Lifeboat Foundation

New research suggests that higher light exposure can enhance alertness and cognitive performance, likely by affecting the activity in areas of the brain region known as the hypothalamus.

The study, published in the journal eLife, is described by the editors as of fundamental importance, and represents a key advancement to our understanding of how different levels of light affect human behavior. The strength of evidence is praised as compelling, supporting the authors’ analyses of the complex interplay between light exposure, hypothalamic activity, and cognitive function.

With further research, the findings could be used to inform various light therapy treatments to increase an individual’s quality of sleep and affective state, and help them feel more awake and perform tasks better throughout the day.

A new study will improve the detection of gravitational waves —ripples in space and time. Scientists at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering co-led the research with an international team.

The research aims to send alerts to astronomers and astrophysicists within 30 seconds after the detection, helping to improve the understanding of neutron stars and black holes and how heavy elements, including gold and uranium, are produced.

The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal.

For the first time, lasers have successfully excited the “thorium transition,” a process long pursued by researchers. This breakthrough sets the stage for groundbreaking advancements in high-precision technologies, such as nuclear clocks.

Physicists have eagerly anticipated this breakthrough: scientists globally have spent years searching for a specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that could lead to groundbreaking technological advancements.

It could be used, for example, to build an nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics – for example, the question of whether the constants of nature are actually constant or whether they change in space and time.

A first-ever stretchy electronic skin could equip robots and other devices with the same softness and touch sensitivity as human skin, opening up new possibilities to perform tasks that require a great deal of precision and control of force.

A proposed experiment could bring scientists closer to answering the long-standing question of whether gravity is a classical or a quantum phenomenon.

A method for freely adjusting the parameters of a loop of optical fiber enables the exploration of exotic topological phases of matter.

Researchers use a laser to excite and precisely measure a long-sought exotic nuclear state, paving the way for precise timekeeping and ultrasensitive quantum sensing.

Any reliably produced, periodic phenomenon—from the swing of a pendulum to the vibrations of a single atom—can form the basis of a clock. Today’s most precise timekeeping is based on extremely narrow electronic transitions in atoms, which resonate at optical frequencies. These stupendously precise optical atomic clocks lose just 1 second (s) in about 30 billion years. However, they could potentially be outperformed by a nuclear clock, which would instead “tick” to the resonant frequency of a transition that occurs in the atomic nucleus instead of in the electronic shell. The most promising candidate for this nuclear standard is an exceptionally low-energy and long-lived excited state, or isomer, of the isotope thorium-229 (²²⁹ Th). Researchers have now achieved the long-sought goal of exciting this transition with ultraviolet light.

Plant life first emerged on land about 550 million years ago, and an international research team co-led by University of Nebraska–Lincoln computational biologist Yanbin Yin has cracked the genomic code of its humble beginnings, which made possible all other terrestrial life on Earth, including humans.

A research team at the University of Pittsburgh led by Alexander Star, a chemistry professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has developed a fentanyl sensor that is six orders of magnitude more sensitive than any electrochemical sensor for the drug reported in the past five years. The portable sensor can also tell the difference between fentanyl and other opioids.