Precisely controlling sparks allows for their use in a wide variety of applications.

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For the first time, scientists have found that electric sparks can be guided using ultrasonic waves. A recent study by researchers from Spain, Finland, and Canada uncovered the way in which ultrasonic waves transport electricity through air.

Researchers revealed that this guidance occurs because the sparks heat up the air, which expands and lowers its density.

The hot air is then guided by ultrasonic waves into regions where the sound intensity is higher, and the next sparks follow these regions of lighter air because of its lower breakdown voltage, according to researchers.

The enzyme PKMzeta is crucial for the maintenance of long-term memories, but a closely related enzyme provides a back-up should PKMzeta fail, thus explaining the controversy over why deleting the gene for PKMzeta may not appear to impair memory.

GitHub has announced a slew of updates for Copilot, while also giving a glimpse into a more agentic future for its AI-powered pair programmer.

Among the notable updates includes a feature called Vision for Copilot, which allows users to attach a screenshot, photo, or diagram to a chat, with Copilot generating the interface, code, and alt text to bring it to life.

So for example, someone on a marketing team could take a screenshot of a web page and illustrate some changes they want made to that page. Rather than requesting such changes via text prompts, it’s now possible to upload an image and just ask Copilot to implement the changes as indicated in the file.

We review the rapid recent progress in single-photon sources based on multiplexing multiple probabilistic photon-creation events. Such multiplexing allows higher single-photon probabilities and lower contamination from higher-order photon states. We study the requirements for multiplexed sources and compare various approaches to multiplexing using different degrees of freedom.

Architects these days…

True Turing a birds eye view.

Dinoflagellates play crucial roles in aquatic ecosystems, particularly as major contributors to harmful algal blooms. They can enter a dormant stage, known as the resting cyst stage, that allows them to survive for extended periods—up to 150 years—in marine sediments. This dormancy is essential for their annual population dynamics, blooming cycles, and geographic expansion.

Despite the ecological importance of resting cysts, the molecular mechanisms governing their dormancy, viability maintenance, and germination in natural sediments remain largely unexplored.

To better understand this process, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), in collaboration with scientists from the University of Connecticut, investigated these mechanisms. They utilized a dinoflagellate mRNA-specific spliced leader as a “hook,” along with single-molecule real-time sequencing and other physiological measurements.

Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question \.

Like the Buddhist concept of Emptiness sunyata.

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The purpose of this lecture is to defend a reading of Nietzsche that attributes to him an ontology that reduces everything to relations of force against the charge that such an ontology is wildly implausible. Rather than rehearsing the textual evidence supporting such a view, the tactic employed in this chapter is to show that Nietzsche’s relational ontology of force can be understood as a proto-form of a view currently being given serious consideration in contemporary philosophy of science: Ontic Structural Realism. Ontic structural realism is a form of structural realism that eliminates things-in-themselves and inflates the ontological significance of relations vis-à-vis relata. Because Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences to justify his rejection of things-in-themselves in favour of a relational ontology of force, it is argued that Nietzsche should be understood as offering a proto-version of ontic structural realism.