Scientists Confirmed Existence Of "Second Sound"

In the world of average, everyday materials, heat tends to spread out from a localized source. Drop a burning coal into a pot of water, and that liquid will slowly rise in temperature before its heat eventually dissipates. But the world is full of rare, exotic materials that don’t exactly play by these thermal rules.

Instead of spreading out as one would expect, these superfluid quantum gasses "slosh" heat side to side — it essentially propagates as a wave. Scientists call this behavior a material’s "second sound" (the first being ordinary sound via a density wave).

Although this phenomenon has been observed before, it’s never been imaged. But recently, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were finally able to capture this movement of pure heat by developing a new method of thermography (a.k.a. heat-mapping).

The results of this study were published in the journal Science, and in an university press release highlighting the achievement, MIT assistant professor and co-author Richard Fletcher continued the boiling pot analogy to describe the inherent strangeness of "second sound" in these exotic superfluids.

"It’s as if you had a tank of water and made one half nearly boiling," Fletcher said. "If you then watched, the water itself might look totally calm, but suddenly the other side is hot, and then the other side is hot, and the heat goes back and forth, while the water looks totally still."

These superfluids are created when a cloud of atoms is subjected to ultra-cold temperatures approaching absolute zero (−459.67 °F). In this rare state, atoms behave differently, as they create an essentially friction-free fluid. It’s in this frictionless state that heat has been theorized to propagate like a wave.

"Second sound is the hallmark of superfluidity, but in ultracold gases so far you could only see it in this faint reflection of the density ripples that go along with it," lead author Martin Zwierlein said in a press statement. "The character of the heat wave could not be proven before."

To finally capture this second sound in action, Zweierlein and his team had to think outside the usual thermal box, as there’s a big problem trying to track heat of an ultracold object—it doesn’t emit the usual infrared radiation. So, MIT scientists designed a way to leverage radio frequencies to track certain subatomic particles known as "lithium-6 fermions," which can be captured via different frequencies in relation to their temperature (i.e. warmer temperatures mean higher frequencies, and vice versa). This novel technique allowed the researchers to essentially zero in on the “hotter” frequencies (which were still very much cold) and track the resulting second wave over time.

This might feel like a big "so what?"pl After all, when’s the last time you had a close encounter with a superfluid quantum gas? But ask a materials scientist or astronomer, and you’ll get an entirely different answer.

While exotic superfluids may not fill up our lives (yet), understanding the properties of second wave movement could help questions regarding high-temperature superconductors (again, still at very low temperatures) or the messy physics that lie at the heart of neutron stars.

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These American Soldiers Are Revered In China

During World War II, some American engineers were given a one-year contract to live and work in China, flying, repairing and making airplanes. Pay is as much as US$ 16,725 a month with 30 days off a year. Housing is included, and you’ll get an extra $700 a month for food. And there’s an extra $11,000 for every Japanese airplane you destroy – no limit.

That’s the deal – in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars – that a few hundred Americans took in 1941 to become the heroes, and some would even say the saviors, of China.

Those American pilots, mechanics and support personnel became members of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), later known as the Flying Tigers.

The group’s warplanes featured the gaping, tooth-filled mouth of a shark on their nose, a fearsome symbol still used by some US military aircraft to this day.

The symbolic fierceness was backed up by AVG pilots in combat. The Flying Tigers are credited with destroying as many as 497 Japanese planes while losing only 73.

Today, despite US-China tensions, those American mercenaries are still revered in China.

"China always remembers the contribution and sacrifice made to it by the United States and the American people during the World War II," says an entry on the Flying Tigers memorial page of China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily Online.

The bond is such that the daughter and granddaughter of the Flying Tigers’ founder are among the few Americans invited to Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of World War II.

In the late 1930s, China had been invaded by the armies of Imperial Japan and was struggling to withstand its better equipped and unified foe. Japan was virtually unopposed in the air, able to bomb Chinese cities at will.

Leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been able to loosely unite China’s warlords under a central government, later hired American Claire Chennault, a retired US Army captain, to form an air force.

Chennault first spent a few years putting together an air raid warning network and building airbases across China, according to the Flying Tigers’ official website. In 1940, he was dispatched to the United States – still a neutral party – to find pilots and planes that could defend China against Japan.

With good contacts in the administration of US President Franklin Roosevelt and a budget that could pay Americans as much as three times what they could earn in the US military, Chennault was able to get the fliers he needed.

A deal was secured to get 100 Curtiss P-40B fighters built for Britain sent to China instead.

In his memoirs, Chennault wrote that the P-40s he got lacked a modern gun sight.

His pilots were "aiming their guns through a crude, homemade, ring-and-post gun sight instead of the more accurate optical sights used by the Air Corps and the Royal Air Force," he wrote.

What the P-40 lacked in ability, Chennault made up for in tactics, having the AVG pilots dive from a high position and unleash their heavy machine guns on the structurally weaker but more maneuverable Japanese planes.

In a low, twisting, turning dogfight, the P-40 would lose.

The pilots Chennault enrolled were far from the cream of the crop.

Ninety-nine fliers, along with support personnel, made the trip to China in the fall of 1941, according to the US Defense Department history.

Some were fresh out of flight school, others flew lumbering flying boats or were ferry pilots for large bombers. They signed up for the Far East adventure to make a lot of money or because they were simply bored.

Perhaps the best known of the Flying Tigers, US Marine Greg Boyington – around whom the 1970’s TV show "Black Sheep Squadron" was based – was in it for the money.

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A New Synthetic Lifeform That Could Spell Doom For Humankind

It's a technology that doesn't even exist yet, but its effects could be so drastically destructive that scientists in the field are calling for it to be banned now, before it's too late.

We're talking, of course, about "mirror life" — synthetic organisms that quite literally turn natural biology on its head.

"We should choose not to build mirror life and pass laws to ensure nobody can," John Glass, a synthetic biologist who helped create the first living cell with a synthetic genome, wrote in a speculative yet terrifying piece for the Financial Times. "The question is not whether we are able to prevent this threat — it is whether we will act while we still can."

Mirror lifeforms contain DNA structures that are the mirror image to all known organisms. In all life on Earth, the DNA double helix is right-handed, meaning its strands, a sugar-phosphate backbone, twist to the right. (If you make a thumbs-up with your right hand, the vertical axis would be aligned with your thumb, while your fingers represent the curl of the spiral.) The opposite is the case for proteins, the building blocks of cells, which are left-handed.

This so-called homochirality is true for all known lifeforms. So what happens when humans engineer a synthetic organism where its DNA twists to the left, while its proteins twist to the right?

The scary thing is that we can't say for sure — but many biologists fear the worst. In December, a group of leading figures in the field, including two Nobel laureates, published a massive technical report warning that the consequences of mirror life "could be globally disastrous," possibly even wiping out all life if the new organisms prove pathogenic to existing life, like us humans.

In June of this year, more than 150 scientists and ethicists echoed these concerns in a conference at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to weigh the risks of developing the tech. "It was something I never expected to see in my scientific career," Glass wrote. He noted that the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, an influential nonprofit organization that funds scientific research, has been unequivocal that it will not support efforts to create mirror organisms.

Most scientists agree that the technology is at least a decade away, perhaps three. But their sense of urgency in preventing it is palpable.

"Once it is possible to build a mirror cell, it would be comparatively easy to engineer many more kinds of mirror bacteria — the simplest form of mirror life," Glass wrote. "If this is achieved and Pandora's box opens it could pose extraordinary risks."

"To the best of our knowledge, our immune systems produce very weak antibody responses against mirror molecules, if any," he explained. "Having even one immune deficiency can cause a patient to die of overwhelming bacterial infections; a mirror bacterial infection might be like having many immune deficiencies at once."

Moreover, mirror bacteria could resist predation by organisms that normally keep their population in check, allowing them to run rampant across ecosystems.

"Contaminated areas could become irreversibly uninhabitable, compromising our agriculture and natural world," Glass said. "Huge numbers of people, animals and plants could be wiped out, with some driven to extinction."

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Debunking The Wild Titanic Conspiracy Theories

When the Titanic sank in 1912, the world was shocked and devastated. The limits of human innovation were cruelly displayed with the destruction of such a technically remarkable ship. But a conspiracy theory that has crept up online in recent years, most recently on Reddit, begs the question: Was it actually the Titanic that sank?

David Grossman of Popular Mechanics tries to examine the validity of this claim and find out where did came from.

Grossman reported that everyone seems to agree on one fact: a ship really did sink in the icy waters of the North Atlantic on 15 April 1912, and approximately 1,500 passengers aboard that ship died. The conspiracy theory simply suggests the Titanic wasn’t actually the technical marvel the ship’s parent company, the White Star Line, had promised.

Rather, the White Star Line swapped ships for the voyage from Southampton to New York, and the ship billed as the top-of-the-line Titanic was actually an older ship: the Olympic.

The British White Star Line had stiff competition in England and across the globe. Locally, it had a fierce rivalry with the Cunard Steamship Company, Ltd., which in 1906–07 had sent on its maiden voyage the world’s then-largest passenger ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania.

To compete with the Lusitania and its mate, White Star Line entered into a giant ship war. The company was no stranger to such battles, but Cunard’s Lusitania and Mauretania had outgunned White Star’s so-called "Big Four" ships in terms of top speed. This time around, the company had some extra backing.

In 1902, White Star had become a property owned by the International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM), a holding company bankrolled by famed financier J.P. Morgan. With Morgan’s permission, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay began work on what came to be known as Olympic-class ships. If they couldn’t match the Lusitania’s speed, Olympic-class ships would outclass Cunard ships: they’d be even bigger, and more luxurious. Three ships were commissioned: the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic.

The Olympic was the first to be built, and as the line’s namesake, it was considered the lead ship. Its maiden trip was widely heralded, and its first few voyages were unqualified successes. But on just its fifth voyage, the vessel ran into serious trouble.

On 20 September 1911, while passing a military vessel, the Hawke, the Olympic made an unexpected turn. Caught off guard, the two ships crashed. The Olympic was able to limp back to port, badly wounded. A trial would later hold the White Star Line responsible for the incident.

So far, everything above is generally agreed to be fact. The Olympic crash is where paths diverge.

After the crash, conspiracy theorists claim, the Olympic was an economic disaster. The lawsuit meant repairs would not be covered by insurance, and it was drawing no money while sitting around the docks. So, the company made a switch: its newly built second ship would take on the name Olympic, while its damaged older ship would be re-purposed to be the Titanic.

Eventually, the true Olympic (now secretly operating as the Titanic) would be scuttled in an accident from which the White Star Line could collect an insurance payment befitting a brand-new ship — all while the ship originally built as the Titanic would have lived on. The only thing that ruined the plan was an iceberg.

Other conspiracy theorists claim a more nefarious reasoning for the sinking: J.P. Morgan was behind the switch, eager to use an inferior ship to drown his enemies onboard.

Proponents of either theory point toward a number of clues: the Titanic didn’t allow for a public examination before its voyage, out of fear it would be found out by experts as Olympic in disguise, theorists claim.

And then there are portholes. A popular Reddit post examines pictures of the Titanic under construction and the Titanic on its first voyage, and finds the second picture suspiciously changed and close to the Olympic.

There are a plethora of other details. For example, separate claims point toward the argument the Olympic lies at the bottom of the sea instead of the original Titanic.

Titanic researchers Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge have published a book on the subject, "Titanic or Olympic: Which Ship Sank?" They’ve also helped to write other books of Titanic history, including "Titanic: The Ship Magnificent". The two take the porthole argument straight on.

"The Olympic," they write, "like the Titanic, was fitted originally with the same 14-porthole arrangement on the port side of her forecastle, but two additional portholes were later fitted; they were there in March 1912."

Closely examined, none of the Olympic/Titanic claims can hold up to the phenomenal effort that was needed for the switch: the two ships were not exactly identical. The Titanic had a "unique café and enlarged á la carte restaurant," Chirnside writes, and was modified based on the company’s earlier experience with the Olympic.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported Titanic wreckage has been recovered with the ship’s unique construction identification number (CIN); the 401 being irrefutable evidence that it wasn't an ill-fated cover up.

That’s not all. It "is simply impossible to pass off a one-year-old ship for a new one, Historian Mark Chirnside says, pointing to a number of small differences between the two, including "additional steel plates that were fitted to the bedplates of Olympic’s engines," added in 1911, and still there in further inspections in the 20s and 30s. When the Titanic was investigated by the British board of trade, no such plates were found.

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Researchers Developed Anti-Clogging Tech

Researchers in Australia have developed a new wastewater treatment system that could prevent fatbergs from clogging city sewers and save water utilities globally billions each year.

A team of engineers from RMIT University’s Effective Technologies and Tools (WETT) Research Centre redesigned a grease interceptor and paired it with a smart chemical treatment.

To their surprise, the solution, which they designed to tackle fatbergs, the solid masses of fat, oil, and grease (FOG) that clog sewers, more than doubled fat removal rates in commercial kitchen wastewater.

"This is a major step forward in preventing FOG from entering our sewers from the biggest contributors: commercial food establishments," Biplob Pramanik, PhD, senior researcher and WETT director, revealed.

Pramanik said that traditional grease traps aren’t built to capture finer particles and emulsified fats found in modern kitchen wastewater. In contrast, the novel system targets all fat types, including the hard-to-remove emulsified fats that typically escape conventional traps.

It reportedly uses a series of baffles, physical barriers inside the grease interceptor, to slow wastewater flow and separate larger fat particles. Moreover, a small dose of alum, which is a common water treatment chemical is added to clump smaller, suspended fats for easy removal.

According to Nilufa Sultana, PhD, lead author of the study, the system proved effective even under real-world conditions, including high temperatures and detergent-heavy wastewater.

"While traditional interceptors only remove around 40 percent of fats, our system achieved up to 98 percent – even when tested with actual kitchen wastewater," the female researcher explained.

The new technology can be scaled to fit various kitchen sizes and retrofitted to existing grease management systems, providing a cost-effective way to protect sewer infrastructure and cut maintenance costs.

Data shows that poor sanitation and inadequate water supply lead to estimated economic losses of US$260 billion annually in developing countries.

Felicity Roddick, PhD, an Emeritus Professor at RMIT University and an expert with over 36 years of experience treating water and wastewater using physical, chemical, and biological processes, said the systems’ implications went beyond infrastructure.

"Fat, oil, and grease blockages can lead to sewage spills in our streets and waterways," Roddick concluded in a press release. "This research shows we can stop the problem at its source, with a simple upgrade to the systems food businesses already use."

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Dark Matter Can Create Massive Black Holes

Latest research revealed that dark matter could gather over vast periods of time at the heart of Jupiter-sized planets, creating black holes that eat these worlds from within. This striking concept may mean extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," could be used to study the mystery of dark matter.

In this new model, superheavy dark matter particles could be trapped by exoplanets, losing energy and drifting toward that world's core. Once there, these superheavy dark matter particles accumulate until they collapse, forming a black hole. This black hole then ravenously eats its way out of its host planet.

This new dark matter/black hole theory doesn't work with all recipes of black holes, however. For instance, if dark matter particles meet and annihilate each other as some models suggest (as happens when electrons meet their antiparticles, positrons), then it wouldn't be possible for them to gather in quantities needed to collapse and birth a black hole.

Dark matter is troubling to scientists because, despite the fact that it accounts for 85 percent of the "stuff" in the universe, we have no idea what it is. The fact that dark matter doesn't interact with light means it can't be made up the electrons, protons, and neutrons that form the atoms that compose everything we see around us: the universe's ordinary matter — stars, planets, moons, living things, etc. This lack of interaction with electromagnetic radiation also makes dark matter effectively invisible. This puzzle has led to scientists to suggest all types of different particles that might possibly account for dark matter, many of which have different properties.

But there's another caveat to the dark matter recipe needed for this process to occur. The constituent particles would have to have very large masses. This rules out one of the most highly favored dark matter candidate particles, the axion, a hypothetical particle with a very small mass.

"If the dark matter particles are heavy enough and don't annihilate, they may eventually collapse into a tiny black hole," University of California, Riverside researcher Mehrdad Phoroutan Mehr said in a statement. "If the dark matter particles are heavy enough and don’t annihilate, they may eventually collapse into a tiny black hole."

Currently, the lightest black holes we are aware of are so-called stellar mass black holes. These are thought to have masses between around 3 and 100 times the mass of the sun. The logic behind this is sound, as these black holes are born when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel at the end of their lives. As a supernova explosion ejects the outer layers of these stars, their stellar cores collapse.

That means the mass range of stellar mass black holes is set by the masses of the progenitor stars that created them. Furthermore, the lower mass is set by the fact that stars with less than 1.4 times the mass of the sun (a value known as the Chandrasekhar limit) can't go supernova, so can't birth a black hole or a neutron star. Instead, these stars leave behind a white dwarf.

There's another mass limit to consider, too. The Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) limit divides stellar cores that create black holes and those that birth neutron stars. Though less well defined than the Chandrasekhar limit, the TOV limit suggests that after ejecting most of its matter, a stellar core needs to have at least 2.2 to 2.9 times the mass of the sun to form a black hole.

This limit is uncertain, as currently the lightest black hole we have detected and confirmed is around 3.8 times the mass of the sun, while the heaviest neutron star ever detected weighs in at 2.4 solar masses.

These planet-eating black holes would be much more diminutive than even the lightest stellar mass black hole if they adopt the mass of the planet they devour. The team proposes that this process could occur within planets with masses the same as Jupiter, which has around 0.001 times the mass of the sun.

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Melania Trump Launched A Nationwide AI Challenge With US$ 10K Prizes

The U.S. First lady Melania Trump unveiled last 26 August the Presidential AI Challenge, a government-backed competition inviting students from kindergarten through 12th grade to use artificial intelligence to solve community problems.

The initiative, announced in a White House video message, seeks to prepare American youth for a future shaped by AI.

"As someone who created an AI-powered audio book and championed online safety through the Take It Down Act, I’ve seen firsthand the promise of this powerful technology," Trump said. "Now, I pass the torch of innovation to you."

The contest stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed to advance AI education.

It asks students to form teams, work with an adult mentor, and use AI tools to build apps, websites, or other solutions to community challenges. Registration opened on 26th August, and submissions are due in December.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House science and technology office, said the goal is to get children comfortable with AI. "We want to have America’s youth plugged in and working on and using AI tools," he said on Fox News Channel. He called the range of possible projects "endless."

Trump framed the challenge in historic terms. "Just as America once led the world into the skies, we are poised to lead again," she said. "This time, in the age of AI."

The White House guidebook advises that elementary students use only age-appropriate AI programs under adult supervision.

Every team that submits a project will receive a Presidential Certificate of Participation. Additional awards will be given at each stage of the competition.

State champions earn a Presidential Certificate of Achievement, cloud credits, and access to online resources. Regional champions receive the same, plus eligibility for a three-day event in Washington, D.C., where selected projects will be showcased at the White House.

National champions receive a Presidential Award Certificate, cloud credits, and US$ 10,000. Elementary winners receive the money for their school or community group, while middle and high school winners get US$ 10,000 each. Educator winners also receive US$ 10,000 per team member.

Interested students and educators can register for the Presidential AI Challenge here.

The initiative reflects the administration’s broader AI strategy. President Trump earlier this year introduced "Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan," designed to ease regulations and boost innovation. At a July summit, he pledged that the U.S. would do "whatever it takes" to lead globally in artificial intelligence.

Melania Trump has tied herself closely to this push. She promoted the Take It Down Act, which targets AI-generated sexual exploitation and deepfakes, and stood beside the president when he signed it into law in May.

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