Best of Last Week – Unexplained radio waves with regular rhythm, eavesdropping lightbulbs and reverse aging technique

June 22, 2020 by Bob Yirka

Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown — CHIME, pictured here, consists of four large antennas, each about the size and shape of a snowboarding half-pipe, and is designed with no moving parts. Rather than swiveling to focus on different parts of the sky, CHIME stares fixedly at the entire sky, looking for fast radio burst sources across the universe. Credit: CHIME Collaboration

It was a big week for space science, as a pair of researchers at the University of Nottingham shed new light on the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy—astrophysicists Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice suggested that there could as many as 30 intelligent civilizations throughout the Milky Way. Also, a team of astronomers working on the CHIME/FRB Collaboration announced that they had detected a regular rhythm of radio waves with origins unknown emanating from a source outside of our galaxy, 500 million light years away. And a team working with data from NASA's ESA Hubble Space Telescope published stunning new images that revealed stars gone haywire—two planetary nebulae that have unusually large masses of gas.

In technology news, a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan, Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon has resulted in the development of a new verification system that ensures complex programs are bug-free without testing. And a team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev showed that light bulb vibrations could yield eavesdropping data—using only a telescope and an optical sensor, the team was able to reconstruct, with a fair degree of fidelity, songs being played in a distant room. Also, a team at ETH Zurich announced that they had designed the first intuitive programming language for quantum computers. And a team of engineers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis announced that they had developed new fuel cells with twice the operating voltage of hydrogen.

In other news, CNN reported that a massive Saharan dust plume is headed for the southeastern U.S.—and that it could bring sensational sunsets. And a team working on a National Health Institute study of wastewater in Italy found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was infecting people in that country as early as December.

And finally, if you are like millions of others around the globe who would like to live a long life without having to experience the negative effects of aging, you might want to check out the results of a research effort by a team at University of California, Berkeley—they found that simply diluting blood plasma rejuvenated tissue and reversed aging in mice.

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