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Category: physics – Page 195

New ‘future-proof’ method could remove phosphorus from wastewater using bacteria

A recent study from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and published in Wa | Chemistry And Physics.

This study is intriguing since one of the results of climate change is increasing water temperatures, so removing phosphorus from such waters will prove invaluable in the future, with this study appropriately being referred to as a “future-proof” method.

Since phosphorus in fresh water often results in algal blooms, removing it from wastewater prior to it being released into fresh water is extremely important. This is because algal blooms drastically reduce oxygen levels in natural waters when the algae die, often resulting in the delivery of high levels of toxins, killing organisms in those waters.

While traditional removal methods result in a large volume of inert sludge that requires treatment and disposal afterwards, this new SCELSE-developed method does not involve chemicals, most notably iron and aluminum coagulants. Using this new method, the research team was successful in removing phosphorus from wastewater at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) and 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

Knots in the resonator: Elegant math in humble physics

At the heart of every resonator—be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone—there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged.

Yale physicists Jack Harris and Nicholas Read know this because they started finding knots in their data.

In a new study in the journal Nature, Harris, Read, and their co-authors describe a previously unknown characteristic of resonators. A is any object that vibrates only at a specific set of frequencies. They are ubiquitous in sensors, electronics, musical instruments, and other devices, where they are used to produce, amplify, or detect vibrations at specific frequencies.

Aquatic carnivorous plants with ultra-fast traps studied

Circa 2010

How do Utricularia, aquatic carnivorous plants commonly found in marshes, manage to capture their preys in less than a millisecond? A team of French physicists from the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique has identified the ingenious mechanical process that enables the plant to ensnare any small, a little too curious aquatic animals that venture too closely. It is the reversal of its curvature and the release of the associated elastic energy that make it the fastest known aquatic trap in the world. These results are published on 16 February 2011 on the website of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.

Utricularia are that capture small prey with remarkable suction . Utricularia are rootless plants formed of very thin, forked leaves on which wineskin-shaped traps, just a few millimeters in size, are attached. Only the flowers, standing on long stems, stick out of the water. The traps are underwater. When an aquatic animal (water fleas, cyclops, daphnia or small ) touches its sensitive hairs, the trap sucks it in, in a fraction of a second, along with water, which is then drained through its walls.

In order to understand the mechanical process involved, the researchers observed and recorded the extremely rapid movements of the capture phase with a . The scientists show that the trap door buckles, which reverses its curvature and allows it to open and close very rapidly, thus entrapping its prey. The suction time (less than a millisecond) is much shorter than was previously assumed.

DeepMind AI learns simple physics like a baby

Inspired by research into how infants learn, computer scientists have created a program that can pick up simple physical rules about the behaviour of objects — and express surprise when they seem to violate those rules. The results were published on 11 July in Nature Human Behaviour1.

Developmental psychologists test how babies understand the motion of objects by tracking their gaze. When shown a video of, for example, a ball that suddenly disappears, the children express surprise, which researchers quantify by measuring how long the infants stare in a particular direction.

Luis Piloto, a computer scientist at Google-owned company DeepMind in London, and his collaborators wanted to develop a similar test for artificial intelligence (AI). The team trained a neural network — a software system that learns by spotting patterns in large amounts of data — with animated videos of simple objects such as cubes and balls.

What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?

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Peter Tse — What Makes Brains Conscious?

Everything we know, think and feel—everything!—comes from our brains. But consciousness, our private sense of inner awareness, remains a mystery. Brain activities—spiking of neuronal impulses, sloshing of neurochemicals—are not at all the same thing as sights, sounds, smells, emotions. How on earth can our inner experiences be explained in physical terms?

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Peter Ulric Tse is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA from Dartmouth (1984; majored in Mathematics and Physics), and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University (1998).

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Dark matter: Our review suggests it’s time to ditch it in favor of a new theory of gravity

We can model the motions of planets in the Solar System quite accurately using Newton’s laws of physics. But in the early 1970s, scientists noticed that this didn’t work for disk galaxies —stars at their outer edges, far from the gravitational force of all the matter at their center—were moving much faster than Newton’s theory predicted.

This made physicists propose that an invisible substance called “dark ” was providing extra gravitational pull, causing the stars to speed up—a that’s become hugely popular. However, in a recent review my colleagues and I suggest that observations across a vast range of scales are much better explained in an alternative theory of gravity proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982 called Milgromian dynamics or Mond —requiring no invisible matter.

Mond’s main postulate is that when gravity becomes very weak, as occurs at the edge of galaxies, it starts behaving differently from Newtonian physics. In this way, it is possible to explain why stars, planets and gas in the outskirts of over 150 galaxies rotate faster than expected based on just their visible mass. But Mond doesn’t merely explain such rotation curves, in many cases, it predicts them.

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