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Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering have created a new method of cleaning micropollutants from water, using zwitterionic molecules — i.e., molecules with the same number of positive and negative charges.

Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student and one of the researchers, explained zwitterionic molecules by comparing them to magnets.

“On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south pole that stick to each other, and on a zwitterionic molecule, you have a positive charge and a negative charge which stick to each other in a similar way,” he said in a release by MIT News.

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AI has come to the hiring process — and it’s made those mandatory personality tests all the weirder.

As 404 Media reports, companies as disparate as McDonald’s, Olive Garden, and FedEx are now requiring that job applicants take personality evaluations, which are then sorted by an AI system whose operations are cloudy at best.

The aforementioned companies are all contracted with Paradox.ai, a “conversational recruiting software” company whose strange personality assessments include images of blue-skinned humanoid aliens that applicants are, apparently, supposed to identify with.

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Peter Atkins discusses the ideas in his book ‘Conjuring the Universe’ with fellow science writer Jim Baggott. They discuss how fundamental the various constants of the universe truly are.

https://global.oup.com/academic/produ…

Professor Peter Atkins is a fellow of Lincoln College in the University of Oxford and the author of about seventy books for students and a general audience. His texts are market leaders around the globe. A frequent lecturer in the United States and throughout the world, he has held visiting professorships in France, Israel, Japan, China, and New Zealand. He was the founding chairman of the Committee on Chemistry Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and was a member of IUPAC’s Physical and Biophysical Chemistry Division. Peter was the 2016 recipient of the American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Award for science journalism.

Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to work with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Mass: The quest to understand matter from Greek atoms to quantum fields; Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’; and The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments.

Continue reading “Are Fundamental Constants Fundamental? | Peter Atkins and Jim Baggott” | >

The laws of nature or physics are assumed to be everywhere the same, on the far side of the universe as sure as on the far side of your house. Otherwise science itself could not succeed. But are these laws equally constant across time? Might the deep laws of physics change over eons of time? The implications would be profound.

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Continue reading “Lee Smolin — Are the Laws of Nature Always Constant?” | >

If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question.

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Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is best known for his work in loop quantum gravity.

Continue reading “Lee Smolin — Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?” | >