An international team of scientists, led by the University of Oxford, has achieved a world-first by creating plasma "fireballs" using the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN, Geneva, to study the stability of plasma jets emanating from blazars. The results, published today (3 November) in PNAS, could shed new light on a long-standing mystery about the Universe’s hidden magnetic fields and missing gamma rays.

A research team from Queen Mary University of London has discovered a new way to engineer thin films that can “tune” themselves much more effectively than existing materials, making them highly responsive and efficient.  

In this study, we propose a lightweight multi-wavelength network model capable of high-fidelity and efficient full-color hologram generation in both 2D and 3D display, called IncepHoloRGB.The high-speed simultaneous generation of RGB holograms at 191 frames per second (FPS) are based on Inception sampling blocks and multi-wavelength propagation module integrated with depth-traced superimposition, achieving an average structural similarity (SSIM) of 0.88 and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 29.00 on the DIV2K test set in reconstruction. 

Air pollution is a major environmental challenge of this century. In a recent Journal of Environmental Sciences review paper, scientists from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have highlighted potential technologies for direct purification of air pollutants in the environment, including photocatalysis and ambient non-photocatalytic approaches. They also propose the novel concept of an ‘Environmental Catalytic City.’

Silver iodide is the material of choice to make clouds release rain and snow. For decades, its remarkable ability to trigger precipitation has been used in cloud seeding to prevent hail damage and mitigate droughts. Now, for the first time, researchers at TU Wien have revealed in atomic detail how this process works.