The paper "Indication of a Pulsar Wind Nebula in the hard X-ray emission from SN 1987A" by Dr. Shigehiro Nagataki (Deputy Program Director, iTHEMS), Dr. Masaomi Ono (Research Scientist, iTHEMS) and Mr. Akira Dohi (Junior Research Associate, iTHEMS) was published in the NASA and INAF press releases on February 23, 2021 (SN1987A's 34th birthday!).

The following is a message from Dr. Nagataki;
"We detected high-energy X-rays by NuSTAR, which are likely to come from activities of pulsar wind nebula of SN1987A (it has been a big mystery why the neutron star in SN1987A has not been detected for 34 years since Prof. Koshiba et al. detected neutrinos at the birth of proto-neutron star in SN198A). Our paper will be published by Astrophysical Journal Letters this week."

On Feb. 22, our iTHEMS colleague, Gordon Baym, gave an online talk from Urbana-Champaign on the detection of the primordial neutrinos created in the early Universe. We are in the sea of those neutrinos at the present day with the neutrino density of about 56/cc for each neutrino species. Although neutrinos (anti-neutrinos) are left-handed (right-handed) in early Universe, both cosmic and galactic magnetic fields as well as the gravitational inhomogeneities can flip their spins with respect to the momentum, so that the helicities (spin projection along the direction of the momentum) of the relic neutrinos could be a new probe of cosmic gravitational and magnetic fields. More that 60 participants attended this interesting seminar and there were lively discussions during and after the talk.

On 18th February, we invited Junichiro Iwasawa from the University of Tokyo, who gave a talk about the unique study to identify the evolutionary constraints of drug-resistance in Escherichia coli using automated high-throughput laboratory experiments. He first talked about the background of drug resistance evolution and about the well-known / novel resistance-conferring genes for E. coli that were elucidated from their data. He then moved on to the details of the data analyses and explained the combined method of random forest regression and principal component analysis on the multi-omics data. We enjoyed a long discussion on every single detail of the impressive work. We especially thank him for accepting our invitation despite the tight schedule with his dissertation. Thank you again for the great talk!
-Ryosuke Iritani

In iTHEMS biology seminar on Feb. 25th, Dr. Hiroshi Yokota (iTHEMS) talked about the mechanism of the non-linear response of DNA under stretching force. In the introduction part, he mentioned the experimental technique using the magnetic tweezer to measure the extension of DNA under stretching force, and he also showed the experimental results of the non-linear response of DNA. He then explained the strategy to clarify the origin of non-linearity by applying mathematical modeling and statistical physics. Introducing the worm-like chain model, he transformed the Hamiltonian in an elegant way and analytically obtained the formula of the extension, which explains the experimental data. His description of the model was very clear, and there were many questions and discussions. We are thankful to Hiroshi for the intriguing talk.

Kyosuke Adachi

On 17th February, we had Ryusuke Hamazaki (from RIKEN Hakubi and iTHEMS) talking about the recent studies on the large deviation principle in our journal club of the Information Theory Study Group.
He started off by demonstrating Bernoulli's process and how to compute the large deviations, and then defined the Level 2.5 large deviations in Markovian jump process, thereby providing the derivation of a recently proposed inequality (the thermodynamic uncertainty relation). Finally, he explained possible extensions to quantum systems. The talk received numerous questions in every single part, specifically from those interested in the derivation and application of the Level 2.5 large deviation. Thanks, Ryusuke, for the great and inspiring talk!
Ryosuke Iritani (iTHEMS)