Tiny Gravitational-Wave Detector Could Search Anywhere in the Sky

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June 30, 2020

Dear Reader, Here are highlights from today's top stories: The South Pole is warming at a rate nearly three times faster than the global average, scientists have discovered. And much of that warming is linked to climate cycles happening thousands of miles away in the tropics. Doctors often suggest losing weight to address health concerns. But focusing on body size often harms more than it helps. Some doctors are moving away from a weight-centric approach to focus on prescribing healthier behaviors. A team of physicists has outlined a way to build a portable gravitational detector that is only one meter long—4,000 times smaller than LIGO.

Sunya Bhutta, Senior Editor, Audience Engagement @sunyaaa

Physics Tiny Gravitational-Wave Detector Could Search Anywhere in the Sky A much smaller and more reproducible version of LIGO could transform gravitational-wave astronomy By Tim Folger

Public Health What if Doctors Stopped Prescribing Weight Loss? Focusing on body size isn't making people healthier. Some clinicians are trying a different approach By Virginia Sole-Smith

Space Mystery Object Blurs Line between Neutron Stars and Black Holes Existing in the "mass gap" dividing two classes of cosmic heavyweights, the object could be the most massive neutron star, the lightest known black hole—or something stranger By Charlie Wood

Public Health To Spot Future Coronavirus Flare-Ups, Search the Sewers Wastewater-based epidemiology can test large groups of people and help better allocate scarce resources By Peter Andrey Smith

Climate Why Is the South Pole Warming So Quickly? It's Complicated Much of the warming is linked to natural climate cycles happening thousands of miles away in the tropics By Chelsea Harvey,E&E News

Computing The Encryption Wars Are Back but in Disguise A government push for access is ostensibly about fighting crime, terrorism and child porn. Yet it could put all of us at risk of unwarranted surveillance By Whitfield Diffie

Climate Animal Migrations Track Climate Change Many species are known to have changed their migration routes in response to the changing climate, now including mule deer and Bewick's swans. By Scott Hershberger | 02:51

Physics The Science of Fireworks We take you inside a single fireworks shell to show you how it all works. If you want to glimpse more than just the inner workings of one fireworks shell, you should check out this post by the SA Visuals team on its long, explosive history inside the pages of Scientific American. 1:05

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FROM THE ARCHIVE The Discovery of Gravitational Waves All you need to know about the ripples in spacetime detected by LIGO | February 2016

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