Heavens

Over the past 30 years, mass shootings have fueled calls for changes in gun ownership and concealed carry legislation, but few studies have evaluated whether permissive gun policies deter mass shootings, and none have determined if their effects are the same on firearms homicides. A new study examined the impact of household gun ownership and concealed carry legislation on annual counts of mass shootings and homicides from firearms in the United States over the last 25 years. The study found that mass shootings occur disproportionately in states with higher levels of gun ownership, while rates of firearms homicides are higher in states with permissive concealed carry policies.

The study, by a researcher at Florida State University (FSU), appears in Justice Quarterly,, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

"Policymakers on both sides of the debate over gun control err in assuming that mass shootings are representative of firearms homicides, and that strategies to prevent mass shootings will reduce gun violence," explains Emma Fridel, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at FSU, who conducted the study. "Lawmakers must enact legislation focused on helping reduce the thousands of firearms homicides that occur annually in the United States, rather than legislation that responds to the more rare mass shootings, as tragic as they are."

Gun violence is a major public health crisis in the United States, with nearly 40,000 annual deaths from suicide, homicide, and accidents involving firearms. Despite the ubiquity of gun violence, widespread fear of mass shootings has disproportionately influenced public discourse on firearms ownership and legislation. Although household gun ownership has been declining since the early 1990s, gun purchases and applications for permits spike after mass shootings (defined as the killing with a firearm of four or more people in 24 hours).

Mass shootings are also used to garner support for more restrictive or permissive firearms laws. One of the most widely discussed--and most widely implemented--policies to prevent mass shootings is permissive concealed carry legislation, which either does not require an additional permit for a gun owner to carry a concealed weapon or limits law enforcement discretion in issuing permits as long as an applicant meets certain basic requirements. While only 15 states had permissive concealed carry policies in the early 1990s, 41 states had them by 2018.

Despite these changes in gun purchasing and carrying policies, it remains unclear if these measures are an effective deterrent. To address the gap in the literature, Fridel compared the impact of changing household gun ownership and concealed carry legislation on the incidence rate of mass shootings and firearms homicides in all 50 U.S. states. She asked whether levels of household gun ownership and concealed carry legislation affected mass shootings in the same way as they do firearms homicides. Fridel used data on firearms homicides from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System from 1991 to 2016 and created a unique dataset of 592 mass shootings in the United States during the same period.

She found that that higher levels of gun ownership increase the likelihood of mass shootings. The fact that gun ownership was the only significant predictor of mass shootings suggests that guns are a promising target for intervention.

Fridel found no evidence that permissive concealed carry laws prevent mass shootings or mitigate their damage. And she found that such laws significantly increase the rate of firearms homicides: More permissive concealed carry legislation was associated with an 11% increase in the rate of firearms homicides.

Fridel calls the national trend toward more permissive concealed carry laws "deeply troubling": Since 2007, the number of concealed handgun permits has skyrocketed 273%, not counting those with concealed firearms in permitless carry states. "Permissive concealed carry legislation is a significant contributor to our nation's gun violence epidemic," she says.

Fridel concludes that gun ownership and legislation do not affect mass shootings and firearms homicides in the same way. As a result, she says, policymakers need to enact distinct prevention initiatives to address each type of gun violence. Based on her findings, she suggests that reducing gun ownership (for example, through universal background checks and permit requirements) would benefit efforts to prevent mass shootings, while reinstating more restrictive concealed carry legislation would decrease the overall rate of firearms homicides.

"The fact that neither intervention has a deleterious effect on crime--higher levels of gun ownership do not reduce firearms homicides, and more permissive concealed carry legislation is not associated with a reduction in mass shootings--suggests that a two-pronged approach would be most beneficial in combating mass shootings and firearms homicides," Fridel says.

Years ago, planetary researchers discovered unusual circular structures on the surface of Venus when observing high-?resolution images from NASA's Magellan mission. Such structures are known as coronae (from the Latin meaning "crowns"; singular: corona). A few years ago, a team of ETH researchers led by Taras Gerya, Professor of Geophysics at the Department of Earth Sciences, used computer models to investigate how these structures may have formed.

Most researchers assume that these odd circular surface features are formed by mantle plumes from deep within the planet.

A mantle plume is an upwelling of hot, molten rock that is transported by convection currents from the lower mantle to the crust in a column that widens in a mushroom-?shape at the top. The heat it carries melts the surface of the crust in a circular form. Continuous material rising from greater depths widens the plume head and expands the ring structure on the surface to form a corona. The solid crust surrounding the mantle plume may crack and ultimately sink below the edge of the corona, triggering local tectonic processes.

Computer simulations of structural variations of coronae

However, the topography of coronae is by no means homogeneous or easy to describe. "These structures exist in a large variety of shapes and dimensions on the Venusian surface," says Anna Gülcher, a doctoral student in Gerya's research group.

Following up on this observation, Gülcher used a larger set of improved 3D simulations to re-?examine the coronae as she sought to establish a link between the variation in surface topography and the processes at work beneath. Her study was recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The new simulations show that a corona's topography depends on the thickness and strength of the crust where the mantle plume strikes it and, above all, that their topographies are directly related to how active the column of magma beneath the surface is.

Active plumes form a ring of fire around Venus

This salient observation enabled Gülcher and her colleagues to classify over a hundred of large coronae on Venus into two main groups: those that have formed above an active plume that is currently rising and carrying molten material, and those above a plume that has cooled and become inactive. "Every corona structure has a specific signature that indicates what is going on beneath it," Gülcher says.

On a map of Venus, she plotted all the coronae according to how their activity was classified. To her surprise, most of the coronae overlying active mantle plumes form a belt in Venus' southern hemisphere. Only a handful of active plumes are located outside this band. "We called this band the 'Ring of Fire' on Venus in reference to the 'Ring of Fire' on Earth," Gülcher says. She assumes that the belt coincides with a zone that expels high levels of rising plume material.

It is important to note, however, that the position and dynamics of Earth's ring of fire are the result of plate tectonics, she explains. On Venus, the cause is vertical hotspot volcanism", a phenomenon that occurs in only a few places on Earth, such as below the Hawaiian Islands.

Exactly why the mantle plumes on Venus are arranged in such a belt, and what this means for deep interior processes on Venus, is an important question to address in future studies, Gülcher says. This may be done with large-?scale computer simulations.

Huge computing capacity required

In their models, the researchers simulate only the very top few hundred kilometers of the mantle plume. In reality, however, the plume conduits could be over 1,000 kilometres long: "Simulating the total length the plumes could reach is out of the question because of the huge computing capacity it would require," Gülcher says. The current simulations, performed using the Euler cluster at ETH, are already eight times larger than previous ones.

The planetary scientists hope that their findings will also provide fresh insights into how mantle plumes function below the surface of the Earth. They are likely to be what causes hotspot volcanism, as seen in the Hawaiian Islands. Mantle plumes may have been a trigger for plate tectonics observed on Earth as well, as Gerya's research group was also able to simulate. As mentioned at the time, Venus could serve as a model for the processes that may have taken place in Earth's early history.

Things can always be done faster, but can anything beat light? Computing with light instead of electricity is seen as a breakthrough to boost the computer speeds. Transistors, the building blocks of data circuits, require to switch electrical signals into light in order to transmit the information via a fiber-optic cable. Optical computing could potentially save the time and energy used to be spent for such conversion. In addition to the high-speed transmission, outstanding low-noise properties of photons make them ideal for exploring quantum mechanics. At the heart of such compelling applications is to secure a stable light source, especially in a quantum state.

When light is shone onto electrons in a semiconductor crystal, a conduction electron can combine with a positively charged hole in the semiconductor to create a bound state, the so-called exciton. Flowing like electrons but emitting light when the electron-hole pair gets back together, excitons could speed up the overall data transmission circuits. In addition, plenty of exotic physical phases like superconductivity are speculated as phenomena arising from excitons. Despite the richness of exotic theoretical predictions and its long history (first reported in the 1930's), much of the physics regarding excitons has been mostly about its initial concept of "simple" binding of an electron and a hole, rarely updated from the findings in the 1930s.

In the latest issue of the journal Nature, a research team led by Professor PARK Je-Geun of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University - previously Associate Director of the Center for Correlated Electron Systems within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea) - found a new type of exciton in magnetic van der Waals material NiPS3. "To host such a novel state of an exciton physics, it requires a direct bandgap and most importantly, magnetic order with strong quantum correlation. Notably, this study makes it the latter possible with NiPS3, a magnetic van der Waals material, an intrinsically correlated system," notes Professor PARK Je-Geun, corresponding author of the study. Prof. Park's group reported the first realization of exact 2D magnetic van der Waals materials using NiPS3 in 2016. Using the same material, they have demonstrated that NiPS3 hosts a completely different magnetic exciton state from the more conventional excitons known to date. This exciton state is intrinsically of many-body origin, which is an actual realization of a genuine quantum state. As such, this new work signals a significant shift in the vibrant field of research in its 80 years of history.

All of this unusual exciton physics in NiPS3 began with bizarrely high peaks spotted in early PL (photoluminescence) experiments done in 2016 by Prof. CHEONG Hyeonsik of Sogang University. It was soon followed by another optical absorption experiment done by Prof. KIM Jae Hoon of Yonsei University. Both sets of optical data clearly indicated two points of significant importance: one is the temperature dependence and the other extremely narrow resonant nature of the exciton.

To understand the unusual findings, Prof. Park used a resonant inelastic X-ray scattering technique, known as RIXS, together with Dr. Ke-Jin Zhou at the Diamond Facilities, the UK. This new experiment was critical to the success of the overall project. First, it confirmed the existence of the 1.5 eV exciton peak beyond any doubt. Secondly, it provided an inspiring guide on how we could come up with a theoretical model and the ensuing calculations. This connection between the experiment and the theory played a pivotal role for them to crack the big puzzle in NiPS3.

Using the analytical process shown above, Dr. KIM Beom Hyun and Prof. SON Young-Woo of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study carried out massive theoretical many-body calculations. By exploring massive quantum states totaling 1,500,000 in the Hilbert space, they concluded that all the experimental results could be consistent with a particular set of parameters. When they compared the theoretical results with the RIXS data (Fig. 3-a), it was clear that they came to a full understanding of the very unusual exciton phase of NiPS3. At last, the team could theoretically understand the magnetic exciton state of many-body nature, i.e., a genuine quantum exciton state.

There are several vital distinctions to be made about the quantum magnetic exciton discovered in NiPS3 as compared with the more conventional exciton found in other 2D materials and all the other insulators having an exciton state. First and foremost, the excitons found in NiPS3 is intrinsically a quantum state arising from a transition from a Zhang-Rice triplet to a Zhang-Rice singlet. Second, it is almost a resolution-limited state, indicative of some kind of coherence present among the states. For comparison, all the other exciton states reported before are from extended Bloch states.

It is probably too early for us to make any definite predictions; it might as well bring on the future of the related field of magnetic van der Waals researches, not to mention our lives. However, it is clear even at this moment that "The quantum nature of the new exciton state is unique and will attract a lot of attention for its potentials in the field of quantum information and quantum computing, to name only a few. Our work opens an interesting possibility of many magnetic van der Waals materials having similar quantum exciton states," explains Professor Park.

MANHATTAN, KANSAS -- Kansas State University physicists have taken extremely fast snapshots of light-induced molecular ring-opening reactions -- similar to those that help a human body produce vitamin D from sunlight. The research is published in Nature Chemistry.

"Think of this as stop-motion like a cartoon," said Daniel Rolles, associate professor of physics and the study's principal investigator. "For each molecule, you start the reaction with a laser pulse, take snapshots of what it looks like as time passes and then put them together. This creates a 'molecular movie' that shows how the electronic structure of the molecule changes as a function of how much time passes between when we start and when we stop."

Shashank Pathak, doctoral student and lead author on the paper, said the idea was to study the dynamics of how a ring opens in a molecule on the time scale of femtosecond, which is one quadrillionth of a second. The researchers use a free-electron laser to visualize how these reactions happen by recording electron energy spectra as the atoms in the molecule move apart.

"The ring opening reaction is observed in nature quite a bit," Pathak said. "One example is the formation of vitamin D3 in our skin. When sunlight shines on our skin, we have big compounds that have these small ring structures that help with the absorption of UV light. The ring opens to form the precursor to vitamin D3 formation."

Making vitamin D involves various biological functions and this ring opening is just one small -- very small -- part of the process, Pathak said. This research was able to record the changes in the molecule in order to understand the speed of the process, how it happens and compare the process to previously accepted theory.

"Understanding the process has implications for making similar processes that can be used in technology more efficient, and for developing general rules that can be applied to similar reactions," said Rolles, who received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER award in 2018 that funded this research.

The molecular test 'Xpert Ultra' combined with the minimally invasive autopsy technique can facilitate the diagnosis of tuberculosis as cause of death in low-income countries, according to a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation. This technology, which can be applied to easily available bodily fluids such as plasma, could be a valuable tool in regions where the disease burden is high.

Tuberculosis (TB) is estimated to have caused one 1.5 million deaths in 2018. However, the real number of deaths caused by the disease remains unknown: around 30% of cases are not diagnosed or not reported and, even if they are reported, it is not easy to determine whether it was the cause of death.

The complete autopsy is the gold standard for establishing the cause of death, but the procedure is rarely performed in low-income countries, due to a shortage of trained pathologists and low acceptability by relatives. For this reason, an ISGlobal team has worked over the last years to develop and validate the minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) technique. "This technique is easier and faster to perform in low-income countries and better accepted by the relatives, since it takes samples from different organs with fine biopsy needles that barely leave a mark," explains Jaume Ordi, co-coordinator of the CADMIA and CADMIA plus projects, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and of which these findings form part.

The present study led by Miguel Martínez, ISGlobal researcher and microbiologist at the Hospital Clinic, evaluated the accuracy of a rapid and simple molecular test, called Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra, for diagnosing tuberculosis as the cause of death in patients who died in the Central Hospital of Maputo, in Mozambique. To do so, the research team used samples obtained by MIA from the lung, central nervous system, cerebrospinal fluid, and plasma of 117 patients with or without TB diagnosis at the time of death.

A high predictive value

Xpert Ultra applied to MIA lung samples correctly detected 78% of death by TB cases, and 67% when using plasma samples. "The combined analysis of lung and central nervous system would only have missed 15% of TB deaths," says Alberto García-Basteiro, first author of the study. In a region such as Mozambique, where mortality by TB and HIV is very high, positivity in plasma MIA samples had a high predictive value (>90%) for establishing TB as cause of death.

"The results show that we can use a simple and highly sensitive tool to analyse MIA samples and confirm -or rule out- that TB was the cause of death," says Martínez.

A study conducted by scientists at São Paulo State University's Institute of Geosciences and Exact Sciences (IGCE-UNESP) in Rio Claro, Brazil, has identified 19 asteroids of interstellar origin classified as Centaurs, outer Solar System objects that revolve around the Sun in the region between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune.

An article on the study titled "An interstellar origin for high-inclination Centaurs" is published in the Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices. The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) - FAPESP.

"The Solar System formed 4.5 billion years ago in a stellar nursery, with its systems of planets and asteroids. The stars were close enough to each other to foster strong gravitational interactions that led to an exchange of material among the systems. Some objects now in the Solar System must therefore have formed around other stars. Until recently, however, we couldn't distinguish between captured interstellar objects and objects that formed around the Sun. The first identification was made by us in 2018," Maria Helena Moreira Morais , one of the two coauthors, told.

Morais graduated in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Porto (Portugal) and earned a PhD in Solar System dynamics from the University of London (UK). She is currently a professor at IGCE-UNESP. The other coauthor is Fathi Namouni, a researcher at Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

The first identification to which Morais referred was the asteroid 514107 Ka'epaoka'awela, as reported by Agência FAPESP in 2018.

The name Ka'epaoka'awela is Hawaiian and can be roughly translated to "mischievous opposite-moving companion of Jupiter". It has occupied the path corresponding to Jupiter's orbit for at least 4.5 billion years but revolves around the Sun in the direction opposite to that of the planets, i.e., it is a retrograde co-orbital asteroid of Jupiter.

"When we identified it as an object that came from outside the Solar System, we didn't know whether it was an isolated case or part of a vast population of immigrant asteroids," Morais said. "In this latest study, we recognized 19 Centaurs of interstellar origin."

Similar to Ka'epaoka'awela, the Centaurs identified in the study have highly inclined orbits with respect to the orbital plane of the planets. "To investigate the origin of these objects, we built a computer simulation that works like a time machine, running their trajectories backwards by 4.5 billion years. The simulation enabled us to find out where these objects were at that time," Morais said.

The planets and asteroids that originated in the Solar System emerged from a thin disk of gas and dust that once orbited the Sun. For this reason, they all moved in the plane of the disk 4.5 billion years ago. If the Centaurs originated in the Solar System, they should also have moved in the plane of the disk at that time. "However, our simulation showed that 4.5 billion years ago, these objects revolved around the Sun in orbits perpendicular to the disk's plane. In addition, they did so in a region distant from the gravitational effects of the original disk," Morais said.

These two findings showed that the Centaurs did not originally belong to the Solar System and must have been captured from nearby stars during the period of planet formation.

Star nursery

The discovery in the Solar System of a population of asteroids of interstellar origin is a major step in the understanding of the differences and similarities between objects that formed in the Solar System and objects in the Solar System that were originally extrasolar. Future astronomic observations and possibly space missions will deepen this understanding. "Studies of this population will bring to light information about the star nursery from which the Sun emerged, the capture of interstellar objects in the primordial Solar System, and the importance of interstellar matter to the chemical enrichment of the Solar System," Morais said.

With regard to chemical enrichment, it is worth recalling that the primordial Universe mainly comprised hydrogen and helium. The lightest natural elements in the periodic table were created by nuclear fusion inside stars and were then spread out through space. The region in which the Solar System is located was chemically enriched by these elements, which contributed to the composition of the human body.

SGRB181123B is the most distant short gamma ray burst with its afterglow measured

Incredibly fast and faint, these events are notoriously difficult to catch

Event offers a rare opportunity to study these systems in a much younger universe

New research shows that neutron stars in a 'teenage' universe could merge relatively quickly

EVANSTON, Ill. -- The farther away an object lies in the universe, the fainter it appears through the lens of a telescope.

So when a Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists detected an afterglow of a short gamma ray burst (SGRB) located 10 billion light years away, they were shocked. Afterglows, after all, are already incredibly faint and fast signals -- sometimes lasting mere hours.

Known as SGRB181123B, the burst occurred just 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. It is the second most-distant well-established SGRB ever detected and the most distant event with an optical afterglow.

"We certainly did not expect to discover a distant SGRB, as they are extremely rare and very faint," said Northwestern's Wen-fai Fong, a senior author of the study. "We perform 'forensics' with telescopes to understand its local environment, because what its home galaxy looks like can tell us a lot about the underlying physics of these systems."

"We believe we are uncovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of distant SGRBs," said Kerry Paterson, the study's first author. "That motivates us to further study past events and intensely examine future ones."

The study will be published on July 14 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Fong is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics). Paterson is a postdoctoral associate in CIERA.

Some of the most energetic and brightest explosions in the universe, SGRBs most likely occur when two neutron stars merge. This merger causes a short-lived burst of gamma rays, which is the most energetic form of light. Astronomers typically only detect seven or eight SGRBs each year that are well-localized enough for further observations. And because their afterglows typically last, at most, a few hours before fading into oblivion, they rarely linger long enough for astronomers to get a close look.

But with SGRB181123B, astronomers got lucky. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory first detected the event on Thanksgiving night in 2018. Within hours, the Northwestern team remotely accessed the international Gemini Observatory, using the Gemini-North telescope, located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Using this 8.1-meter telescope, the researchers measured SGRB181123B's optical afterglow.

With follow-up observations using Gemini-South in Chile, MMT in Arizona and Keck in Hawaii, the team realized SGRB181123B may be more distant than most.

"We were able to obtain deep observations of the burst mere hours after its discovery," Paterson said. "The Gemini images were very sharp, allowing us to pinpoint the location to a specific galaxy in the universe."

"With SGRBs, you won't detect anything if you get to the sky too late," Fong added. "But every once in a while, if you react quickly enough, you will land on a really beautiful detection like this."

A glimpse into 'cosmic high noon'

To uncover the SGRB's distance from Earth, the team then accessed a near-infrared spectrograph on Gemini-South, which can probe redder wavelengths. By taking a spectrum of the host galaxy, the researchers realized they had serendipitously uncovered a distant SGRB.

After identifying the host galaxy and calculating the distance, Fong, Paterson and their team were able to determine key properties of the parent stellar populations within the galaxy that produced the event. Because SGRB181123B appeared when the universe was only about 30% of its current age -- during an epoch known as "cosmic high noon" -- it offered a rare opportunity to study the neutron star mergers from when the universe was a "teenager."

When SGRB181123B occurred, the universe was incredibly busy, with rapidly forming stars and fast-growing galaxies. Massive binary stars need time to be born, evolve and die -- finally turning into a pair of neutron stars that eventually merge.

"It's long been unknown how long neutron stars -- in particular those that produce SGRBs -- take to merge," Fong said. "Finding an SGRB at this point in the universe's history suggests that, at a time when the universe was forming lots of stars, the neutron star pair may have merged fairly rapidly."

Japan -- The cold, dark chaos of space is filled with mystery.

Fortunately, the ways in which we can peer into the mists of the void are increasing, and now include Kyoto University's 3.8 meter Seimei telescope.

Using this new instrument -- located on a hilltop in Okayama to the west of Kyoto -- astronomers from Kyoto University's Graduate School of Science and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have succeeded in detecting 12 stellar flare phenomena on AD Leonis, a red dwarf 16 light years away. In particular, one of these flares was 20 times larger than those emitted by our own sun.

"Solar flares are sudden explosions that emanate from the surfaces of stars, including our own sun," explains first author Kosuke Namekata.

"On rare occasions, an extremely large superflare will occur. These result in massive magnetic storms, which when emitted from our sun can significantly effect the earth's technological infrastructure."

Hence understanding the properties of superflares can be vital, but their rareness means that data from our sun is difficult to gather. This has led researchers to look for exoplanets similar to earth, and to examine the stars they orbit.

Writing in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, the team reports on a long week of setting the sights of Seimei -- along with other observational facilities -- to AD Leonis.

This M-type red dwarf has temperatures lower than that of our sun, resulting in a high incidence of flares. The team expected a number of these to be large, and were astounded to then detect a superflare on their very first night of observations.

"Our analyses of the superflare resulted in some very intriguing data," Namekata explains.

Light from excited hydrogen atoms of the superflare exhibited an amount of high-energy electrons roughly one order of magnitude greater than typical flares from our sun.

"It's the first time this phenomenon has been reported, and it's thanks to the high precision of the Seimei Telescope," says Namekata.

The team also observed flares where light from excited hydrogen atoms increased, but did not correspond with an increase in brightness across of the rest of the visible spectrum.

"This was new for us as well, because typical flare studies have observed the continuum of the light spectrum -- the broad range of wavelengths -- rather than energy coming from specific atoms," continues Namekata.

The high-quality of these data was thanks to the new telescope, which the team hopes will open doors to new revelations regarding extreme space events.

Kazunari Shibata, leader of the study, concludes, "More information on these fundamental stellar phenomena will help us predict superflares, and possibly mitigate magnetic storm damage here on earth."

"We may even be able to begin understanding how these emissions can affect the existence -- or emergence -- of life on other planets."

Every summer millions of people visit parks and protected areas along the shorelines of the Great Lakes to camp, hike, swim and explore nature's beauty.

While COVID-19 has impacted staffing, operations and budgets at the parks, tourists this year also may notice changes if recent record-high water levels persist on Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie and Lake Superior.

A new study by a graduate student at The University of Toledo zeroes in on how coastal flooding and erosion in 2019 damaged park facilities and roads and interrupted visitor experiences, as well as examines the financial cost of the high water levels.

The research presented at the 2020 Great Lakes Virtual Conference, which is hosted by the International Association of Great Lakes Research, was completed by Eric Kostecky, a graduate student earning his master's degree in geography, as part of a course in environmental planning he took last fall while completing his undergraduate degree in geography and planning.

"A humbling statistic is that 75% of the parks indicated that continued higher lake levels in 2020 and beyond would further impact park operations and infrastructure," Kostecky said. "Future management actions would be to improve parking lots and roads and to move hiking trails, campgrounds and public access locations."

To gather information, Kostecky surveyed 50 parks along the Great Lakes, both federal and state parks in the United States and provincial parks in Canada. Twenty-nine responded.

"Even though Great Lakes parks and protected areas have experienced impacts from shoreline erosion and flooding during previous high water-level events in 1972-73 and 1985-86, this study is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue those impacts," said Dr. Patrick Lawrence, professor and chair of the UToledo Department of Geography and Planning and Kostecky's faculty advisor.

The study shows 50% of the responding parks were impacted by both shoreline erosion and flooding, with the most common type of damage being to boat launches and building structures that were flooded, and roads near dunes washed away by waves.

Total cost of damage for 55% of the parks was $50,000 or less.

As a result of the damage, parks implemented a variety of changes for public safety last year: sections of the park were closed, select park operations were canceled, and some visitor education programs were suspended.

Great Lakes water levels peaked in July 2019, with increases varying between 14 and 31 inches above their long-term averages; Lake Superior was at 14 inches above its average, while Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario were at 31 inches above average, Lawrence said.

"The water levels in the Great Lakes fluctuate, but they don't fluctuate rapidly, so it's hard to say if we're still in the upswing or on the downswing," Kostecky said. "We won't know if we're continuing to rise or if waters have started to recede for the next couple of years."

The Great Lakes shoreline stretches 10,000 miles around eight U.S. states and Canada.

"Many parks and protected areas in the Great Lakes have struggled with the economic costs and interruptions of their operations, including services and programs for their visitors, and are concerned that as this period of high water levels continues this summer, they will face ongoing challenges in delivering the levels of public access and services to their visitors so eager to explore the parks and enjoy the nature and environment provided by these special spaces," Lawrence said.

What The Study Did: This observational study looked at changes from 2007 to 2016 in the proportion of U.S. adults who screened positive for depression and received treatment.

Authors: Taeho Greg Rhee, Ph.D., M.S.W., of the University of Connecticut in Farmington, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1818)

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The universe, as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics, is a noisy, crackling space where particles blink constantly in and out of existence, creating a background of quantum noise whose effects are normally far too subtle to detect in everyday objects.

Now for the first time, a team led by researchers at MIT LIGO Laboratory has measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on objects at the human scale. In a paper published in Nature, the researchers report observing that quantum fluctuations, tiny as they may be, can nonetheless "kick" an object as large as the 40-kilogram mirrors of the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), causing them to move by a tiny degree, which the team was able to measure.

It turns out the quantum noise in LIGO's detectors is enough to move the large mirrors by 10-20 meters -- a displacement that was predicted by quantum mechanics for an object of this size, but that had never before been measured.

"A hydrogen atom is 10-10 meters, so this displacement of the mirrors is to a hydrogen atom what a hydrogen atom is to us -- and we measured that," says Lee McCuller, a research scientist at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The researchers used a special instrument that they designed, called a quantum squeezer, to "manipulate the detector's quantum noise and reduce its kicks to the mirrors, in a way that could ultimately improve LIGO's sensitivity in detecting gravitational waves," explains Haocun Yu, a physics graduate student at MIT.

"What's special about this experiment is we've seen quantum effects on something as large as a human," says Nergis Mavalvala, the Marble Professor and associate head of the physics department at MIT. "We too, every nanosecond of our existence, are being kicked around, buffeted by these quantum fluctuations. It's just that the jitter of our existence, our thermal energy, is too large for these quantum vacuum fluctuations to affect our motion measurably. With LIGO's mirrors, we've done all this work to isolate them from thermally driven motion and other forces, so that they are now still enough to be kicked around by quantum fluctuations and this spooky popcorn of the universe."

Yu, Mavalvala, and McCuller are co-authors of the new paper, along with graduate student Maggie Tse and principal research scientist Lisa Barsotti at MIT, along with other members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

A quantum kick

LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves arriving at the Earth from cataclysmic sources millions to billions of light years away. It comprises two twin detectors, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector is an L-shaped interferometer made up of two 4-kilometer-long tunnels, at the end of which hangs a 40-kilogram mirror.

To detect a gravitational wave, a laser located at the input of the LIGO interferometer sends a beam of light down each tunnel of the detector, where it reflects off the mirror at the far end, to arrive back at its starting point. In the absence of a gravitational wave, the lasers should return at the same exact time. If a gravitational wave passes through, it would briefly disturb the position of the mirrors, and therefore the arrival times of the lasers.

Much has been done to shield the interferometers from external noise, so that the detectors have a better chance of picking out the exceedingly subtle disturbances created by an incoming gravitational wave.

Mavalvala and her colleagues wondered whether LIGO might also be sensitive enough that the instrument might even feel subtler effects, such as quantum fluctuations within the interferometer itself, and specifically, quantum noise generated among the photons in LIGO's laser.

"This quantum fluctuation in the laser light can cause a radiation pressure that can actually kick an object," McCuller adds. "The object in our case is a 40-kilogram mirror, which is a billion times heavier than the nanoscale objects that other groups have measured this quantum effect in."

Noise squeezer

To see whether they could measure the motion of LIGO's massive mirrors in response to tiny quantum fluctuations, the team used an instrument they recently built as an add-on to the interferometers, which they call a quantum squeezer. With the squeezer, scientists can tune the properties of the quantum noise within LIGO's interferometer.

The team first measured the total noise within LIGO's interferometers, including the background quantum noise, as well as "classical" noise, or disturbances generated from normal, everyday vibrations. They then turned the squeezer on and set it to a specific state that altered the properties of quantum noise specifically. They were able to then subtract the classical noise during data analysis, to isolate the purely quantum noise in the interferometer. As the detector constantly monitors the displacement of the mirrors to any incoming noise, the researchers were able to observe that the quantum noise alone was enough to displace the mirrors, by 10-20 meters.

Mavalvala notes that the measurement lines up exactly with what quantum mechanics predicts. "But still it's remarkable to see it be confirmed in something so big," she says.

Going a step further, the team wondered whether they could manipulate the quantum squeezer to reduce the quantum noise within the interferometer. The squeezer is designed such that when it set to a particular state, it "squeezes" certain properties of the quantum noise, in this case, phase and amplitude. Phase fluctuations can be thought of as arising from the quantum uncertainty in the light's travel time, while amplitude fluctuations impart quantum kicks to the mirror surface.

"We think of the quantum noise as distributed along different axes, and we try to reduce the noise in some specific aspect," Yu says.

When the squeezer is set to a certain state, it can for example squeeze, or narrow the uncertainty in phase, while simultaneously distending, or increasing the uncertainty in amplitude. Squeezing the quantum noise at different angles would produce different ratios of phase and amplitude noise within LIGO's detectors.

The group wondered whether changing the angle of this squeezing would create quantum correlations between LIGO's lasers and its mirrors, in a way that they could also measure. Testing their idea, the team set the squeezer to 12 different angles and found that, indeed, they could measure correlations between the various distributions of quantum noise in the laser and the motion of the mirrors.

Through these quantum correlations, the team was able to squeeze the quantum noise, and the resulting mirror displacement, down to 70 percent its normal level. This measurement, incidentally, is below what's called the standard quantum limit, which, in quantum mechanics, states that a given number of photons, or, in LIGO's case, a certain level of laser power, is expected to generate a certain minimum of quantum fluctuations that would generate a specific "kick" to any object in their path.

By using squeezed light to reduce the quantum noise in the LIGO measurement, the team has made a measurement more precise than the standard quantum limit, reducing that noise in a way that will ultimately help LIGO to detect fainter, more distant sources of gravitational waves.

Predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravitational waves are ripples in space-time generated by certain movements of massive objects. They are important to study because they allow us to detect events in the universe that would otherwise leave little or no observable light, like black hole collisions.

In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo collaborations made the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The waves were emitted from a 1.3 billion-year-old collision between two supermassive black holes and were detected using 4 km long optical interferometers as the event caused ripples in the Earth's space-time.

Researchers from UCL, University of Groningen, and University of Warwick propose a detector based on quantum technology that is 4000 times smaller than the detectors currently in use and could detect mid-frequency gravitational waves.

The study, published today in New Journal of Physics, details how state-of-the-art quantum technologies and experimental techniques can be used to build a detector capable of measuring and comparing the strength of gravity in two locations at the same time.

It would work by using nano-scale diamond crystals weighing ?10?^(-17) kg. The crystals would be placed in a quantum spatial superposition using Stern-Gerlach interferometry. Spatial superposition is a quantum state where the crystals exist in two different places at the same time.

Quantum mechanics allows for an object, however big, to be spatially delocalised in two different places at once. Despite being counter-intuitive and in direct conflict with our everyday experience, the superposition principle of quantum mechanics has been experimentally verified using neutrons, electrons, ions and molecules.

Corresponding author Ryan Marshman (UCL Physics & Astronomy and UCLQ), said: "Quantum gravitational sensors already exist using the superposition principle. These sensors are used to measure Newtonian gravity and make for incredibly accurate measurement devices. The quantum masses used by current quantum gravitational sensors are much smaller such as atoms, but experimental work is progressing the new interferometry techniques needed to make our device work to study gravitational waves.

"We found that our detector could explore a different range of frequencies of gravitational waves compared to LIGO. These frequencies might only be available if scientists build large detectors in space with baselines that are hundreds of thousands of kilometres in size."

The team envision that their proposed smaller detector could be used to build a network of detectors that would be capable of picking out gravitational wave signals from background noise. This network would also be potentially useful giving precise information on the location of the objects that are creating the gravitational waves.

Co-author, Professor Sougato Bose (UCL Physics & Astronomy and UCLQ), said: "While the sensor we have proposed is ambitious in its scope, there does not appear to be any fundamental or insurmountable obstacle to its creation using current and near future technologies.

"All the technical elements to make this detector have been individually realised in different experiments around the world: the forces required, the quality of the vacuum required, the method to place the crystals in superposition. The difficulty will come in putting it all together and making sure the superposition stays intact."

The next step is for the team to collaborate with experimentalists to start building prototypes of the device. Importantly, the same class of detectors can also contribute to detecting whether gravity is a quantum force, as shown in recent work at UCL and elsewhere.

Ryan Marshman said: "Indeed our initial ambition was to develop the device to explore nonclassical gravity. But, since it would be a considerable effort to realise such a device, we thought it was really important to examine the efficacy of such a device also for measuring very weak classical gravity such as gravitational waves and found out that it is promising!"

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Nature is full of colors, from the radiant shine of a peacock's feathers or the bright warning coloration of toxic frogs to the pearl-white camouflage of polar bears.

Usually, fine structural detail necessary for the conservation of color is rarely preserved in the fossil record, making most reconstructions of the fossil based on artists' imagination.

A research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has now unlocked the secrets of true coloration in the 99-million-year-old insects.

Colors offer many clues about the behaviour and ecology of animals. They function to keep organisms safe from predators, at the right temperature, or attractive to potential mates. Understanding the coloration of long-extinct animals can help us shed light on ecosystems in the deep geological past.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on July 1, offers a new perspective on the often overlooked, but by no means dull, lives of insects that co-existed alongside dinosaurs in Cretaceous rainforests.

Researchers gathered a treasure trove of 35 amber pieces with exquisitely preserved insects from an amber mine in northern Myanmar.

"The amber is mid-Cretaceous, approximately 99 million years old, dating back to the golden age of dinosaurs. It is essentially resin produced by ancient coniferous trees that grew in a tropical rainforest environment. Animals and plants trapped in the thick resin got preserved, some with life-like fidelity," said Dr. CAI Chenyang, associate professor at NIGPAS who lead the study.

The rare set of amber fossils includes cuckoo wasps with metallic bluish-green, yellowish-green, purplish-blue or green colors on the head, thorax, abdomen, and legs. In terms of color, they are almost the same as cuckoo wasps that live today, said Dr. CAI.

The researchers also discovered blue and purple beetle specimens and a metallic dark-green soldier fly. "We have seen thousands of amber fossils but the preservation of color in these specimens is extraordinary," said Prof. HUANG Diying from NIGPAS, a co-author of the study.

"The type of color preserved in the amber fossils is called structural color. It is caused by microscopic structure of the animal's surface. The surface nanostructure scatters light of specific wavelengths and produces very intense colors. This mechanism is responsible for many of the colors we know from our everyday lives," explained Prof. PAN Yanhong from NIGPAS, a specialist on palaeocolor reconstruction.

To understand how and why color is preserved in some amber fossils but not in others, and whether the colors seen in fossils are the same as the ones insects paraded more than 99 million years ago, the researchers used a diamond knife blades to cut through the exoskeleton of two of the colorful amber wasps and a sample of normal dull cuticle.

Using electron microscopy, they were able to show that colorful amber fossils have a well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light. The unaltered nanostructure of colored insects suggested that the colors preserved in amber may be the same as the ones displayed by them in the Cretaceous. But in fossils that do not preserve color, the cuticular structures are badly damaged, explaining their brown-black appearance.

What kind of information can we learn about the lives of ancient insects from their color? Extant cuckoo wasps are, as their name suggests, parasites that lay their eggs into the nests of unrelated bees and wasps. Structural coloration has been shown to serve as camouflage in insects, and so it is probable that the color of Cretaceous cuckoo wasps represented an adaptation to avoid detection. "At the moment we also cannot rule out the possibility that the colors played other roles besides camouflage, such as thermoregulation," adds Dr. CAI.

Astronomers have made the first measurement of spin-orbit alignment for a distant 'super-Jupiter' planet, demonstrating a technique that could enable breakthroughs in the quest to understand how exoplanetary systems form and evolved.

An international team of scientists, led by Professor Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter, has carried out the measurements for the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b - located 63 light years from Earth.

The planet, found in the Pictor constellation, has a mass of around 11 times that of Jupiter and orbits a young star on a similar orbit as Saturn in our solar system.

The study, published today (June 29th 2020) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, marks the first time that scientists have measured the spin-orbit alignment for a directly-imaged planetary system.

Crucially, the results give a fresh insight into enhancing our understanding of the formation history and evolution of the planetary system.

Professor Kraus said: "The degree to that a star and a planetary orbit are aligned with each other tells us a lot about how a planet formed and whether multiple planets in the system interacted dynamically after their formation."

Some of the earliest theories of the planet formation process were proposed by prominent 18th century astronomers Kant and Laplace. They noted that the orbits of the solar system planets are aligned with each other, and with the Sun's spin axis, and concluded that the solar system formed from a rotating and flattened protoplanetary disc.

"It was a major surprise when it was found that more than a third of all close-in exoplanets orbit their host star on orbits that are misaligned with respect to the stellar equator.", said Prof. Kraus.

"A few exoplanets were even found to orbit in the opposite direction than the rotation direction of the star. These observations challenge the perception of planet formation as a neat and well-ordered process taking place in a geometrically thin and co-planar disc."

For the study, the researchers devised an innovative method that measures the tiny spatial displacement of less than a billionth of a degree that is caused by Beta Pictoris' rotation.

The team used the GRAVITY instrument at the VLTI, which combines the light from telescopes separated 140 metres apart, to carry out the measurements. They found that the stellar rotation axis is aligned with the orbital axes of the planet Beta Pictoris b and its extended debris disc.

"Gas absorption in the stellar atmosphere causes a tiny spatial displacement in spectral lines that can be used to determine the orientation of the stellar rotation axis.", said Dr. Jean-Baptiste LeBouquin, an astronomer at the University of Grenoble in France and a member of the team.

"The challenge is that this spatial displacement is extremely small: about 1/100th of the apparent diameter of the star, or the equivalent to the size of a human footstep on the moon as seen from Earth."

The results show that the Beta Pictoris system is as well-aligned as our own solar system. This finding favors planet-planet scattering as the cause for the orbit obliquities that are observed in more exotic systems with Hot Jupiters.

However, observations on a large sample of planetary systems will be required to answer this question conclusively. The team proposes a new interferometric instrument that will allow them to obtain these measurements on many more planetary systems that are about to be discovered.

"A dedicated high-spectral resolution instrument at VLTI could measure the spin-orbit alignment for hundreds of planets, including those on long-period orbits.", said Prof. Kraus, "This will help us to answer the question what dynamical processes shape the architecture of planetary systems."