Menu

Blog

Page 1912

Apr 27, 2023

WHO: biological hazard brewing in Sudan as fighters overtake a central public health lab

Posted by in category: biological

A fighting faction in Sudan has occupied the country’s main public health lab, putting pathogen collections at risk, the WHO said.

Apr 27, 2023

Newly observed effect makes atoms transparent to certain frequencies of light

Posted by in category: particle physics

A newly discovered phenomenon dubbed “collectively induced transparency” (CIT) causes groups of atoms to abruptly stop reflecting light at specific frequencies.

CIT was discovered by confining ytterbium atoms inside an —essentially, a tiny box for light—and blasting them with a laser. Although the laser’s light will bounce off the atoms up to a point, as the frequency of the light is adjusted, a transparency window appears in which the light simply passes through the cavity unimpeded.

“We never knew this transparency window existed,” says Caltech’s Andrei Faraon (BS ‘04), William L. Valentine Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and co-corresponding author of a paper on the discovery that was published on April 26 in the journal Nature. “Our research has primarily become a journey to find out why.”

Apr 27, 2023

Why we are the only humans in the Universe and why it matters for our collective future

Posted by in categories: cosmology, neuroscience

Note that this is very far away from a return to an anthropocentric worldview, to pre-Copernican times when the Earth was the center of Creation. (I call it biocentric to make the distinction clear.) Biocentrism is necessarily post-Copernican. I am saying that we are unique and important — but not for having been created by a god, or for being the result of a purposeful cosmic directive.

We are unique and important for being self-aware living entities capable of asking questions about their origin and future. We may not be the measure of all things as Protagoras of Abdera proclaimed long ago, but we are the things that can measure. We experience the world, we measure it, and we tell stories about what we see and what we feel. And what we are finding out is that we may very well be the only ones asking such questions — or, at the very least, the only ones we know of, which effectively amounts to the same thing. Even if “they” exist and tell stories, their stories will not be ours. There is only one human voice in the cosmos. And if we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

Continue reading “Why we are the only humans in the Universe and why it matters for our collective future” »

Apr 27, 2023

Voyager 2 is the Eveready Bunny of Spacecraft: It Just Keeps Going and Going

Posted by in category: life extension

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have studied the four giant planets of the Solar System. It was launched from Earth in 1977 and continues its extended mission through interstellar space, making new discoveries 45 years after launch.


A system hack extends the life of the 5 instruments still working on the venerable spacecraft, now over 45 years into its extended mission.

Apr 27, 2023

Can Collective Intelligence Be the Reason Why Human Brains Are Shrinking?

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers have found that for much of human evolutionary history our brains kept growing. In fact, if you count from our last shared ancestors with chimpanzees six million years ago, the human brain size almost quadrupled. This happened thanks in part to the improving diet and nutrition of early humans. Cro Magnons, the Homo sapiens that had the largest brains in history were alive from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. But as the recent study from scientists at Dartmouth and Boston Universities points out, around 3,000 years ago, during the current Holocene geological epoch, our brains began to diminish.

Apr 27, 2023

By 2030, Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says Humans Can Achieve Immortality

Posted by in categories: life extension, Ray Kurzweil

His bold prediction and the reasoning behind it resurfaced in a YouTube video that has gone viral.

Apr 27, 2023

A new quantum approach to solve electronic structures of complex materials

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, engineering, information science, quantum physics

If you know the atoms that compose a particular molecule or solid material, the interactions between those atoms can be determined computationally, by solving quantum mechanical equations—at least, if the molecule is small and simple. However, solving these equations, critical for fields from materials engineering to drug design, requires a prohibitively long computational time for complex molecules and materials.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) and Department of Chemistry have explored the possibility of solving these electronic structures using a quantum .

The research, which uses a combination of new computational approaches, was published online in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation. It was supported by Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne, and by the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM).

Apr 27, 2023

New Therapy Found to Prevent Aggressive Brain Cancer Recurrence in Mice

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology, robotics/AI

A new gel-based treatment for glioblastoma—a highly aggressive form of brain cancer—has shown to be 100% effective at preventing recurrence in mice. Researchers hope the therapy will translate well into human physiology, where it could help resolve tens of thousands of cancer diagnoses every year.

Glioblastoma manifests as a tumor growing on the brain or spinal cord. While many glioblastoma patients have the tumor surgically removed, the mass often returns, even in cases involving post-surgical radiation or chemotherapy. The disease is so persistent that the average patient lives only 12 to 16 months after diagnosis, making glioblastoma one of the most lethal forms of cancer currently understood.

Continue reading “New Therapy Found to Prevent Aggressive Brain Cancer Recurrence in Mice” »

Apr 27, 2023

2,600-year-old stone busts of ‘lost’ ancient Tartessos people discovered in sealed pit in Spain

Posted by in category: futurism

Archaeologists in Spain have unearthed five life-size busts of human figures that could be the first-known human depictions of the Tartessos, a people who formed an ancient civilization that disappeared more than 2,500 years ago.

The carved stone faces, which archaeologists date to the fifth century B.C., were found hidden inside a sealed pit in an adobe temple at Casas del Turuñuelo, an ancient Tartessian site in southern Spain. The pieces were scattered amongst animal bones, mostly from horses, that likely came from a mass sacrifice, according to a translated statement (opens in new tab) published April 18.

Apr 27, 2023

Cynthia Rudin Builds AI That Humans Can Understand

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Cynthia Rudin wants machine learning models, responsible for increasingly important decisions, to show their work.