The modern world is powered by electrical circuitry on a "chip" — the semiconductor chip underpinning computers, cell phones, the internet, and other applications. In the year 2025, humans are expected to be creating 175 zettabytes (175trillion gigabytes) of new data. How can we ensure the security of sensitive data at such a high volume? And how can we address grand-challenge-like problems, from privacy and security to climate change, leveraging this data, especially given the limited capability of current computers?

A promising alternative is emerging quantum communication and computation technologies. For this to happen, however, it will require the widespread development of powerful new quantum optical circuits­; circuits that are capable of securely processing the massive amounts of information we generate every day. Researchers in USC's Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science have made a breakthrough to help enable this technology.

While a traditional electrical circuit is a pathway along which electrons from an electric charge flow, a quantum optical circuit uses light sources that generate individual light particles, or photons, on-demand, one-at-a-time, acting as information carrying bits (quantum bits or qubits). These light sources are nano-sized semiconductor "quantum dots"-tiny manufactured collections of tens of thousands to a million atoms packed within a volume of linear size less than a thousandth of the thickness of typical human hair buried in a matrix of another suitable semiconductor.

As the average length of women's menstrual cycles matches the moon's 29.5-day waxing and waning cycle, many cultures associated the moon with fertility. The celestial body's influence on humans biology had largely been dismissed as myth, but several recent studies have linked lunar phases with sleep and moods. In a study published January 27 in Science Advances, researchers analyzed long-term data from women and found that for some their periods synced with lunar light and gravity cycles at certain times in their lives.

"[The study] has not completely settled the debate," says Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a chronobiologist at the University of Vienna who was not involved with the research. "But it's really cool that this puts fresh spirit into the whole discussion: is the moon — yes or no — [affecting] human biology."

Charlotte Helfrich-Förster, a chronobiologist at Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg in Germany and the lead author of the study, says she was initially "skeptical" of a link between lunar menstrual cycles. "On the other hand, it is very interesting that the [menstrual] cycle length is more or less the moon cycle length, and it's known from many studies that animals — at least marine organisms — rely on the moon for synchronizing their reproduction," she says. To examine whether moon cycles influence human menstrual cycles, Helfrich-Förster and her colleagues examined 22 women who recorded the date their period started for five to 32 years.

As the moon makes its 27.3-day journey around the Earth, it exhibits three different lunar cycles: the luminance cycle, the perigee-apogee cycle, and the lunar standstill cycle. The position of Earth's natural satellite in relation to the sun changes during its orbit, causing the familiar luminance cycle between the new and full moon every 29.5 days. This celestial circuit is elliptical, thereby altering the moon's gravitational tug as it swings from perigee, the closest point on the loop around Earth, to apogee, its most distant, every 27.5 days. Additionally, this orbit is tilted in relation to the Earth's axis, causing varying gravitational effects on the Southern and Northern hemispheres across the 27.3-day lunar standstill cycle.

And many other things genetic. The presenters provide revealing information about how our understanding of genetics has changed in the last seven decades. Very easy to follow:

The human genome is much more complex than anyone imagined. In fact, the level of complexity argues directly against any sort of evolutionary origin for the code that makes us.

An international team, led by the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM-SNSB), has discovered a minuscule new species of chameleon. The sole known, apparently adult male of the new species has a body size of just 13.5 mm, making it the smallest known male of the roughly 11,500 known non-avian reptiles. A comparison with 51 other chameleon species showed that the new species has exceptionally large genitals. The study was published in the open access journal Scientific Reports.

On an expedition in the North of Madagascar, a joint team of German and Malagasy scientists came across a new contender for the title of 'world's smallest reptile." They have named the new species Brookesia nana. "At a body length of just 13.5 mm and a total length of just 22 mm including the tail, the male nano-chameleon is the smallest known male of all 'higher vertebrates"' says Frank Glaw, Curator of Herpetology at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM-SNSB) and first author on the study. The female is larger at 19 mm body length and 29 mm total length. In spite of intensive efforts, the authors were only able to find two individuals.

The U.S. Navy's "UFO patents" sound like they've been ripped from a science fiction novel.

The U.S. Navy has patents on weird and little understood technology. According to patents filed by the Navy, it is working on a compact fusion reactor that could power cities, an engine that works using "inertial mass reduction," and a "hybrid aerospace-underwater craft." Dubbed the "UFO patents", The War Zone has reported that the Navy had to build prototypes of some of the outlandish tech to prove it worked.

Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to "provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter." It's responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines.

Neanderthals' gut microbiota included beneficial microorganisms that are also found in the modern human microbiome. An international research group led by the University of Bologna achieved this result by extracting and analyzing ancient DNA from 50,000-year-old fecal sediments sampled at the archaeological site of El Salt, near Alicante (Spain).

Published in Communication Biology, their paper puts forward the hypothesis of the existence of ancestral components of human microbiota that have been living in the human gastrointestinal tract since before the separation between the Homo sapiens and Neanderthals that occurred more than 700,000 years ago.

While scientists and historians have long surmised that etchings on stones and bones have been used as a form of symbolism dating back as early as the Middle Paleolithic period (250,000-45,000 BCE), findings to support that theory are extremely rare.

A recent discovery by archeologists from the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa alongside a team from the Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France have uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

Remarkably the fragment remained largely intact and the researchers were able to detect six similar etchings on one side of the bone, leading them to believe that they were in the possession of something which held symbolic or spiritual significance. The find, which was recently published in the scientific journal Quaternary International, was discovered in a trove of flint tools and animal bones exposed at a site during archaeological excavations.

Beginning in 2018, one of the brightest X-ray lights in the sky went dark, and scientists still aren't sure why.

The black hole responsible for creating the lights-out mystery lives in GRS 1915+105, a star system 36,000 light-years from Earth containing both a normal star and the second-heaviest known black hole in the Milky Way. That heavyweight is 10 to 18 times the mass of the sun and second in mass only to Sagittarius A* (or SgrA*), the supermassive black hole in the galactic center. The region around the GRS 1915+105 black hole typically shines with an intense X-ray light, as it feeds on its companion star. As the material circles the cosmic drain, the particles within rub together, generating energy before dropping into the darkness at the black hole's center. That swirling material is the black hole's accretion disk, which lights up with X-rays as the black hole devours more and more sustenance.

CBET 4929 & MPEC 2021-C16, issued on 2021, February 04, announce the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~19) in infrared images obtained during Jan. 22 UT with the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or NEOWISE; formerly the WISE earth-orbiting satellite). The new comet has been designated C/2021 B3 (NEOWISE).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage.

Stacking of 50 unfiltered exposures, 30 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2021, January 27.1 from X02 (Telescope Live, Chile) through a 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 10" arcsecond in diameter. (Observers E. Guido, M. Rocchetto, E. Bryssinck, M. Fulle, G. Milani, C. Nassef, G. Savini, A. Valvasori).

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version; made with TYCHO software by D. Parrott):

On November 7, 2020, around 21h 27min UT, a very bright fireball was observed and caught on camera over Scandinavia. Witnesses which were close to the trajectory were affected by cloudy skies and did not see the fireball, but some heard a "deep exploding sounds" or "long rumbling sounds like thunder or a motor".


The event has been caught on cameras, some associated to a meteor observing network like the Norsk Meteornettwerk or by CCTV video recordings. Those show a slow moving meteor lasting a few seconds and which brightness lit up the ground and the sky. Another video is available here.