In the photoelectric effect, a photon ejects an electron from a material. Researchers at ETH have now used attosecond laser pulses to measure the time evolution of this effect in molecules. From their results they can deduce the exact location of a photoionization event. When a photon hits a material, it can eject an electron […]
Experts around the world are getting increasingly worried about new AI tools that make it easier than ever to edit images and videos — especially with social media’s power to share shocking content quickly and without fact-checking. Some of those tools are being developed by Adobe, but the company is also working on an antidote […]
Verizon’s FIOS fiber optic broadband keeps millions of US homes online. However, monitoring stability and reacting to faults and outages which affect customer experience takes huge amounts of resources. Until recently, Verizon primarily relied on customer feedback to understand when the speed and quality of its service was falling short of expectations. In recent years, […]
Mars may be known as the Red Planet, but it’s a “blue dune” image NASA has released that’s got everyone talking. NASA unveiled an image of a sand dune on Mars’ Lyot Crater region that has been enhanced to get a better look at the surface features of the fourth planet. The image was taken […]
Infrared cameras are the heat-sensing eyes that help drones find their targets, even in the dead of night or through heavy fog. Hiding from such detectors could become much easier, thanks to a new cloaking material that renders objects—and people—practically invisible. “What we have shown is an ultrathin stealth ‘sheet.’ Right now, what people have […]
Take a glass thread a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Use it as a wire between two metals. Hit it with a laser pulse that lasts a millionth of a billionth of a second. Remarkable things happen. The glass-like material is transformed ever so briefly into something akin to a metal. And the […]
An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system. By combining data taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, their results show that gravity in this galaxy behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, confirming the […]
A LONG time ago, in a galaxy far away, two black holes collided. We know this because more than a billion years later, on the morning of 14 September 2015, we felt it: in the world’s most exquisitely sensitive measuring device, laser beams shifted ever so slightly as ripples in space-time washed over Earth. This […]
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe. Ordinary matter, or “baryons,” make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of black holes. But until now, astrophysicists had only been able to locate about two-thirds of the matter […]
Over the past few years, physicists have predicted that a new form of matter called time crystals may have potential applications in quantum computing. Now in a new study, physicists Raditya Weda Bomantara and Jiangbin Gong at the National University of Singapore have taken some of the first steps toward showing exactly how that might […]
Microsoft has overhauled its MSN News app for mobile. As you might expect, it’s curated for your interests, offers breaking news alerts, support for widgets on both Android and iOS, continuous scrolling and a dark theme for reading at night. A blog post from Microsoft is quick to point out that its News service uses […]
Instagram is ready to compete head-on with YouTube. Today at a flashy event in San Francisco, the company announced it will begin allowing users to upload videos up to one hour in length, up from the previous one-minute limit. And to house the new longer-form videos from content creators and the general public, Instagram is […]
