Massive Earthquake Could Strike Canada as Ancient Fault Line Wakes - ScienceAlert

Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting science data gathered in the distant Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto. On June 23, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed New Horizons, acting on stored commands uplinked to its main computer last July, had safely awakened from a 321‑day hibernation period that began Aug. 7. With the spacecraft now approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation took about 8 hours and 52 minutes to reach the APL Mission Operations Center via NASA's Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain.

About 4,500 years ago, while the Egyptians were busy stacking pyramids, the North Star was a completely different star called Thuban. It sat in the constellation Draco, the dragon, and it held the job for centuries before Earth’s wobble handed the title to Polaris. Astrophotographers have spent the last hundred-odd years obsessing over that pole, because lining a mount up with it (a ritual called polar alignment) is the price of admission for long, sharp exposures. It’s fiddly, it’s cold, and it usually happens in the dark with a red flashlight in your teeth. So I find it delightful that DWARFLAB named its new flagship smart telescope Draco, because the whole point of this thing is letting you skip that ritual altogether. Draco is a 90mm smart telescope from DWARFLAB, the team behind the pocketable DWARF II and DWARF 3, and it argues that serious imagers no longer have to trade ambition for convenience. It packs a folded f/3.8 optical system, a 50MP telephoto camera, a wide-angle camera for Milky Way shots, and a dedicated guide camera into a 12.1-pound (5.5kg) body you carry with one hand.

A Guelph Police Service patch can be seen on an officer's shoulder. (CityNews file photo) Police in Guelph are investigating after reports a woman was woken up in her bedroom by a stranger pulling off her blanket.

This microfluidic device squeezes mouse skin cells as they pass through, loosening their tightly packed DNA so CRISPR tools can reach and switch on genes to make cell reprogramming more efficient. Credit: Song Li Lab/UCLA Human cells hold about two meters (6.6 feet) of DNA, folded and compacted to fit inside a nucleus. That packing is essential for life, but it creates a problem for scientists. Some of the genes that control a cell's identity are buried so deep in tightly packed DNA that gene-targeting tools such as CRISPR activation, or CRISPRa, struggle to reach them.

Progressive transition from reversible to irreversible decoherence. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/t2yx-9bqh Quantum systems can occupy superpositions, quantum states that combine different possibilities. For instance, a microwave field can be prepared in a superposition of an empty state and a state that contains microwave light.