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Neutrinos are subatomic particles produced in many types of radioactive decays, including in nuclear reactors. Because neutrinos interact with matter extremely weakly, they are impossible to shield. The SNO+ experiment has just shown that a detector filled with simple water can detect neutrinos from nuclear reactors, even though the neutrinos create only tiny signals in the detector.

The roles microbes play in ecosystems are changing with global warming. Microbes are also affected by infection by viruses, but scientists know relatively little about how these viral infections could change how microbes react to warming. In this study, scientists describe different ways that increasing temperatures could affect viruses and their microbial hosts. Their preliminary models show that viruses could alter carbon balance, causing some ecosystems to switch from net carbon sources to net carbon sinks.

Rouven Essig is a theoretical particle physicist at Stony Brook University. He conceives new experiments and detection methods in the search for knowledge about dark matter.

Some mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) that emerge from a hot soup of matter generated in collisions of atomic nuclei appear to have a preferential “global spin alignment.” The spin preference cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms. A new model suggests that local fluctuations in the strong force may play a role in triggering the preference. The global spin alignment measurements may give scientists a new way to study local fluctuations in the strong force, which is the strongest and least understood of the four fundamental forces in nature.

The air pollutant secondary organic aerosol (SOA) forms when ammonia and amines react with oxygenated species. When ammonia is present when alkenes react with ozone, SOA increases in size and numbers. This may be due to Criegee intermediates. New research found that a particular amine, dimethylamine, reacts 34,000 times faster with one version of the Criegee intermediate acetaldehyde oxide than with another version of the same compound.

Fusion energy researchers use a technique called Gas-Puff Imaging (GPI) to visualize an important phenomenon in tokamak devices involving turbulence in plasma magnetic confinement fields. This technique can generate roughly 1 million frames of visual data, far too much for humans to analyze by eye. Scientists recently tested a machine-learning based approach for analyzing GPI images. The system provides detailed, time- and space-resolved information and could aid in design and operation of future fusion power devices.

The tensor charge in protons is the net transverse spin of the proton or the quarks that make it up. The only way to obtain the tensor charge from experimental data is using the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to extract the "transversity" function, which encodes the difference between the number of quarks with their spin aligned and anti-aligned to the proton’s spin when it is in a transverse direction. Using state-of-the-art data science techniques, researchers recently made the most precise ever empirical determination of the tensor charge.