Space.com reports: Laika, a stray dog scooped off the streets of Moscow, launched on the Soviet Union's Sputnik 2 mission in November 1957, just a month after Sputnik 1's liftoff opened the space age. The 11-lb. (5 kilograms) mixed-breed quickly died of overheating and circled Earth as a corpse until April 1958, when Sputnik 2 fell back into the atmosphere and burned up.

Laika was sacrificed to aid humanity's march into the cosmos, her pioneering mission and those of her successors designed to help show that our species could survive jaunts into the final frontier. A new documentary called "Space Dogs" asks us to examine that sacrifice and what it says about us. [Trailer here] "This film is about the relationship of another species to us humans. A species that has been used in space history in two ways: both as an experimental object and as a symbol of courage and heroism," directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter said in a statement.

"The dogs had to fulfill mankind's dream by conquering the cosmos for them," the duo added...

Kremser and Peter dug up stunning, never-before-seen footage of Laika and other Soviet space dogs. Some of these archival snippets show the pups being prepped for their landmark launches, their poor little bodies bristling with implanted tubes and wires. Other footage depicts post-landing processing of the shorn and wobbly strays fortunate enough to survive their orbital ordeals. Getting ahold of this priceless historic material was no easy task...

"Space Dogs" is not chiefly about Laika and her fellow space explorers; the historical footage comprises less than one-third of the roughly 90-minute film. The bulk of the documentary is devoted to strays on the streets of modern Moscow, especially one young dog with floppy ears who roams the city with charismatic enthusiasm.
This week saw the "virtual cinema launch" of the documentary, with a real-world release into theatres next weekend.

"Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be," reports the New York Times. Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report: Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astronomers contend that a black hole may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. All summer, they have been arguing over how to find it, if indeed it is there, and what to do about it, proposing plans that are only halfway out of this world...

Earlier this year, Edward Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, chimed in... Dr. Witten suggested borrowing a trick from Breakthrough Starshot, the proposal by Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner and Dr. Hawking to send thousands of laser-propelled microscopic probes to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Dr. Witten suggested sending hundreds of similarly small probes outward in all directions to explore the solar system. By keeping track of incoming signals from the probes, scientists on Earth would be able to tell if and when each one sped up or slowed down as it encountered the gravitational field of Planet Nine or anything else out there.

Key to this plan would be the ability of the probes to keep pinging Earth precisely every hundred-thousandth of a second. In May, astronomers Scott Lawrence and Zeeve Rogoszinski of the University of Maryland suggested instead monitoring the trajectories of the probes with high-resolution radio telescopes, which would obviate the need for high-precision clocks on the probes.
Another idea came from Avi Loeb, chair of the astronomy department at Harvard and leader of a scientific advisory board for Breakthrough Starshot: in July Dr. Loeb was back, with a student, Amir Siraj, and a new idea for finding the Planet Nine black hole. If a black hole were out there, they argued, it would occasionally rip apart small comets, causing bright flares that could soon be spotted by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, previously known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, now under construction in Chile. The observatory's mission, starting in 2021, is to make a movie of the universe, producing a panorama of the entire southern night sky every few days and revealing anything that has changed or moved. Such flares should occur a few times a year, they noted. "Our calculations show that the flares will be bright enough for the Vera Rubin Observatory to rule out or confirm Planet Nine as a black hole within one year of monitoring the sky with its L.S.S.T. survey," Dr. Loeb wrote in an email.

Moreover, because the Rubin telescope examines such a large swath of sky, it could detect or rule out black holes of similar size all the way out to the Oort cloud, a vague and diffuse assemblage of protocomets and primordial, frozen riffraff a trillion miles from the sun, they said.

The prospect of finding a black hole in our own solar system "is as startling as finding evidence that someone might be living in the shed in your backyard," Dr. Loeb said in the email. "If so, who is it, and how did it get there?"

"Scientists have known for nearly 200 years that certain materials can convert heat to electricity..." reports Science, describing research into an intriguing new approach: Refrigerators, boilers, and even lightbulbs continually dump heat into their surroundings. This "waste heat" could — in theory — be turned into electricity, as it is sometimes done with power plants, automobile engines, and other high-heat sources. The problem: These "low-grade" sources give off too little heat for current technology to do the conversion well.

Now, researchers have created a device that uses liquids to efficiently convert low-grade heat to electricity. The advance might one day power energy-scavenging devices that can light up sensors and lights and even charge batteries... Thermocells are good at converting small temperature differences into electricity, but they typically produce only tiny currents... This thermocell generated five times more power for the same electrode area than previous versions, materials physicist Jun Zhou and his colleagues at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology report this week in Science.

It also more than doubled the efficiency needed to make a viable commercial device. A paperback book-size module of 20 thermocells could run LED lights, power a fan, and charge a mobile phone, the team found.

Long-time Slashdot reader bsharma shares an announcement from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope site: Researchers found that small-scale concentrations of dark matter in clusters produce gravitational lensing effects that are 10 times stronger than expected. This evidence is based on unprecedently detailed observations of several massive galaxy clusters by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile...

Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the senior theorists on the team, added, "There's a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models. This could signal a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties, as these exquisite data have permitted us to probe the detailed distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales."

The team's paper will appear in the September 11 issue of the journal Science... This unexpected discovery means there is a discrepancy between these observations and theoretical models of how dark matter should be distributed in galaxy clusters.

It could signal a gap in astronomers' current understanding of the nature of dark matter.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: Dining out raises the risk of contracting Covid-19 more than other activities, such as shopping or going to a salon, according to a report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings come as many states consider the safest ways to reopen businesses, especially restaurants. Those who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, "were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results," the study authors wrote. And those who were diagnosed without any known exposure to the virus were more likely to report having visited a bar or coffee shop in the previous two weeks. The increased risk makes sense; it's easy to wear a mask in stores or in places of worship, but it's nearly impossible to do so while eating and drinking. In addition to being maskless, individuals are often close together when eating at a restaurant, sitting across the table from one another.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, according to a major report (PDF) by the conservation group WWF. The report says this "catastrophic decline" shows no sign of slowing. And it warns that nature is being destroyed by humans at a rate never seen before. The report looked at thousands of different wildlife species monitored by conservation scientists in habitats across the world. They recorded an average 68% fall in more than 20,000 populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish since 1970.

Measuring the variety of all life on Earth is complex, with a number of different measures. Taken together, they provide evidence that biodiversity is being destroyed at a rate unprecedented in human history. This particular report uses an index of whether populations of wildlife are going up or down. It does not tell us the number of species lost, or extinctions. The largest declines are in tropical areas. The drop of 94% for Latin America and the Caribbean is the largest anywhere in the world, driven by a cocktail of threats to reptiles, amphibians and birds. Research published in the journal Nature suggests that to turn the tide we must transform the way we produce and consume food, including reducing food waste and eating food with a lower environmental impact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The distinctive Pringles tube is being re-designed after criticism that it's almost impossible to recycle. The current container for the potato-based snack was condemned as a recycler's nightmare. It's a complex construction with a metal base, plastic cap, metal tear-off lid, and foil-lined cardboard sleeve. The Recycling Association dubbed it the number one recycling villain -- along with the Lucozade Sports bottle. Now Pringles' maker Kellogg's is trialling a simpler can -- although experts say it's not a full solution. The existing version is particularly troublesome because it combines so many different materials

Some 90% of the new can is paper. Around 10% is a polyal (plastic) barrier that seals the interior to protect the food against oxygen and moisture which would damage the taste. But how about the lid? Well, two options are on trial in some Tesco stores -- a recyclable plastic lid and a recyclable paper lid. Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. [Simon Ellin from the Recycling Association] said the polyal-coated card might be recyclable but the product would need to be tested in recycling mills. And what of the much-criticised Lucozade Sports bottle? Mr Ellin said its unchanged basic design was still a big problem, as machines found it hard to differentiate the plastic in the bottle and the plastic that makes up its outer sleeve. He called on the makers, Suntory, to reduce the size of the external sleeve, as it has with the new Ribena bottle.

Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.

[I]n a new study published in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples and found that Earth is barreling toward a hothouse state not seen in 50 million years. Live Science reports: The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth's climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era -- the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states -- dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states -- in response to changes in the planet's orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.

The zig-zagging chart (shown above) ends with a sobering peak. According to the researchers, the current pace of anthropogenic global warming far exceeds the natural climate fluctuations seen at any other point in the Cenozoic era, and has the potential to hyper-drive our planet out of a long icehouse phase into a searing hothouse state. "Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that," study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for 2300 in the 'business-as-usual' scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years." (The IPCC is a United Nations group that assesses the science, risks and impacts of climate change on the planet.)

NASA aims to pay private companies to collect moon dirt in an effort to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources. Space.com reports: The agency just issued a request for proposals (RFP) to this effect, [NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine] explained in a blog post today. NASA wants private companies, from the United States or abroad, to snag 1.8 ounces to 18 ounces (50 to 500 grams) of lunar material by 2024 and officially transfer ownership of the stuff to the space agency on the lunar surface. NASA will pay $15,000 to $25,000 for each of these caches, with 80% of the money delivered after sample collection. Companies will get 10% upon signing a contract and 10% after launching their spacecraft, Bridenstine added.

NASA will eventually bring the lunar material down to Earth, if all goes according to plan. (The space agency already has a considerable stash of moon rocks here, of course. The Apollo astronauts brought home 842 lbs., or 382 kilograms, of lunar material between 1969 and 1972.) The main goal of the new RFP, which you can find here, is to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources, Bridenstine said. For example, participating companies may choose to collect far more than 18 ounces of material and sell the excess to non-NASA buyers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Former Theranos Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Holmes is exploring a "mental disease" defense for her criminal fraud trial, in one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched cases. That possibility was revealed Wednesday when the judge overseeing the case ruled that government prosecutors can examine Holmes. The ruling was in response to the failed blood-testing startup founder's plan to introduce evidence of "mental disease or defect" or other mental condition "bearing on the issue of guilt," according to the filing. Holmes may be seeking to introduce the evidence to challenge the requirement that prosecutors prove her intent to do something wrong or illegal.

Holmes intends to use testimony from Mindy Mechanic, a clinical psychologist at California State University at Fullerton, according to the filing. Mechanic is an expert on the psychosocial consequences of trauma, with a focus on violence against women, and often provides expert testimony in cases involving "interpersonal violence," according to her faculty profile on the school's website. Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Michigan law school, said mounting a so-called insanity defense won't be easy, as the defendant must meet a high standard of proof. "Contrary to what you may see in the movies, an insanity defense in federal cases is rare and hard to fake," McQuade said in an email. Holmes must show that, at the time she committed the alleged offenses, a severe mental defect made her "unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of (her) acts." In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila rejected Holmes's argument that she shouldn't have to submit to a psychological examination by government experts. The judge ruled that such an examination is fair given Holmes's intent to use testimony from Mechanic.

New submitter Crowchild Bob writes: The specific and intricate shape of the Romanesco plant is perfect as a testing ground for the new camera, which will be fitted into the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) in Chile. The 3,200 megapixel camera is set to uncover a huge amount of detail still unknown about astronomy, such as dark matter and dark energy. The plan for the VRO is to map out the sky by snapping pictures with the new digital camera every few nights for a decade. From moving and flashing phenomenon to billions of stars and galaxies, the camera will try and capture it all in precise detail. "We'll get very deep images of the whole sky. But almost more importantly, we'll get a time sequence," VRO director Steve Kahn told BBC. "We'll see which stars have changed in brightness, and anything that has moved through the sky like asteroids and comets," he continued.

The camera is put together at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. It's made up of a 25 inch (64 cm)-wide focal plane and 189 individual sensors. One of the biggest challenges of the assembly project was putting it all together given the required precision and complex electronics. The first images ever taken with the camera were released on Tuesday and provided record-breaking detail of the broccoli plant.

The United States can generate affordable electricity without producing carbon dioxide emissions by 2035 by deploying hydrogen or carbon capture technology, according to a report released on Wednesday by a climate policy think tank. Reuters reports: The report by California-based Energy Innovatihere which researches ways to combat global warming, highlighted five scenarios for the United States to generate 100% clean energy in 15 years, without raising power costs. Three rely on the deployment of green hydrogen technology and two rely on capturing CO2 emissions from existing power plants. "These are real technologies that are not yet deployed at scale, but they are not a fantasy. We have 15 years to get there," said Sonia Aggarwal, one of the report's authors. The analysis builds on a report produced by Energy Innovation earlier this year with the University of California Berkeley that said power-sector emissions can be cut 90% by 2035 by deploying more solar, wind, and battery storage. A Reuters review of the plans of the country's top power producers showed many are relying on natural gas-fired power to supplement increased reliance on renewables. Aggarwal said its analysis shows no new gas power plants are needed.

Apple has developed two types of masks that the company is beginning to distribute to corporate and retail employees to limit the spread of Covid-19. From a report: The masks -- called the Apple Face Mask and Apple ClearMask -- are the first developed in-house by the Cupertino, California-technology giant for its staff. The company previously created a different face shield for medical workers and distributed millions of other masks across the health-care sector. Apple told staff members that the masks were developed by the Engineering and Industrial Design teams, the same groups that work on devices such as the iPhone and iPad. The Apple Face Mask is made up of three layers to filter incoming and outgoing particles. It can be washed and reused as many as five times, the company told employees. In typical Apple style, the mask looks unique with large coverings on the top and bottom for the wearer's nose and chin. It also has adjustable strings to fit around a person's ears. Apple told staff that the masks were designed and manufactured completely by Apple. The company, which confirmed the news, said it conducted careful research and testing to find the right materials to filter the air properly while not disrupting the supply of medical personal protective equipment.

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found. From a report: An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which "might imply that a large number ... is yet to vanish," the authors write. The study didn't identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals' impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.

phalse phace writes: A large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom. A spokesperson for AstraZeneca, a frontrunner in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, said in a statement that the company's "standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data." In a follow-up statement, AstraZeneca said it initiated the study hold. The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened were not immediately known, though the participant is expected to recover, according to an individual familiar with the matter. The spokesperson described the pause as "a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials." The spokesperson also said that the company is "working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline." An individual familiar with the development said researchers had been told the hold was placed on the trial out of "an abundance of caution." A second individual familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the finding is having an impact on other AstraZeneca vaccine trials underway -- as well as on the clinical trials being conducted by other vaccine manufacturers.

A new large-scale survey of the sky looked into the dark forest of the cosmos, examining over 10 million stars, but failed to turn up any evidence of alien technologies. CNET reports: The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on Monday, details a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a collection of 4096 antennas planted in the red soil of Western Australia that detects radio signals from space. "They are little spider-like antennas that sit on the ground," explains Chenoa Tremblay, co-author on the study and astrophysicist with CSIRO, an Australian government scientific research organization.

Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation. Tremblay explains this region is scientifically interesting because a large number of stars have exploded and died, creating ideal conditions for new stars to form. The search for extraterrestrial life "piggy-backs" on other work studying this region to understand the life cycle of stars. [...] After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool." And there's another big caveat. "Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.

A reader shares a report from The New York Times: As the world awaits the arrival of a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, a team of researchers has come forward with a provocative new theory: that masks might help to crudely immunize some people against the virus. The unproven idea, described in a commentary published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is inspired by the age-old concept of variolation, the deliberate exposure to a pathogen to generate a protective immune response. First tried against smallpox, the risky practice eventually fell out of favor, but paved the way for the rise of modern vaccines.

Masked exposures are no substitute for a bona fide vaccine. But data from animals infected with the coronavirus, as well as insights gleaned from other diseases, suggest that masks, by cutting down on the number of viruses that encounter a person's airway, might reduce the wearer's chances of getting sick. And if a small number of pathogens still slip through, the researchers argue, these might prompt the body to produce immune cells that can remember the virus and stick around to fight it off again. "You can have this virus but be asymptomatic," said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the commentary's authors. "So if you can drive up rates of asymptomatic infection with masks, maybe that becomes a way to variolate the population."

That does not mean people should don a mask to intentionally inoculate themselves with the virus. "This is not the recommendation at all," Dr. Gandhi said. "Neither are pox parties," she added, referring to social gatherings that mingle the healthy and the sick. The theory cannot be directly proven without clinical trials that compare the outcomes of people who are masked in the presence of the coronavirus with those who are unmasked -- an unethical experimental setup. And while outside experts were intrigued by the theory, they were reluctant to embrace it without more data, and advised careful interpretation.

As countries race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, just determining who's infected remains a major challenge. From a report: Large-scale testing is a crucial element in containing the virus, experts say, because many who contract it exhibit little to no symptoms. Without widespread testing, it's a daunting task to identify contagious individuals and isolate them. To help meet that challenge, the XPRIZE Foundation, which aims to spur technological and industry advancements, is offering a $5 million prize to develop a new Covid-19 rapid test. Competitors can enter until midnight Tuesday. Since July, 659 teams from 68 countries have registered. Currently, test results for the novel coronavirus can take up to two weeks, creating headaches for medical professionals, public-health experts and elected officials. Without the ability to test people often and with speedy results, many cases may go undetected, which can lead to new clusters of infections.

"We have, like everyone else around the globe, seen the impact this has had on mental health, physical health, bringing the wheels off of the economy," said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of the XPRIZE Foundation. "We always look at innovation to solve grand challenges." Ansari and her family poured millions into funding the first XPRIZE in 2004 that launched the commercial space race. That $10 million prize brought in about $100 million of investment to the teams that competed, helping fuel what is now a more than $100 billion industry. Ansari's hope is that the Covid prize will seed a similar investment boom to fight a virus that has infected more than 27.3 million people and killed more than 892,000 worldwide.

fahrbot-bot writes: It's one of the oddest tenets of quantum theory: a particle can be in two places at once -- yet we only ever see it here or there. Textbooks state that the act of observing the particle "collapses" it, such that it appears at random in only one of its two locations. But physicists quarrel over why that would happen, if indeed it does. Now, one of the most plausible mechanisms for quantum collapse -- gravity -- has suffered a setback. The gravity hypothesis traces its origins to Hungarian physicists Karolyhazy Frigyes in the 1960s and Lajos Diosi in the 1980s. The basic idea is that the gravitational field of any object stands outside quantum theory. It resists being placed into awkward combinations, or "superpositions," of different states. So if a particle is made to be both here and there, its gravitational field tries to do the same -- but the field cannot endure the tension for long; it collapses and takes the particle with it.

Still, the hypothesis seemed impossible to probe with any realistic technology, notes Diosi, now at the Wigner Research Center, and a co-author on the new paper. "For 30 years, I had been always criticized in my country that I speculated on something which was totally untestable." New methods now make this doable. In the new study, Diosi and other scientists looked for one of the many ways, whether by gravity or some other mechanism, that a quantum collapse would reveal itself: A particle that collapses would swerve randomly, heating up the system of which it is part. "It is as if you gave a kick to a particle," says co-author Sandro Donadi of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. If the particle is charged, it will emit a photon of radiation as it swerves. And multiple particles subject to the same gravitational lurch will emit in unison. "You have an amplified effect," says co-author Catalina Curceanu of National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Rome.