Lunar craters in permanent shadow could be ideal locations for building the most stable optical lasers ever made. The ultrastable laser could provide a GPS-like signal enabling spacecraft to navigate the Moon’s surface and more. Jun Ye, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues describe their proposal in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The Moon’s frigid polar regions, where permanently shadowed craters reside, have a low-vibration, high vacuum environment that’s highly suitable for ultrastable lasers. Such a laser could lock its frequencies onto signals from optical atomic clocks on satellites, providing the first atomic timekeeping signal on an extraterrestrial body. Networks of these lasers could make possible highly precise measurements of the distance between satellites and the lunar surface and could potentially even detect gravitational waves passing through.

These polar regions, which are designated as possible landing sites for future missions in NASA’s Artemis program, remain central to long-term lunar exploration because they contain water-ice and other resources needed to maintain a human presence.

Researchers are developing a connected brain-gut-pancreas system on a chip to study how signals travel between organs and why glucose affects brain function.

Artificial intelligence companies influence policy and regulation using similar techniques to Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and Big Oil, according to a new study.