spectral energy distribution

The electron beam of a microscope usually flies through emptiness, like a courier on an empty highway. Any air molecule is a bump that makes it bounce and lose direction. So before, to examine a sample, you had to freeze it, dry it, or coat it with metal—and still you could only look in a vacuum.

Twelve stars have received X-ray passports. Now, for each of them, we know the exact radiation dose received by a planet in the habitable zone, the region where liquid water is possible.

A protein in a cell is not a frozen sculpture. It is constantly in motion: bending, breathing, jittering. This motion, its dynamics, determines how the protein works. But peering directly into the dance is hard, and computer simulations often demand enormous computing power. A new approach, named DynaMode, views protein motion as a musical piece.

A camera that captures not light but a stream of electrons reflected off a crystal is a hybrid pixel detector. It can count every electron that hits it, generating almost no noise of its own. In normal mode, when the electron beam flows continuously, the detector works perfectly.

When a bright spot flares up on a star, astronomers want to know how much energy was released into space. They used to picture a flare as a growing campfire: the area of the fire increases, but the heat remains the same. That made calculations simpler, but reality turned out to be different.

A solar flare is like an explosion in the atmosphere: bright, fast, with different 'voices.' X-rays come from electrons that have been accelerated and then abruptly slowed down, losing energy. But in 2017, detectors on the Fermi satellite caught a different signal — gamma rays that didn't fit this picture.

Cosmic dust isn't dirt: it's tiny grains, like soot from a campfire, scattered between the stars. Some of them spin at breakneck speeds, millions of times per second, emitting faint radio waves. Astronomers call this anomalous microwave emission: it interferes with studies of the early universe, but it's also a mystery in its own right.

Fast radio bursts are millisecond-long cosmic signals. Previously, searching for them was like blindly tuning a radio dial. The EDEN neural network sees the entire frequency spread and recognizes the burst pattern like a musician reads notes. On source FRB 20121102A, it found 5,927 bursts — three times more than before.

At Jefferson Lab, electrons are accelerated to 12 GeV and smash into protons to pry out their secrets. But existing detectors are like cameras with a narrow field of view: you either see a lot but dimly, or brightly but only a tiny patch. Electron scattering is the main tool, but statistics are insufficient for subtle effects.