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Physicists discover first “black hole triple”

In a recent discovery, astronomers have found that the black hole in the well-known low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system V404 Cygni is part of a much larger structure—a wide triple system.


Many black holes detected to date appear to be part of a pair. These binary systems comprise a black hole and a secondary object — such as a star, a much denser neutron star, or another black hole — that spiral around each other, drawn together by the black hole’s gravity to form a tight orbital pair.

Now a surprising discovery is expanding the picture of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.

In a study appearing today in Nature, physicists at MIT and Caltech report that they have observed a “black hole triple” for the first time. The new system holds a central black hole in the act of consuming a small star that’s spiraling in very close to the black hole, every 6.5 days — a configuration similar to most binary systems. But surprisingly, a second star appears to also be circling the black hole, though at a much greater distance. The physicists estimate this far-off companion is orbiting the black hole every 70,000 years.

Saturday Citations: On chimpanzee playwrights; the nature of dark energy; deep-diving Antarctic seals

This week, researchers reported the world’s second-tiniest toad, winning the silver in the Brachycephalus contest. Chemists at UCLA disproved a 100-year-old organic chemistry rule. And researchers in Kenya report that elephants don’t like bees, which could be a conservation boon (for the elephants. And maybe also the bees?). Additionally, scientists addressed an old thought experiment about monkeys and the theater, physicists correlated dark energy with the black hole population in the universe, and a group of Antarctic seals were found to be highly strategic and also adorable:

The Mind of the Body: A Window into Embodiment and our Future

Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist was a collaborative conference put on by the Center for Process Studies (CPS) and the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in March of 2024. This three-day conference brought leading process thinkers across various disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and theology into critical dialogue with McGilchrist’s work in a collegial effort to assess, question, extend, and apply it. For more information on the conference and to purchase recordings, please visit https://ctr4process.org/mcgilchrist-conference/

How Physicists Broke the Solar Efficiency Record

This solar breakthrough just changed everything.
Thanks to Opera for sponsoring this video. Click here https://opr.as/Opera-browser-DrBenMiles to upgrade your browser for FREE!

Last month, Oxford PV’s breakthrough solar cell broke the efficiency world record and is the world’s first commercially available Perovskite solar panel.
How does it work? And what does this mean for the future of solar?

Thanks you so much to the team for allowing me behind the scenes into their development facility and for the free Halloween costume.

#solar #efficiency #breakthrough #physics #perovskite.

Chapters.
0:00 The Solar Power Breakthrough.
3:25 Humanity’s Journey to Capture the Sun.
8:46 How We Broke the Limit of Solar Efficiency.
13:15 Building the World’s First Perovskite Solar Panel.
17:23 The Future of Solar.

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1992, 31 October

On this day in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was correct in believing that the earth went around the sun.


2. In the first place, I wish to congratulate the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having chosen to deal, in its plenary session, with a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ‘the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology

The emergence of the subject of complexity probably marks in the history of the natural sciences a stage as important as the stage which bears relation to the name of Galileo, when a univocal model of order seemed to be obvious. Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

This realisation poses a question which concerns scientists, philosophers and theologians: how are we to reconcile the explanation of the world – beginning with the level of elementary entities and phenomena – with the recognition of the fact that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’?

Cosmic Inflation Explained | Cosmology 101 Episode 6

In this episode of Cosmology 101, we learn how the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) validated the Big Bang Theory and led to the development of the concept of cosmic inflation.

Explore the challenges and ongoing debates in cosmology as scientists seek to uncover the true nature of the early universe and the origins of cosmic structure.

Join Katie Mack, Perimeter Institute’s Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication, on an incredible journey through the cosmos in our new series, Cosmology 101.

Sign up for our newsletter and download exclusive cosmology posters at: https://landing.perimeterinstitute.ca

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Optical technique measures intramolecular distances with angstrom precision

Physicists in Germany have used visible light to measure intramolecular distances smaller than 10 nm thanks to an advanced version of an optical fluorescence microscopy technique called MINFLUX. The technique, which has a precision of just 1 angstrom (0.1 nm), could be used to study biological processes such as interactions between proteins and other biomolecules inside cells.

In conventional microscopy, when two features of an object are separated by less than half the wavelength of the light used to image them, they will appear blurry and indistinguishable due to diffraction. Super-resolution microscopy techniques can, however, overcome this so-called Rayleigh limit by exciting individual fluorescent groups (fluorophores) on molecules while leaving neighbouring fluorophores alone, meaning they remain dark.

One such technique, known as nanoscopy with minimal photon fluxes, or MINFLUX, was invented by the physicist Stefan Hell. First reported in 2016 by Hell’s team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, MINFLUX first “switches on” individual molecules, then determines their position by scanning a beam of light with a doughnut-shaped intensity profile across them.

Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? — Joscha Bach, Artificial Intelligence Researcher

Joscha Bach is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist who works on on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. We got connected over the hard problem of consciousness — namely, why do people seem to think it’s so hard? During our conversation we deal with the foundational questions of the technological future being built in Silicon Valley, the fever dream of machine intelligence, and try to understand why people seem to think that there’s even such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB

Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub.

00:00:00 Go!
00:04:09 Career Advice.
00:11:31 Beauty, Grace, & Hotness.
00:13:48 Putting on Airs.
00:22:32 Patreon Ask.
00:22:33 Winning for the sake of winning.
00:29:35 Transformative experiences.
00:36:25 Speciation event, or crap again?
00:42:17 Who is Joscha Bach.
00:52:39 Physics & Causality.
01:00:52 Physics vs Biology.
01:12:16 Life vs Cells.
01:20:14 Biosynthetic AGI
01:28:15 Creativity & Novelty.
01:38:52 Wetware & Neuromorphic computing.
01:50:46 The Limits of Hardware.
02:05:07 The value of Agency.
02:15:47 Layers of Society.
02:35:03 Chimp Empire.
02:52:31 Collapse.
03:05:13 The Hard Problem.
03:43:28 Computer Imagination.
04:02:52 How reasoning works.
04:14:28 Reward Functions.
04:20:01 Consciousness dreams.
04:25:35 The heart of the disagreement.
04:30:15 Consensus.

#AGI #consciousness #machinelearning.

Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience.