Mars’s Giant Canyon Still Tectonically Active, New Research Shows - Aviation Week

Scientists at Columbia University and Imperial College London have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.

The largest canyon system in the solar system is still tectonically active, billions of years after it formed. Seismic data show that a “marsquake” originated 20 to 40 kilometers beneath Valles Marineris as rocks slid sideways along a fault.

Experimental setup: (a) Three-level Λ-scheme of rubidium atoms interacting with coupling and probe laser fields; (b) a glass cell containing rubidium vapor through which the coupling and probe beams propagate; (c) the coupling-laser interference pattern that creates a spatially modulated refractive index; (d) the transverse profile of the probe beam after propagation through the induced lattice. Credit: Vjekoslav Vulić, Institute of Physics Zagreb Scientists from the Quantum Technologies Group at the Institute of Physics Zagreb, in collaboration with a colleague from the Physics Department at the Faculty of Science (PMF), have experimentally demonstrated for the first time the existence of discrete one-dimensional (1D) solitons in an optically induced photonic lattice in warm rubidium vapor.

In a study published in Advanced Optical Materials, researchers at Vilnius University (VU) demonstrated perovskite-based laser structures that maintained stable performance over more than 400 million pulses. Their findings address one of the major challenges limiting the practical use of perovskites: their instability. These semiconductor materials could play an important role in next-generation optical technologies, but their tendency to degrade has long posed a challenge for researchers worldwide. In some sense, perovskites can be compared to graphene. Like perovskites, graphene spent years being studied in labs because of its potential before industry eventually began using it. Today, it's widely applied in solar energy, electronics and batteries. Perovskites may hold even greater potential, but they come with a major drawback: they're highly unstable and degrade quickly in the presence of moisture.

India swung for the moon with Chandrayaan-1, its first deep space mission.