The bottom quark or b quark, also known as the beauty quark, is a third-generation heavy quark with a charge of −1/3 e.

All quarks are described in a similar way by electroweak and quantum chromodynamics, but the bottom quark has exceptionally low rates of transition to lower-mass quarks. The bottom quark is also notable because it is a product in almost all top quark decays, and is a frequent decay product of the Higgs boson.

Latency, a measure of how long it takes your internet signal to travel to space and back, will also drop to around 20ms this year, Musk added. That would be a validation of the company's strategy of launching its satellites into low-Earth orbit, which reduces the distance that those signals need to travel. That strategy has also raised red flags with astronomers worried about obstructions to night sky visibility, which is something SpaceX has been working to address with updates to its satellite design.

Photo manipulation

Compared to other forms of scientific misconduct, image fraud (manipulation of images to distort their meaning) is of particular interest since it can frequently be detected by external parties. In 2006, the Journal of Cell Biology gained publicity for instituting tests to detect photo manipulation in papers that were being considered for publication.[23] This was in response to the increased usage of programs such as Adobe Photoshop by scientists, which facilitate photo manipulation. Since then more publishers, including the Nature Publishing Group, have instituted similar tests and require authors to minimize and specify the extent of photo manipulation when a manuscript is submitted for publication. However, there is little evidence to indicate that such tests are applied rigorously. One Nature paper published in 2009[24] has subsequently been reported to contain around 20 separate instances[25] of image fraud.

Although the type of manipulation that is allowed can depend greatly on the type of experiment that is presented and also differ from one journal to another, in general the following manipulations are not allowed:[citation needed]

splicing together different images to represent a single experiment
changing brightness and contrast of only a part of the image
any change that conceals information, even when it is considered to be aspecific, which includes:
changing brightness and contrast to leave only the most intense signal
using clone tools to hide information
showing only a very small part of the photograph so that additional information is not visible

Image manipulations are typically done on visually repetitive images such as those of western blots, histologies or data visualisations like graphs.