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Blog – Page 11

University of Toronto Scarborough researchers have harnessed artificial intelligence (AI) and brain activity to shed new light on why we struggle to accurately recognize faces of people from different races.

Across a pair of studies, researchers explored the Other-Race-Effect (ORE), a well-known phenomenon in which people recognize faces of their own race more easily than others. They combined AI and collected through EEG (electroencephalography) to reveal new insights into how we perceive other-race faces, including visual distortions more deeply ingrained in our brain than previously thought.

“What we found was striking—people are so much better at seeing the facial details of people from their own race,” says Adrian Nestor, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and co-author of the studies.

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Future space missions could use quantum technologies to help us understand the physical laws that govern the universe, explore the composition of other planets and their moons, gain insights into unexplained cosmological phenomena, or monitor ice sheet thickness and the amount of water in underground aquifers on Earth.

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL), a first-of-its-kind facility aboard the International Space Station, has performed a series of trailblazing experiments based on the quantum properties of ultracold atoms. The tool used to perform these experiments is called an , and it can precisely measure gravity, magnetic fields, and other forces.

Atom interferometers are currently being used on Earth to study the fundamental nature of gravity and are also being developed to aid aircraft and ship navigation, but use of an atom interferometer in space will enable innovative science capabilities.

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In physics, a phase transition is a transformation of a substance from one form to another. They happen everywhere, from beneath the Earth’s crust to the cores of distant stars, but the classic example is water transitioning from liquid to gas by boiling.

Things get much more complex when physicists zoom in on the minuscule quantum realm or work with exotic matter. Understanding phase transitions rewards both increased knowledge of fundamental physics and future technological applications.

Now researchers have found out how thin layers of noble gases like helium and metals like aluminum melt in confined spaces by topological excitations. In the study, the layers were confined between two graphene sheets at high pressures.

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Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step in paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.

The mass of neutrinos and their antineutrinos is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos are in the Standard Model of particle physics and are very common in nature. They are produced, for example, by in the sun. Every second, trillions of solar neutrinos travel through us.

“Their mass determination would be of utmost importance,” says Professor Anu Kankainen from the University of Jyväskylä. “Understanding them can give us a better picture of the evolution of the universe.”

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The triangle is a small instrument made of a metal rod bent into a triangle shape that is open at one corner. While small, its sound is distinct, with multiple overtones and nonharmonic resonance. But what causes the surprisingly powerful sound?

“The instrument produces enchanting and beautiful tones, raising deep and profound questions about the connection between music and physics,” author Risako Tanigawa said. “Optical sound measurement has only been applied to limited subjects until now. By observing the sound field of a triangle for the first time, we captured phenomena not previously explored through microphone observations.”

In a paper published in JASA Express Letters, Tanigawa and colleagues at NTT Corporation and Waseda University in Japan captured sound fields around musical triangles.

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From bird flocking to fish schooling, many biological systems exhibit some type of collective motion, often to improve performance and conserve energy. Compared to other swimmers, manta rays are particularly efficient, and their large aspect ratio is useful for creating large lift compared to drag. These properties make their collective motion especially relevant to complex underwater operations.

To understand how their affect their propulsion, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) and the Ningbo Institute of NPU, in China, modeled the motions of groups of , which they present in Physics of Fluids.

“As underwater operation tasks become more complex and often require multiple underwater vehicles to carry out group operations, it is necessary to take inspiration from the group swimming of organisms to guide formations of underwater vehicles,” said author Pengcheng Gao. “Both the shape of manta rays and their propulsive performance are of great value for biomimicry.”

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The global climate is in an imbalance. Potential “tipping elements” include the Greenland ice sheet, coral reefs, and the Amazon rainforest. Together they form a network that can collapse if just one individual component tips.

Researchers from Bonn University Hospital (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now shed light on seemingly sudden and rare, often irreversible changes within a system, such as those that can be observed in the climate, the economy, social networks or even the human brain. They took a closer look at extreme events such as epileptic seizures.

Their aim was to better understand the mechanisms underlying such changes in order to ultimately make predictions. The results of their work have now been published in the journal Physical Review Research.

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A new way of explaining gravity could bring us a step closer to resolving the heretofore irresolvable differences it has with quantum mechanics.

Physicists Mikko Partanen and Jukka Tulkki at Aalto University in Finland have devised a new way of thinking about gravity that they say is compatible with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory describing the other three fundamental forces in the Universe – strong, weak, and electromagnetic.

It’s not quite a theory of quantum gravity… but it could help us get there.

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