Best of Last Week – Revisiting cold fusion, a better drug to treat breast cancer and a health benefit of eating red meat
It was another good week for physics as a pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Alice Di Tucci and Jean-Luc Lehners, found that stabilizing the no-boundary proposal shed light on the universe's quantum origins, supporting the idea that the universe appeared out of nothing and that time did not exist until the universe began. Also, a team with members from the University of British Columbia, MIT, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Google announced that they were launching a joint project aimed at reopening the cold case of cold fusion. And a team led by Lan Gao of the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Edison Liang of Rice University created a stable, strongly magnetized plasma jet in their laboratory—one that was also coherent.
In space news, an international collaboration of astronomers announced that the "forbidden" planet had been found in the "Neptunian desert." Exoplanet NGTS-4b orbits in a region close to its star, where Neptune-sized planets are not usually found. Also, a team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center posted a document describing three ways to travel at (nearly) the speed of light. And another team at the same site reported that the James Webb Space Telescope has emerged successfully from final thermal vacuum testing, crossing another milestone on its way to a 2021 launch.
In other news, Earth scientists Gavin Hayes and Diego Melgar found a telling early moment that indicates a coming megaquake. Data from a GPS monitor shows the peak rate of acceleration of ground displacement. Also, a team led by Sara Hurvitz with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston created a new breast cancer drug that boosts survival rates by 30 percent. And a team at Oxford University outlined their efforts to recreate human-like thinking in machines.
And finally, if you are a red-meat eater who has been wondering about its impact on your health, there is some good news: a team with members from Curtin University and the Australian National University has found that eating red meat as part of a healthy diet could be linked to a reduced risk of multiple sclerosis.
© 2019 Science X Network