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Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/06/17/epis…formation/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.

Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are also even deeper questions, having to do with why there is a universe at all, and why the early universe had low entropy, that most working cosmologists don’t address. Today’s guest, Anthony Aguirre, is an exception. We talk about these deep issues, and how tackling them might lead to a very different way of thinking about our universe. At the end there’s an entertaining detour into AI and existential risk.

Anthony Aguirre received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. He is currently associate professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where his research involves cosmology, inflation, and fundamental questions in physics. His new book, Cosmological Koans, is an exploration of the principles of contemporary cosmology illustrated with short stories in the style of Zen Buddhism. He is the co-founder of the Foundational Questions Institute, the Future of Life Institute, and the prediction platform Metaculus.

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Two of the participants met the definition of partial success at 12 and 18 months, and the overall success of CALEC was 93% at 12 months and 92% at 18 months. Three participants received a second corneal CALEC transplant, of which one experienced complete success by the end check-up visit of the study.

Additional analysis of the impact of CALEC on vision showed varying levels of improvement of visual acuity in all 14 of the participants. The corneal procedure displayed a high safety profile with no adverse events occurring. However, one participant had a bacterial infection eight months after transplant due to chronic contact lens use. Any other adverse events were minor and were resolved quickly.

The CALEC trial is the first human study of a stem cell therapy to be funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI) branch of the NIH. However, the CALEC procedure remains an experimental procedure and it is not offered at Mass Eye and Ear or at any other hospital in America. Mass General Brigham’s Gene and Cell Therapy Institute will be conducting additional randomized-control design studies including a larger number of participants at multiple centers, with longer follow-ups before this treatment will be submitted for federal approval.

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Plasmonic modulators are tiny components that convert electrical signals into optical signals in order to transport them through optical fibers. A modulator of this kind had never managed to transmit data at a frequency of over a terahertz (over a trillion oscillations per second).

Now, researchers from the group led by Jürg Leuthold, Professor of Photonics and Communications at ETH Zurich, have succeeded in doing just that. Previous modulators could only convert frequencies up to 100 or 200 gigahertz—in other words, frequencies that are five to ten times lower.

The work is published in the journal Optica.

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With today’s data rates of only a few hundred megabytes per second, access to digital information remains relatively slow. Initial experiments have already shown a promising new strategy: Magnetic states can be read out by short current pulses, whereby recently discovered spintronic effects in purpose-built material systems could remove previous speed restrictions.

Researchers at HZDR and TU Dortmund University are now providing proof of the feasibility of such ultrafast data sources. Instead of , they use ultrashort , thereby enabling the read-out of magnetic structures within picoseconds, as they report in the journal Nature Communications.

“We now can determine the magnetic orientation of a material much quicker with light-induced current pulses,” explains Dr. Jan-Christoph Deinert of HZDR’s Institute of Radiation Physics. For their experiments, the physicist and his team employed light that is invisible to the human eye—so-called terahertz radiation.

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An international team of researchers affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a novel cross-linker additive that significantly addresses the longstanding stability issues associated with organic solar cells, also known as organic photovoltaics (OPVs).

With the incorporation of just 0.05% of this cross-linking agent, the lifespan of OPVs can be improved by over 59%. Industry analysts suggest this breakthrough brings the commercialization of OPVs—regarded as next-generation solar cells—closer to reality.

Led by Professor BongSoo Kim in the Department of Chemistry at UNIST, the research team, in collaboration with researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the University of Lille in France, and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), identified the operational principles of this innovative cross-linker using a variety of advanced analytical techniques.

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Demand for lithium is rising due to its use in batteries for mobile devices, cars and clean energy storage. Securing access to natural deposits of the mineral is now a matter of strategic importance, but lithium can be found elsewhere in nature.

As an alternative to mining, Imperial researchers have created a technology that could be used to efficiently extract it from saltwater sources such as salt-lake brines or geothermal brine solutions.

Conventional extraction from brines takes months and uses significant amounts of water and chemicals, generating greenhouse gas emissions in the process. The alternative developed by Dr. Qilei Song and his team in the Department of Chemical Engineering uses a membrane that separates lithium from by filtering it through tiny pores.

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Nickel’s role in the future of electric vehicle batteries is clear: It’s more abundant and easier to obtain than widely used cobalt, and its higher energy density means longer driving distances between charges.

However, nickel is less stable than other materials with respect to cycle life, , and safety. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Argonne National Laboratory aim to change that with a new study that dives deeply into nickel-based cathodes, one of the two electrodes that facilitate in batteries.

“High-nickel cathodes have the potential to revolutionize the EV market by providing longer driving ranges,” said Arumugam Manthiram, a professor at the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the study published in Nature Energy.

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Scientists say they have developed a new AI-assisted model of a digital twin with the ability to adapt and control the physical machine in real time.

The discovery, reported in the journal IEEE Access, adds a new dimension to the digital copies of real-world machines, like robots, drones, or even autonomous cars, according to the authors.

Digital twins are exact replicas of things in the physical world. They are likened to video game versions of real machines with which they digitally twin, and are constantly updated with real-time data.

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Heman Bekele has just been named Time’s 2024 Kid of the Year.

S 15, is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition. ‘.

Last year NPR interviewed Heman Bekele about his invention of a soap to fight skin cancer. He was motivated by his childhood in Ethiopia: He saw people working in the sun and thought of health risks.

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A research team led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered “berkelocene,” the first organometallic molecule to be characterized containing the heavy element berkelium.

Organometallic molecules, which consist of a metal ion surrounded by a carbon-based framework, are relatively common for early actinide elements like uranium (atomic number 92) but are scarcely known for later actinides like berkelium (atomic number 97).

“This is the first time that evidence for the formation of a chemical bond between berkelium and carbon has been obtained. The discovery provides new understanding of how berkelium and other actinides behave relative to their peers in the periodic table,” said Stefan Minasian, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division and one of four co-corresponding authors of a new study published in the journal Science.

Breakthrough in heavy-element chemistry shatters long-held assumptions about transuranium elements.

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