How did life on Earth originate? Scientists still aren’t sure, and this remains one of the world’s most fascinating and mind-boggling mysteries.
One way of approaching the question is to think generally about how complex systems emerge from chaos. Since the 1800s, scientists have known that entropy is always increasing, with everything in our Universe trending toward disorder over time.
A more nuanced understanding of entropy is helping today’s scientists make progress on the question of the origin of life, as Sean Carroll explains in this Big Think video.
Survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing continue to carry hidden biological imprints of trauma, even decades after the event and in the absence of visible mental health issues.
This illustration is a conceptual drawing of a neuromorphic computer. Each wafer in the stacks of octagons, about the diameter of a vinyl record, houses a billion synapses. The white strands are fiber optic connections. Courtesy/LANL.
Physicist Dr. Lídia Del Rio, Essentia Foundation’s Research Fellow for Quantum Information Theory at the University of Zürich, explains to Hans Busstra one of the strangest quantum conundra confronting the foundations of physics: the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) thought experiment.
Scientific papers discussed in this video:
Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself. Daniela Frauchiger & Renato Renner: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146… experiments in a quantum computer, Nuriya Nurgalieva, Simon Mathis, Lídia del Rio, Renato Renner: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06236 Other interesting links related to the video: Quantum ‘thought experiment software’ https://github.com/XuemeiGu/Quanundrum Great Quantum artwork by Nuriya Nurgalieva: https://www.theoryverse.com/art Part One: Modelling Observers 00:00 Introduction 04:13 The object-subject divide in quantum mechanics 07:58 How would you explain the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment? 09:40 Observations are not facts 12:16 Is collapse relative? 14:11 Losing information = measurement 15:38 How do you model the agent in quantum mechanics? 17:54 What is reversibility in QM? Part Two: Explaining the Frauchiger-Renner Thought Experiment 22:14 Lídia explains Maxwell’s Demon and how the demon can be modelled 29:28 Formatting the ‘hard drive’ of the demon equals the energy gained 31:20 Lídia explains the Frauchiger-Renner thought experiment 41:51 The quantum circuit of the FR experiment 50:31 Where the experiment gets really weird 54:52 How to make sense of the weirdness? Part Three: The Implications and Meaning of the FR Experiment 1:03:59 What assumptions CANNOT all be true? 1:07:47 Critique from the physics community on the FR experiment 1:13:30 The philosophical implications of the FR experiment 1:16:04 Agreeing or disagreeing on Heisenberg cuts 1:17:27 Quanundrum software to test thought experiments 1:20:14 (No title – you might want to add something here) 1:23:16 Does the FR experiment “favor” a many-worlds interpretation, or does it require an epistemic approach? 1:25:04 Every theory, at some point, breaks 1:26:57 On the (in)completeness of quantum theory 1:29:35 What the FR experiment could mean for quantum computers… 1:32:06 What makes the FR experiment REALLY strange? 1:35:31 You cannot have an outside view AND know what’s going on inside… 1:36:01 What does it mean philosophically? 1:40:16 What if objective collapse or many-worlds is true? 1:43:20 Do you believe in free will? 1:45:54 Lídia does believe in an objective world… 1:47:15 What would a world weirder than quantum mechanics look like? 1:52:37 Where does thinking about “different” universes become relevant for physics? 1:55:51 On What the Bleep Do We Know, quantum woo, and the real meaning of quantum mechanics… 1:57:52 Nature doesn’t care about our Heisenberg cut… 1:59:33 Quantum mechanics and non-dualism 2:02:04 Physicists should be aware of their own faiths, religion, and mortality… 2:04:06 On the nature of the self, and how Lídia’s work has informed her outlook on life 2:09:31 Final words Sesame Street Russian Dolls video, under fair use: • Sesame Street Matryoshka Doll 10 All music licensed under Storyblocks and Soundstripe All stock footage licensed under Storyblocks Interview content copyright by Essentia Foundation, 2025 www.essentiafoundation.org.
Thought experiments in a quantum computer. Nuriya Nurgalieva, Simon Mathis, Lídia del Rio, Renato Renner: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.
The limitations of current symptom-focused treatments drive the urgent need for effective therapies for autism and Fragile X syndrome (FXS). Currently, no approved pharmacological interventions target the core symptoms of these disorders. Advances in understanding the underlying biology of autism and FXS make this an important time to explore novel options. Indeed, several treatments have recently been tested in clinical trials, with promising results in treating core symptoms of autism and FXS. We focus on emerging interventions, such as gut microbiome therapies, anti-inflammatory approaches, bumetanide, phosphodiesterase 4D inhibitors, and endocannabinoid modulators. We also discuss factors, such as disorder heterogeneity, which may have contributed to poor efficacy in previously failed late-phase trials and impact recent trials, emphasizing the need for personalized treatment approaches.
A team of integrative biologists at the University of Texas, Western Washington University and Columbia University Irving Medical Center has found that both wide and narrow hips provide women with certain physical benefits, though they both also have downsides. In their study published in the journal Science, the group compared hip structure among 31,000 people listed in the UK Biobank, with other physical features including those associated with pregnancy and birth.
For many years, evolutionary theorists have debated aspects of what has come to be known as the obstetrical dilemma. Prior research has shown that as humans evolved, their brains grew bigger. But prior research has also shown that as people began to walk upright, their hips grew narrower, creating a conundrum—wider hips are needed to deliver babies with bigger brains.
For this new study, the research team investigated the ways that nature has dealt with the obstetrical dilemma by studying hips and the pelvic floor.
Humans and other animal species can experience many types of pain throughout the course of their lives, varying in intensity, unpleasantness and origin. Several past neuroscience studies have explored the neural underpinnings of pain, yet the processes supporting the ability to distinguish different types of physical pain are not fully understood.
In most vertebrates, painful sensations are known to arise from the nervous system, which includes the brain, an intricate network of nerves and the spinal cord. While the brain’s contribution to the encoding and processing of pain has been widely explored in the past, the role that neural circuits in the spinal cord play in the differentiation of physical pain remains unclear.
Researchers at Karolinska Institute, Uppsala University and other institutes recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how networks of nerve cells in the spinal cord of adult mice contribute to the encoding of pain originating from exposure to heat and mechanical pain, which is caused by applied physical forces (e.g., pinches, cuts, etc.).
