Forging of Stars & Planets

New insights into the formation of gas streams that propel the growth of infant stars have been unveiled by astronomers with help from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, revealing deeper insights into how they feed on material from their surrounding disks.

The new findings are offering astronomers unprecedented new details about young stars and planets, and the processes that give rise to their formation and evolution over time.

The new research focused on investigations into the structure of gas flows in protoplanetary disks, which are the massive, dusty clouds of gas surrounding newly formed stars. Based on recent Webb telescope data, researchers involved were able to confirm the existence of a previously “hidden” mechanism that astronomers have long suspected to be behind what allows stars to gain mass as they grow.

Revealing a Magnetic Mystery
Detailed in a new paper in Nature Astronomy, the new research, led by scientists from the University of Arizona and supported by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, reveals that magnetic winds play a key role in transporting material that helps stars grow, along with shaping the mass present in their surrounding disk into a planetary system.     READ MORE...

An Exotic Propulsion Space Race

An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.


“We have a space race brewing,” said Gianni Martie, the founder of the Applied Physics (AP) think tank and co-author on a pair of forthcoming warp drive research papers, in an email to The Debrief. “There’s still a ton to discover and invent, but we have the next steps now, which we didn’t have before.”


Comprised of over 30 physicists and scientists in related disciplines, the AP team has gained a sizeable reputation in the warp theory community due to their highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers on numerous warp drive concepts. 

One of those concepts recently reported by The Debrief has gained significant attention, inspiring many researchers and scientists to declare the team’s “constant velocity warp drive model” as the first practical, viable warp drive concept ever proposed.


The AP team has also created the Warp Factory, a set of development and simulation tools that allow fellow researchers in this nascent field to evaluate the physics of their own models, which can greatly improve the model’s quality and viability.       READ MORE...

Warp Factory Simulator

International Thinktank Applied Physics (AP) has released its “Warp Factory” simulator and toolkit to help scientists and engineers move closer to building a real-world Star Trek-style warp drive. 

Having already established itself in the nascent field of warp mechanics with the previous release of its “” design in 2021, AP is now offering its expertise to the broader community to advance the development of existing and future warp drive concepts. physical warp drive

The Public Benefit Corporation is also putting its money where its mouth is by offering warp field theorists a chance at $500,000 worth of grant money, a commitment the organization describes as an example of its “firm grounding in humanitarian and commercial scientific solutions.  READ MORE...

Creating Tee Tiny Objects Using Light

Engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology say they have developed a breakthrough method for printing incredibly small metallic nanostructures using the power of light. While some methods to accomplish this same task currently exist, they are slow and cumbersome, preventing their use at any viable commercial scale.

The engineers believe that their method, referred to as superluminescent light projection, represents a breakthrough that could enable revolutionary technological advancements in a wide range of industrial, commercial, and scientific applications, including advances in nanotechnology.  READ MORE...

Japan Testing Fusion Laser

In an initiative that could redefine space safety, the Japanese-based startup EX-Fusion plans to test a ground-based fusion laser system to “capture, remove/, or push out” objects operating in Earth’s orbit.

In a statement announcing a partnership with the Australian company EOS Space Systems, EX-Fusion said they aim to use ground-based laser systems to address the mounting problem of space debris, a growing concern for global space agencies and satellite operators.   READ MORE...

Ancient Landscape Beneath Antartica

team of researchers says they have discovered a massive ancient landscape beneath Antarctic ice, where it has remained preserved for eons.

Formed close to 34 million years ago, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) has seen significant change over the course of the last several geological epochs, with its ancient ice retreating and advancing like the ebb and flow of ocean tides, resulting in variations in ice coverage that have altered the Antarctic landscape.  READ MORE...

New Super lens Technique

Researchers have developed a potentially revolutionary superlens technique that once seemed impossible to see things four times smaller than even the most modern microscopes have seen before.

Known as the ‘diffraction limit’ because the diffraction of light waves at the tiniest levels has prevented microscopes from seeing things smaller than those waves, this barrier once seemed unbreakable.

Many have tried to peer below this optical barrier using a technique that researchers in the field term ‘superlensing,” including making customized lenses out of novel materials. But all have gathered too much light. 

Now, a team of physicists from the University of Sydney says they have discovered a viable path that peeks beyond the diffraction limit by a factor of four times, allowing researchers to see things smaller than ever seen before. And the way they did, it is like nothing anyone else has tried.

“We have now developed a practical way to implement superlensing without a super lens,” said Dr. Alessandro Tuniz from the School of Physics and University of Sydney Nano Institute and the study’s lead author, in a press release announcing the achievement.

To accomplish this feat, the researchers placed their light probe a distance from the sample they wanted to image and collected high-resolution and low-resolution information. 

According to the release, the probe gathered light “at terahertz frequency at millimetre wavelength, in the region of the spectrum between visible and microwave.”  READ MORE...