Best of Last Week: A loose thread in string theory, e-cigarettes harm brain stem, and diet's role in obesity pandemic
It was a good week for physics as a team at the University of Chicago combined light and matter to make particles with new behaviors—the particles, which are part atom and part light, were found to also interact with each other quite strongly. Also, a team with members from Iowa State University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Alabama used light waves to accelerate supercurrents, enabling ultrafast quantum computing—and allowing light-induced superconductivity without an energy gap. And an associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, found a loose thread in a string theory puzzle—perhaps moving one step closer to solving a string theory puzzle 20 years in the making. Also, a team with members from the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and General Atomics found evidence suggesting that tiny granules could bring clean and abundant fusion power to Earth.
It was also a good week for technology research, as a team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that with little training, machine-learning algorithms can uncover hidden scientific knowledge by scanning the text of millions of papers. Also, a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, reported on their experiments involving artificial gravity breaking free from science fiction—by spinning volunteers on a metal platform. And a team with members from Princeton University and MIT described experiments that showed a dramatic increase in solar cell output by knocking out two electrons with a single photon instead of the usual one. Also, a group led by a team at Stanford University announced that they had developed a new, more user-friendly language for programming supercomputerscalled Regent. It allows researchers to run projects without having to become experts in C++. And a team at the University of California, Riverside, found that electronic cigarettes damage the brain stem by producing a stress response in neural stem cells.
And finally, if you are one of the millions of obese people in the world today, and you have been blaming your genes for it, you might want to have a look at research conducted by a team led by Maria Brandkvist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology—they found that while genetics does play a role, the obesity pandemic is mostly due to diet.
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