The HADES detector in Darmstadt, Germany.
The experiment is the first to measure the temperature of quark matter under conditions akin to the inside of a neutron star collision. When neutron stars — the super-dense cores of dead stars — spiral together and collide, they shake the fabric of space-time and trigger explosions called kilonovas. To produce similar conditions, the team slammed gold atoms moving at nearly the speed of light into a gold target.
When the researchers plotted the energies of these matter-antimatter pairs, they found that the energies formed an exponentially falling curve. If the electrons and positrons had originated from particles with a characteristic energy or mass, there would have been a bump in the curve. Its smooth shape was an unmistakable sign that the matter had assumed an exotic form. The slope of the curve clocked the fireball’s temperature at hundreds of thousands of times that of the sun’s center, and the team calculated that its protons and neutrons reached a density analogous to the effect of cramming New York City into a sugar cube.
This is some hot stuff alright.
A New Type of Visual Prosthesis
First, to stimulate a stage of visual processing with synaptic precision, just as the natural visual system does it, we need a way to activate neurons in the visual system prosthetically. We do this by injecting a custom virus into the region of the brain where the optic nerves first connect within the center of the brain. The virus injects genes into those cells and changes them into photoreceptors: now they are excitable by light. Because these neurons reach all the way to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain, and because they are laid out in a map that matches the visual world, we can stimulate their synaptic connections precisely with a video projector to recreate how they would react to real incoming visual inputs. We then target the central visual neurons and ultimately restore vision.
Cyberpunk 2019
Trampoline mirror may push laser pulse through fabric of the Universe
"The numbers get even more mind blowing when you consider that all of that energy is focused, such that the intensities reach something like 1022W/cm2. To put this in perspective, you start creating a plasma when intensities hit 1012W/cm2. Once intensities get above 1025W/cm2, if the light hits just a single electron, there's enough energy to cause e=mc2 to start a cascade of electron-positron production out of the vacuum. If the laser intensity hits 1029W/cm2, not even that single electron is required—
the light will rip virtual electrons out of the vacuum, generating real charges from the apparent nothingness of empty space."
