Best of Last Week: The three-body problem, a way to block Google tracking and a drug to treat obesity
It was a good week for physics, as a team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Racah Institute of Physics developed a novel theory to addresses a centuries-old physics problem—the "three body problem." Also, a team at Stanford University, watched 2D puddles of electrons spontaneously emerge in a 3D superconducting material—they call the phenomenon "inter-dimensional superconductivity." And a combined team from TU Wien and Utrecht University created light waves that can penetrate opaque materials—the "scattering-invariant modes of light" they discovered could be used to examine the interior of an object.
In technology news, users of Google's Chrome browser can block the FLoC tracking system used by Google by installing an app called DuckDuckGo. Also, a team at Brown University developed a deep learning network called DeepONet that is capable of learning using both linear and nonlinear operators. A team with members from Google Research, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington developed a new photo colorizing technique that uses skin reaction to light for life-like results. Also, a team at Tsinghua University identified a strategy that can be used to achieve large transport gap modulation in graphene—a strategy that involves the use of an electric field to control conductor-to-insulator transitions.
In other news, a pair of researchers, one with the University of Pennsylvania, the other the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, found that COVID-19 was not the sole cause of excess deaths in the U.S. last year—Samuel Preston and Yana Vierboom found that compared to European countries, the number of deaths expected to have occurred beyond normal explanations has been rising for several years in the U.S. And the team studying photographs of the impact left by a nitrogen gas exploding experiment on asteroid Bennu conducted by the Osiris-Rex spacecraft early this month, found evidence of huge boulders tossed several meters.
And finally, if you are have struggled with body weight, help may soon be on the way. A team of researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre and Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal, discovered that a drug already in use in humans corrects obesity in mice by reducing inflammation related to intake of excess nutrients.
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