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Blog – Page 13

Somewhere in our galaxy are engines capable of driving atomic fragments to velocities that come within a whisker of lightspeed.

The explosive deaths of stars seems like a natural place to search for sources of these highly energetic cosmic bullets, yet when it comes to the most powerful particles, researchers have had their doubts.

Numerical simulations by a small international team of physicists may yet save the supernova theory of cosmic ray emissions at the highest of energies, suggesting there is a brief period where a collapsing star could still become the Universe’s most extreme accelerator.

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A study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics has identified four previously unknown primordial open cluster (OC) groups in the Milky Way.

Open clusters, loose assemblies of stars born from the same giant molecular cloud (GMC), are typically considered to form in isolation. However, the newly discovered OC groups consist of multiple member clusters originating from the same GMC, formed through sequential processes.

Notably, two of these groups, labeled G1 and G2, appear to have formed via a hierarchical mechanism triggered by multiple supernova (SN) explosions.

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Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discoverable through their conservation across the mammalian lineage. We therefore designed a cross-species neural activity screen, applicable to humans and mice, combining precise affective behavioral measurements, clinical medication administration, and brain-wide intracranial electrophysiology. This screen revealed conserved biphasic dynamics in which emotionally salient sensory signals are swiftly broadcast throughout the brain and followed by a characteristic persistent activity pattern. Medication-based interventions that selectively blocked persistent dynamics while preserving fast broadcast selectively inhibited emotional responses in humans and mice.

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Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment has always been deeply misunderstood. In this article I’d like to explain how, if understood properly, it might shed new light on the mechanism by which consciousness evolved.

Schrödinger’s cat and schrödinger’s hat

The purpose of Schrödinger’s thought experiment was to highlight serious problems in the (then very new) “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Quantum Mechanics (CI). The CI was a bit of a botch-job, because the founders of QM had no idea how to “interpret” the strange new physics they had discovered. The CI says quantum systems remain in a superposition (a “smeared out” state where everything than can happen is somehow happening in parallel) until measured, but does not define what counts as a “measurement”, or why. Schrödinger always rejected this idea, and his thought experiment was intended to demonstrate why. He proposes a sealed box (so no “measurements” can take place), in which has been placed a cat, and a quantum source with a 50% probability of releasing poison. According to the CI, so long as the system inside the box remains “unmeasured”, the poison has both been released and not-released and therefore that cat is both dead and alive.

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