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Ada Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota

In June 2020, I asked a historian whether the United States was heading toward civil war.

Six years later, her answer is worth hearing again.

Ada Palmer studies censorship, heresy, and how power shifts during information revolutions. Her research asks what the printing press can teach us about the choices we face in the digital one. She is also the author of Terra Ignota, the award-winning #ScienceFiction series set in a 25th-century world of borderless nations and voluntary citizenship.

We talked for 3 hours and 7 minutes. We talked about Peter Turchin’s laws of #History and whether the past can predict anything. About what popular science like Cosmos gets wrong about the Inquisition. About what she learned reenacting the papal election of 1,492 with her students. About Viking ethics, of all things. And about whether one person still matters when history seems to move on its own.

One line from her has stayed with me:

“Your choices aren’t: keep the world I have or make a better one. Your choices are: let the world change towards the entrenchment of power… or work to shape that change.”

Continue reading “Ada Palmer on Viking Ethics, Laws of History, and Terra Ignota” | >

Microsoft presses Trump to scuttle ban on Chinese data center tech

America’s AI boom depends on a critical component made largely in China. And now Microsoft is urging Trump NOT to ban it.

It’s called an optical transceiver. These devices convert electrical signals into optical signals, allowing data to travel through fiber-optic cables between servers, switches, and routers inside data centers.

Here’s the problem: China accounts for roughly two-thirds of the global market.

Washington is concerned that Chinese-made transceivers could potentially be exploited to steal data, install malware, or disrupt U.S. data center operations.

But banning them could create another problem: a massive supply-chain bottleneck.

Microsoft and other tech companies warn that U.S. manufacturers simply don’t have the capacity to replace Chinese suppliers at scale. Billions of dollars’ worth of AI chips have already been purchased, but without the optical transceivers needed to connect the infrastructure, those chips could end up sitting idle.

And there’s another complication: one of China’s leading suppliers, Zhongji Innolight, has been added to the Pentagon’s list of Chinese companies alleged to have military ties.

Continue reading “Microsoft presses Trump to scuttle ban on Chinese data center tech” | >

Physicists create a bizarre new quantum state called a fractional fermi sea

Physicists have uncovered a strange new form of quantum behavior in which particles organize themselves in ways that challenge established theories. Even more surprising, the particles maintain a remarkable hidden order despite being driven into an extremely energetic state.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the group led by Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, working with theoretical physicist Alvise Bastianello of the CNRS and Université Paris-Dauphine, describe how to engineer an exotic quantum state known as a “fractional Fermi sea.”

The breakthrough involves pushing ultracold cesium atoms far beyond their normal conditions by repeatedly changing how strongly they attract or repel one another. Rather than simply becoming disordered, the particles rearrange themselves into an unusual configuration that behaves differently from the quantum systems scientists have traditionally studied.

LHC collaboration presents first result in the hunt for ‘quirks’

An international collaboration of physicists has presented its first results in its search for hypothetical particles that could help to explain the vast disparity between the strength of gravity and the three fundamental forces described by the Standard Model. Following three years of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s FASER experiment, the FASER Collaboration found no evidence for these heavy, slow-moving “quirks.”

All the same, their analysis offers important guidance in the ongoing search for the particles and could inspire similar searches at other large-scale particle colliders.

The collaboration’s analysis has been published in Physical Review Letters.

World’s most sensitive lab-based axion search presents its first results

Physicists at the ALPS II collaboration have reported the first results from the Any-Light-Particle-Search (ALPS) II experiment: the most sensitive instrument of its kind in the search for hypothetical “axions.” Headed by Axel Lindner at the DESY Research Centre in Germany, the collaboration found no evidence for axions in this initial campaign, but its results offer valuable guidance for future runs: tightening the search for one of the most promising candidates for dark matter.

The research has been posted as a preprint on arXiv and will be published in Physical Review Letters.

Earliest known compact quasar pair poses a black hole growth puzzle

The oldest pair of compact quasars ever observed has been found only 900 million years after the Big Bang. Scientists say there is no theoretical explanation for how the pair of actively feeding black holes grew so massive at such an early time in the history of the universe. The pair of quasars has been given the Hawaiian nickname Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua.

An international team of astronomers has discovered J1602+4228AB, nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the most distant, and thus oldest, compact pair of quasars ever found in the universe. Their close separation also makes them the most compact pair of quasars found in the early-universe era known as cosmic dawn. While astronomers theorize that quasar pairs are common, actually finding and characterizing these energetic objects is rare. Even rarer—finding them this early in the history of the universe.

Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua’s surprising nature was revealed through observations with the Gemini North telescope, located on the dormant volcano Maunakea in Hawai’i, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Silvia Onorato, a postdoctoral research associate at NSF NOIRLab, led the study. This research is presented in a paper titled “Nāpōwawā’enakaulua: a close quasar pair at cosmic dawn in the Aether survey” appearing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Repurposing the internet’s backbone to advance whale monitoring

Bioacoustics researcher Léa Bouffaut, at the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, has spent the past several years eavesdropping on the conversations of whales. But instead of using underwater microphones like other marine scientists, she listens by tapping into fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor—a powerful tool to aid in marine mammal conservation.

The cables—originally installed for telecommunications or power transmission—also pick up vibrations from sound waves. The technology, known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), works by using special instrumentation, sending laser pulses through fiber-optic cables and measuring tiny changes caused by passing sound waves, including whale sounds. By measuring these disturbances, she can detect sounds along many miles of cable where each vocalizing whale species leaves a unique fingerprint.

Distributed acoustic sensing using fiber-optic cables essentially turns long stretches of seafloor into dense networks of virtual acoustic sensors that are critical for monitoring whales—details needed to safeguard declining whale populations.