model of fundamental particles and interactions has now been in place for about a half-century. It has successfully passed experimental test after experimental test at particle accelerators. However, many of the model’s features are poorly understood, and it is now clear that standard-model particles only compose about 5% of the observed energy density of the Universe. This situation naturally encourages researchers to look for new particles and interactions that fall outside this model. One way to perform this search is to prepare a gas of polarized atoms and to look for changes in this polarization that might come from new physics. Haowen Su from the University of Science and Technology of China and colleagues have used two separated samples of polarized xenon gas to probe spin-dependent interactions [1] (Fig. 1). The results place constraints on axions—a candidate for dark matter—in a theoretically favored mass range called the axion window.

Searches for new spin-dependent interactions have exploded over the past decade. Special relativity and quantum mechanics tightly constrain the mathematical form for such interactions, with the main adjustable parameters being the coupling strength and the spatial range. Since the form of these interactions is generic across many models, it is possible to conduct experimental searches for new interaction signatures, even in the absence of a specific theory for beyond-standard-model physics.

In the social media age, there is little doubt about who is the star of the animal kingdom. Cats rule the screens just as their cousins, the lions, rule the savanna. Thanks to Erwin Schrödinger, this feline also has a place of honor in the history of physics. And it was Eme the cat that inspired Anxo Biasi, researcher at the Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías (IGFAE), to publish an article in the American Journal of Physics.

A collaborative study by researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Illumina has showcased the exceptional capabilities of the DRAGEN (Dynamic Read Analysis for GENomics) platform in comprehensive genome analysis.

With recent box office hits like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Little Mermaid and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the average viewer might assume that the casts of Hollywood films are more diverse now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. But verifying these perceptions can be tricky.

Imperial researchers have proposed a new way to directly probe quantum entanglement, the effect that led to the puzzling concept of “spooky action at a distance,” where previously grouped particles’ quantum states cannot be described independently of each other. The research has been accepted for publication in Physical Review X.

Imagine that instead of viewing an image through a lens, you look through a kaleidoscope that focuses invisible light to obtain a new range of colors. The photon, the ephemeral messenger of light, usually appears alone, but here it appears in a duet, which is the basis of two-photon vision. This is an extraordinary phenomenon in which the human eye, instead of perceiving traditional light, receives pulses of infrared lasers, the gateway to the invisible world.

However, the key to this is measuring the brightness of two-photon stimuli, which until now was only possible for visible light. ICTER scientists have made a breakthrough and determined the luminance value for infrared using photometric units (cd/m²). Thanks to this approach, it is possible to link the luminance of two-photon stimuli to a new physical quantity related to perceived brightness: the two-photon retinal illumination.

Research—conducted by scientists from the International Centre for Eye Research (ICTER) with the participation of Ph.D. student Oliwia Kaczkoś, Ph.D. Eng. Katarzyna Komar and Prof. Maciej Wojtkowski—has shown that the luminance of a two-photon stimulus can reach almost 670 cd/m² in the safe range of laser power for the eye.