One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region…

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A new study of two supernova remnants, the debris left behind after stars explode, suggests the explosions came from stellar siblings that once orbited each other. The first star's detonation sent its binary companion hurtling through space, and then, after traveling for thousands of years, the surviving star blew up, too.

arXiv:2601.14288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present DeepInflation, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, DeepInflation integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that DeepInflation can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (with the ACT DR6 results taken as an example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. DeepInflation serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy cluster called CL0016+1609, or MACS J0018.5+1626, that is very bright at X-ray wavelengths and is one of the most extensively studied clusters at X-ray and radio wavelengths. X-ray observations of this cluster revealed that it is two clusters merging along our line of sight.

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arXiv:2601.18652v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Galaxy clusters are the largest virialized structures in the Universe and are predominantly dominated by dark matter. The hydrostatic mass and the mass obtained from gravitational lensing measurements generally differ, a discrepancy known as the hydrostatic mass bias. In this work, we derive the hydrostatic mass of galaxy clusters within the framework of Rastall gravity. We consider two scenarios: (i) the absence of dark matter and (ii) the presence of dark matter. In both cases, we constrain the Rastall parameter in the cluster-scale using observational data. In the first scenario, Rastall gravity effectively reduces the hydrostatic mass, bringing it closer to the observed baryonic mass. The best linear fit yields a slope $\mathbf{M}=1.07\pm0.11$, indicating a near one-to-one correspondence between the two masses. In the second scenario, Rastall gravity helps to alleviate the hydrostatic mass bias. The linear fit between the Rastall hydrostatic mass and the observed lensing mass results in a best-fit slope $\mathbf{M}=0.99\pm0.26$, which is very close to unity. We also calculate the goodness-of-fit for every fit. The statistical evaluations indicate that Rastall gravity provides a viable phenomenological framework that can improve certain aspects of the mass discrepancy problem at the level of scaling relations. However, it does not universally outperform other modified gravity model, when evaluated using standard goodness-of-fit criteria.

We visited a giant field of solar mirrors to learn about Concentrated Solar Power technology! Full video - https://youtu.be/ccO0_hSXMyM Previous videos in this series: 1800 miles in a hydrogen car [https://youtu.be/hghIckc7nrY] Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric vs Battery Electric [https://youtu.be/dWAO3vUn7nw] Big problem facing renewable energy [https://youtu.be/mHmIVw9etns] Support Physics Girl videos → https://www.patreon.com/physicsgirl Music provided by APM https://www.apmmusic.com/ http://physicsgirl.org/ http://twitter.com/thephysicsgirl http://facebook.com/thephysicsgirl http://instagram.com/thephysicsgirl Creator/Host: Dianna Cowern Editor: Levi Butner