Adding salt to meals at the table is linked to an earlier death, according to a study of 500,000 middle-aged Britons. From a report: Researchers found that always adding salt to food knocks more than two years off life expectancy for men and one-and-a-half years for women. This does not include seasoning during the cooking process. The study did not definitively rule out other factors, such as salt consumption being a proxy for a generally less healthy lifestyle, but the team behind the work said the evidence was compelling enough that people should consider avoiding seasoning their meals.

"To my knowledge, our study is the first to assess the relation between adding salt to foods and premature death," said Prof Lu Qi of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, who led the work. "Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, by adding less or no salt to food at the table, is likely to result in substantial health benefits, especially when it is achieved in the general population." The findings were based on research involving more than 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank study, who were followed for an average of nine years. When joining the study between 2006 and 2010, they were asked, via a touchscreen questionnaire, whether they added salt to their foods and how often they did so.

Researchers from two Germany universities 'have demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by 33 km (20.5 miles) of fiber optics," reports New Atlas.

Besides being a new distance record, "The team says this is an important step on the way to realizing a practical quantum internet." In their experiments, the team entangled two rubidium atoms kept in optical traps in two different buildings on the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich campus. They were separated by 700 m (2,297 ft) of fiber optics, which was extended out to 33 km with extra spools of cable. Each atom was excited with a laser pulse, which causes it to emit a photon that's quantum entangled with the atom. The photons are then sent down the fiber optic cables to meet at a receiving station in the middle. There, the photons undergo a joint measurement, which entangles them — and because they're each already entangled with their own atom, the two atoms become entangled with each other as well.

While photons have been entangled over great distances before, this study marks a new distance record for entangling two atoms, which could function as "quantum memory" nodes, over fiber optics.

It's the world's largest particle accelerator — and after a three-year pause for upgrades, CERN's Large Hadron Collider now detects more data, runs at higher speeds, and performs at its highest energy level ever — a whopping 13.6 trillion electron volts.

Will that prove the existence of dark matter? The Washington Post reports: Though scientists largely believe dark matter is real, none have been able to see or create it. Data collection and power upgrades made to the particle smasher could provide researchers one of their best chances to visualize and understand the substance.... Inside the collider, superconducting magnets are chilled to roughly minues-456 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than space — while two particle beams traveling close to the speed of light are made to collide. Using advanced sensors and monitors, scientists analyze the substances created by those collisions, which replicate conditions similar to the Big Bang. It allows them to learn about the earliest moments of the universe...

During the Large Hadron Collider's four-year experiment, scientists are hoping to find evidence of dark matter. As they fire up the machine, protons will spin at nearly the speed of light. The hope, researchers said, is that when they collide, it creates new particles resembling the properties of dark matter.... "High-energy colliders remain the most powerful microscope at our disposal to explore nature at the smallest scales and to discover the fundamental laws that govern the universe," said Gian Giudice, head of CERN's theory department....

If CERN scientists do not discover dark matter in the next four years, they have more upgrades in the works. The upgrades are likely to take three years after the current run stops, leaving the fourth round of data collection and experiments to start in 2029.

As planned, the trial could capture 10 times more data than previous experiments, according to CERN's website.

In October 2020, the agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft nearly sank into the surface of the rubbly asteroid while picking up rocks for shipment to Earth in 2023, team members revealed Thursday (July 7). The spacecraft only escaped getting stuck or sinking into oblivion within Bennu by firing its thrusters at the right moment. Space.com reports: "We expected the surface to be pretty rigid," principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. "We saw a giant wall of debris flying away from the sample site. For spacecraft operators, it was really frightening." Now that the spacecraft (more formally known as Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is safely on its way back to our planet to deliver its precious cargo, scientists are digging into the science implications of the dramatic moment.

"It turns out that the particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid," Lauretta said in a University of Arizona statement. That structure is why the OSIRIS-REx sampling probe had such a close call, he and his colleagues determined. The loose surface, made up of particles jostling against each other like plastic balls in a children's play area, has implications for how asteroids were formed and also for planetary defense techniques to protect against potential rogue space rocks coming near our planet, NASA added in a second statement.

On Wednesday evening NASA released a "test" image from the telescope that suggests the forthcoming scientific images and data will be spectacular. Ars Technica reports: The release of the test photo, which NASA casually says is "among the deepest images of the Universe ever taken," almost feels like a flex because it is so good for a throw-away engineering image. The space agency collected the image in late May during a week-long stability test intended to demonstrate the capabilities of the telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor. This instrument helps Webb find and lock onto astronomical targets, and it was built by the Canadian Space Agency.

"The resulting engineering test image has some rough-around-the-edges qualities to it," NASA said in a news release. "It was not optimized to be a science observation; rather, the data was taken to test how well the telescope could stay locked onto a target, but it does hint at the power of the telescope. It carries a few hallmarks of the views Webb has produced during its postlaunch preparations. Bright stars stand out with their six, long, sharply defined diffraction spikes-- an effect due to Webb's six-sided mirror segments. Beyond the stars, galaxies fill nearly the entire background." Ars notes that we will see the public release of the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope in just five days, beginning at 10:30 am ET (14:30 UTC).

Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of bankrupt blood-testing company Theranos, on Thursday was found guilty of 12 counts of conspiracy and fraud against certain investors and patients. Axios reports: It's a similar verdict to one handed down in January to Theranos founder and ex-CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who once dated Balwani. Balwani isn't a household name like Holmes, but he was instrumental in building a billion-dollar house of cards that duped both investors and patients. Balwani's attorneys tried to pin the blame for Theranos' failures on Holmes, much as her attorneys had tried to blame Balwani.

As we wrote when the trial began: Holmes tried to thread an incredibly narrow rhetorical needle, denying the existence of fraud while also redirecting blame. Balwani seems to be attempting something similar; claiming he was a savvy executive with lots of past success, but also a naif who was bamboozled by Holmes. But prosecutors, who originally wanted to try the pair together, often used Balwani's own words against him. For example, they presented a text message from Balwani to Holmes that read: "I am responsible for everything at Theranos." One big difference between the trials, however, was that Balwani didn't testify in his own defense.

Among the ocean's menagerie of bizarre creatures, sea dragons stand out. From a report: Relatives of sea horses and pipefish, sea dragons have long narrow snouts that they use like a straw to suck up meals of microscopic crustaceans. Instead of scales, the fish are covered in bony armor, and their backbones are kinked. Like their sea horse cousins, male sea dragons gestate a female's fertilized eggs in a pouch. They come in two groups of species, leafy and weedy. "Leafies" have elaborate branching appendages that make them virtually indistinguishable from the floating seaweed in their Southern Australian habitats. Weedy sea dragons are more streamlined but are also more colorful, with purple stripes and yellow polka dots.

Bill Cresko at the University of Oregon studies sea dragon genetics to answer one fundamental question: He and his colleagues want to know "how the hell" these fish came to look the way they do. "We're just really fascinated by, 'How can you have an organism that looks like that? What has changed in the genome?'" he said. A study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tried to answer these questions. Researchers sequenced the genomes of leafy and weedy sea dragons and compared them with other fish. The strange appearance of sea dragons made the team think that there might have been something unusual happening with their fibroblast growth factor genes, "which are really important for development of things like teeth, which they don't have, or the shape of faces or appendage outgrowth, to name just a few," said Susie Bassham, a researcher in Dr. Cresko's lab and an author of the paper. But when they zeroed in on the animals' genomes, the researchers were surprised to see that sea dragons were missing several of these key developmental genes altogether.

While the sea dragons were missing these growth genes, their genomes were packed with repetitive sections of code called transposons. This sort of repetitive code throughout the genome was once called "junk DNA," as scientists were not sure what it did. But transposons, or "jumping genes," are actually capable of cutting and pasting themselves from one spot within the genetic code to another, preventing other genes from shaping an organism's traits. The researchers cannot say for sure if the jumping genes are responsible for the absence of the growth factor genes. There is evidence of repeating genetic code near the spots where genes are missing, which might point to transposon activity, Dr. Small said. But scientists will need more genomes from across the fish family tree to confirm a cause-and-effect relationship.

As sea levels rise, coastal areas face a growing risk of flooding. But humans and environments near urban centers and the ocean may face issues beyond rising water. These areas have also been home to a large number of manufacturing facilities. From a report: Over the years, many of them may have left toxic chemicals in the soil. And now, those areas are also being threatened by floods. When it rains too hard or the sea rises too much, people nearby can expect to be exposed to a wide variety of leftover material and chemicals, some of which aren't meant to be ingested or touched by humans. How big is the risk? Many of our largest cities lie near the sea. By some counts, in 2020, around 400 million people lived within 20 meters of sea level and within 20 kilometers of a coastline.

New research has used historical data coupled with sea level rise projections to dive into how this issue may affect the United States. It finds that as the climate warms and floods become more common, more people will likely be exposed to industrial pollution from the manufacturing sites. Urban areas and marginalized groups within them may be particularly at risk. "We have all these sites; we know where they're at," Thomas Marlow, the research's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at New York University's Abu Dhabi campus, located in the United Arab Emirates, told Ars. "What are some of the climate risks they are facing, including from extreme weather events, rainfall -- that type of thing -- or sea level rise?"

British scientists and academic researchers have been dealt a blow after 115 grants from a flagship EU research programme were terminated because of the continuing Brexit row over Northern Ireland. From a report: One academic said he was "relieved" to be exiting the country and feared the UK was going down a "dark path" like Germany in the 1930s. One hundred and fifty grants were approved for British applicants after the then Brexit minister, David Frost, successfully negotiated associate membership of the $95.3bn Horizon Europe programme but most will now be cancelled. Beneficiaries in the UK were told by the European Research Council (ERC) that unless associate membership had been approved by 29 June, the grants would not be available unless the researchers moved their work to a European institution.

Ratification of the membership has been in abeyance because the UK has not implemented the Brexit trading arrangements agreed under the Northern Ireland protocol. With the deadline passed, it has emerged that just 18 of the 150 academics will take up the grants but must move to an EU institution to get the funds. Thiemo Fetzer, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick who was approved for $1.53m of funding for research into media and geopolitics, confirmed he was one of the 18 who had reluctantly decided to move to the EU. He said: "I am relieved as this whole Brexit process has eroded my trust in the UK's institutions and this Horizon Europe association was just another incarnation of this."

Methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows. The result helps to explain the rapid growth in methane in recent years and suggests that, if left unchecked, methane related warming will escalate in the decades to come. From a report: The growth of this greenhouse gas -- which over a 20 year timespan is more than 80 times as potent than carbon dioxide -- had been slowing since the turn of the millennium but since 2007 has undergone a rapid rise, with measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recording it passing 1,900 parts a billion last year, nearly triple pre-industrial levels. "What has been particularly puzzling has been the fact that methane emissions have been increasing at even greater rates in the last two years, despite the global pandemic, when anthropogenic sources were assumed to be less significant," said Simon Redfern, an earth scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

About 40% of methane emissions come from natural sources such as wetlands, while 60% come from anthropogenic sources such as cattle farming, fossil fuel extraction and landfill sites. Possible explanations for the rise in methane emissions range from expanding exploration of oil and natural gas, rising emissions from agriculture and landfill, and rising natural emissions as tropical wetlands warm and Arctic tundra melts. But another explanation could be a slowdown of the chemical reaction that removes methane from the atmosphere. The predominant way in which methane is "mopped up" is via reaction with hydroxyl radicals (OH) in the atmosphere.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species. The breakthrough paves the way for countries to store skin cells from animals as an insurance policy, as the cells can be used to create clones that boost the species' genetic diversity if they become threatened with extinction in the future. While scientists have used frozen cells to produce clones for conservation projects, the cells are kept in liquid nitrogen which is expensive and risky: if there are power outages or the liquid nitrogen is not regularly topped up, the cells melt and become unusable. Freeze dried sperm can also be used to create clones, but cannot be obtained from all animals.

In the latest work, researchers froze dried skin cells from mouse tails and stored them for up to nine months before trying to create clones from them. The freeze-drying processes killed the cells, but the scientists found they could still create early stage cloned embryos by inserting the dead cells into mouse eggs that had their own nuclei removed. These early stage mouse embryos, known as blastocysts, were used to create stocks of stem cells that were put through another round of cloning. The stem cells were inserted into mouse eggs emptied of their own nuclei, leading to embryos that surrogate mice carried to term. The first cloned mouse, named Dorami after a melon bread-loving robot in the Doraemon Manga series, was followed by 74 more. To check whether the clones had healthy fertility, nine females and three males were bred with normal mice. All the females went on to have litters.

Despite the achievement, the process is inefficient -- freeze drying damaged DNA in the skin cells -- and the success rate for creating healthy female and male mouse pups was only 0.2 to 5.4%. In some of the cells, the Y chromosome was lost, leading to female mice being born from cells obtained from male animals. "If the same treatment could be performed in endangered species where only males survived, it would be possible to produce females and naturally preserve the species, the authors write in Nature Communications.

AmiMoJo writes: Finnish researchers have installed the world's first fully working 'sand battery' which can store green power for months at a time. The developers say this could solve the problem of year-round supply, a major issue for green energy. Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind. The device has been installed in the Vatajankoski power plant which runs the district heating system for the area. Low-cost electricity warms the sand up to 500C by resistive heating (the same process that makes electric fires work). This generates hot air which is circulated in the sand by means of a heat exchanger. Sand is a very effective medium for storing heat and loses little over time. The developers say that their device could keep sand at 500C for several months. So when energy prices are higher, the battery discharges the hot air which warms water for the district heating system which is then pumped around homes, offices and even the local swimming pool.

Four mathematicians whose research covers areas like prime numbers and the packing of eight-dimensional spheres are the latest recipients of the Fields Medals, which are given out once every four years to some of the most accomplished mathematicians under the age of 40. From a report: At a ceremony in Helsinki on Tuesday, the International Mathematical Union, which administers the awards, bestowed the medals, made of 14-karat gold, to Hugo Duminil-Copin, 36, of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques just south of Paris and the University of Geneva in Switzerland; June Huh, 39, of Princeton University; James Maynard, 35, of the University of Oxford in England; and Maryna Viazovska, 37, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Mark Braverman, 38, of Princeton University received the Abacus Medal, a newer award that was modeled after the Fields for young computer scientists. Dr. Viazovska is just the second woman to receive a Fields Medal, while Dr. Huh defies the stereotype of a math prodigy, having not been drawn into the field until he was already 23 and in his last year of college. The Fields Medals, first awarded in 1936, were conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician. They and the Abacus Medal are unusual among top academic honors in that they go to people who are still early in their careers -- younger than 40 years on Jan. 1 -- and honor not just past achievements but also the promise of future breakthroughs. That the Fields are given only once every four years adds prestige through rarity -- something more like gold medals at the Olympics. Another award, the Abel Prize, is modeled more on the Nobel Prize and recognizes mathematicians annually for work over their careers. The recipients learned months ago that they had been chosen but were told not to share the news with friends and colleagues.

The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of "pentaquark" and the first-ever pair of "tetraquarks," which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. From a report: Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or "tetraquarks" and "pentaquarks." These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two "open-charm" tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a "double open-charm" tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

This month will mark a new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial life, when the most powerful space telescope yet built will start spying on planets that orbit other stars. Astronomers hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will reveal whether some of those planets harbor atmospheres that might support life. New York Times: Identifying an atmosphere in another solar system would be remarkable enough. But there is even a chance -- albeit tiny -- that one of these atmospheres will offer what is known as a biosignature: a signal of life itself. "I think we will be able to find planets that we think are interesting -- you know, good possibilities for life," said Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. "But we won't necessarily be able to just identify life immediately."

So far, Earth remains the only planet in the universe where life is known to exist. Scientists have been sending probes to Mars for almost 60 years and have not yet found Martians. But it is conceivable that life is hiding under the surface of the Red Planet or waiting to be discovered on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn. Some scientists have held out hope that even Venus, despite its scorching atmosphere of sulfur dioxide clouds, might be home to Venusians. Even if Earth turns out to be the only planet harboring life in our own solar system, many other solar systems in the universe hold so-called exoplanets. In 1995, Swiss astronomers spotted the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Known as 51 Pegasi b, the exoplanet turned out to be an unpromising home for life -- a puffy gas giant bigger than Jupiter, and a toasty 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. In the years since, scientists have found more than 5,000 other exoplanets. Some of them are far more similar to Earth -- roughly the same size, made of rock rather than gas and orbiting in a "Goldilocks zone" around their star, not so close as to get cooked but not so far as to be frozen.

Germany's BioNTech, Pfizer's partner in COVID-19 vaccines, said the two companies would start tests on humans of next-generation shots that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses in the second half of the year. From a report: Their experimental work on shots that go beyond the current approach include T-cell-enhancing shots, designed to primarily protect against severe disease if the virus becomes more dangerous, and pan-coronavirus shots that protect against the broader family of viruses and its mutations. In presentation slides posted on BioNTech's website for its investor day, the German biotech firm said its aim was to "provide durable variant protection." The two partners, makers of the Western world's most widely used COVID-19 shot, are currently discussing with regulators enhanced versions of their established shot to better protect against the Omicron variant and its sublineages.

Tuesday Ars Technica reported that "after more than a decade and more than $20 billion in funding, NASA and its litany of contractors are very close to declaring the 111-meter tall rocket ready for its debut launch." Long-time Slashdot reader added "It seems silly saying SLS will launch 'in just two months' for a rocket that was supposed to have first flown in 2016, but here we are."

From Ars Technica's report: On June 20, NASA successfully counted the rocket down to T-29 seconds during a pre-launch fueling test. Although they did not reach T-9 seconds, as was the original goal, the agency's engineers collected enough data to satisfy the requisite information to proceed toward a launch.

During a pair of news conferences last week, NASA officials declined to set a launch target for the mission. However, in an interview Tuesday with Ars, NASA's senior exploration official, Jim Free, said the agency is working toward a launch window of August 23 to September 6. "That's the one we're targeting," Free said. "We'd be foolish not to target that right now. We made incredible progress last week."

Next up is rolling the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center for final launch preparations, including arming the flight termination system. A team of technicians and engineers will also replace a seal on a "quick disconnect" where a hydrogen leak was observed during fuel loading.... [W]orkers have made their plans to process the vehicle during a relatively quick turnaround. "That group knows exactly what they need to do when we get back," he said. "I don't think we're stretching ourselves to get there. We're probably pushing ourselves a little bit, but we're not going to do something stupid." On this timeline, the SLS rocket could roll back to the launch pad in less than two months.
Friday the Register reported that the rocket's rollback encountered "a delay caused by concerns over the crawlerway" — that is, the 4.2-mile (6.8 km) road of rocks: The massive transporter used to move the Space Launch System between Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and launchpad requires a level pathway and teams have been working on the inclined pathway leading to the launchpad where the rocket currently resides to ensure there is an even distribution of rocks to support the mobile launcher and rocket.
But NASASpaceflight.com reported that the roll back actually happened on Saturday — apparently taking ten hours and 18 minutes, "slightly faster than the expected travel time of 11 hours....

"After returning to the VAB, SLS has another six to eight weeks of final launch preparations ahead of the rollout for the debut mission. This still makes the planned launch window possible, although the margins are slim."

Photosynthesis "is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant," according to a new announcement from the University of California, Riverside. But now scientists at the school and the University of Delaware "have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis." The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

"With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering...

Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn. "We were able to grow food-producing organisms without any contributions from biological photosynthesis..." said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study. The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark....

By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.

"Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. "By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs...."

"Imagine someday giant vessels growing tomato plants in the dark and on Mars — how much easier would that be for future Martians?" said co-author Martha Orozco-Cárdenas, director of the UC Riverside Plant Transformation Research Center.
Thans to Slashdot reader John.Banister for sharing the link!

Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shares a thought-provoking article from Popular Mechanics: Does reality exist, or does it take shape when an observer measures it? Akin to the age-old conundrum of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, the above question remains one of the most tantalizing in the field of quantum mechanics, the branch of science dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles on the microscopic level.... Now, scientists from the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in the São Paulo metropolitan area in Brazil are adding fuel to the suggestion that reality might be "in the eye of the observer."

In their new research, published in the journal Communications Physics in April, the scientists in Brazil attempted to verify the "complementarity principle" the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed in 1928. It states that objects come with certain pairs of complementary properties, which are impossible to observe or measure at the same time, like energy and duration, or position and momentum. For example, no matter how you set up an experiment involving a pair of electrons, there's no way you can study the position of both quantities at the same time: the test will illustrate the position of the first electron, but obscure the position of the second particle (the complementary particle) at the same time....

"We used nuclear magnetic resonance techniques similar to those used in medical imaging," Roberto M. Serra, a quantum information science and technology researcher at UFABC, who led the experiment, tells Popular Mechanics. Particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons all have a nuclear spin, which is a magnetic property analogous to the orientation of a needle in a compass. "We manipulated these nuclear spins of different atoms in a molecule employing a type of electromagnetic radiation. In this setup, we created a new interference device for a proton nuclear spin to investigate its wave and particle reality in the quantum realm," Serra explains. "This new arrangement produced exactly the same observed statistics as previous quantum delayed-choice experiments," Pedro Ruas Dieguez, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT) in Poland, who was part of the study, tells Popular Mechanics. "However, in the new configuration, we were able to connect the result of the experiment with the way waves and particles behave in a way that verifies Bohr's complementarity principle," Dieguez continues.

The main takeaway from the April 2022 study is that physical reality in the quantum world is made of mutually exclusive entities that, nonetheless, do not contradict but complete each other.
Stephen Holler, an associate professor of physics at Fordham University, tells Popular Mechanics that the study underscores a famous observation by Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

93-year-old Peter Higgs was awarded a Nobel Prize nine years ago after the Large Hadron Collider experiments finally confirmed of the existence Higgs boson particles he'd predicted back in 1964. "This discovery was a seminal moment in human culture," says physicist Frank Close, who's written the new book Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass .

But Scientific American reports there's more to the story: For years, the significance of the prediction was lost on most scientists, including Higgs himself. But gradually it became clear that the Higgs boson was not just an exotic sideshow in the particle circus but rather the main event. The particle and its associated Higgs field turned out to be responsible for giving all other particles mass and, in turn, creating the structure of galaxies, stars and planets that define our universe and enable our species... Yet the finding, however scientifically thrilling, pushed a press-shy Peter Higgs into the public eye. When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics the next year, Higgs left his home in Edinburgh and camped out at a pub across town on the day of the announcement so the prize committee wouldn't be able to reach him.
Physicist Close shares more details in an interview with Scientific American: Close: One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him was when he said the discovery of the boson "ruined [his] life." I thought, "How can it ruin your life when you have done some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything you've believed in has been shown to be correct, and you've won a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?" He said, "My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea." He is a very retiring person who was being thrust into the limelight.

That, to my mind, is why Peter Higgs the person is still elusive to me even though I've known him for 40 years...

Higgs had spent two to three years really trying to understand a particular problem. And because he had done that hard work and was still trying to deepen his understanding of this very profound concept, when a paper turned up on his desk posing a related question, Higgs happened to have the answer because of the work he'd done. He sometimes says, "I'm primarily known for three weeks of my life." I say, "Yes, Peter, but you spent two years preparing for that moment."

Q: The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs's prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime. What did it mean to him that the particle was finally detected?

He said to me that his first reaction was one of relief that it was indeed confirmed. At that moment he knew [the particle existed] after all, and he felt a profound sense of being moved that that was really the way it was in nature — and then panic that his life was going to change.