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Blog – Page 2059

Astronomers have proposed a new way to solve the so-called “Hubble tension,” but the approach ultimately raises more questions than it answers.

By way of background, cosmologists are in a bit of a crisis these days. One of the most important numbers they can measure is the so-called Hubble constant, the rate of expansion of the present-day universe. At their disposal cosmologists have two sets of tools to measure this number. On one side are tools that probe the relatively nearby universe, like measuring the brightnesses of a certain kind of exploding star known as Type 1a supernovae. These supernovae all erupt with the same absolute brightness, so by measuring their observed magnitudes, astronomers can calculate their distances, and then use that to estimate how quickly the universe is expanding.

The downside of this approach is that supernovae don’t always explode with exactly the same brightness, and for the kind of precision measurements astronomers are aiming for, they have to include assumptions and modeling of supernovae, which can potentially introduce inaccuracies.

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I’ve been diving into this cool concept called gravitational time dilation, and it’s like this mind-bending thing predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. This concept highlights the actual difference in elapsed time between events observed by individuals situated at varying distances from a massive gravitational source.

If you’re hanging out close to a massive gravitational source, like a planet or star, time slows down for you. It’s like a cosmic slow-motion effect. But if you move away from it, time speeds up. This has been proven in experiments with atomic clocks placed at different heights — the closer to the Earth’s surface, the slower the clock ticks compared to those higher up.

Einstein first talked about this in 1907 when he was figuring out special relativity in speedy frames of reference. In general relativity, it’s like time is doing a dance based on where you are in space, as described by this thing called a metric tensor.

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A new study by Dr Constantine Evans of Maynooth University and researchers at the University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology, published in Nature, shows how the molecules that build structures can do both the thinking and the doing.

We tend to separate the brain and muscle – the brain does the thinking; the muscle does the doing. The brain takes in complex information about the world, makes decisions, while muscle merely executes.

This brain-muscle separation has also shaped how we think about the working within a single cell; some molecules within cells are seen as ‘thinkers’ that take in information about the chemical environment and decide what the cell needs to do for survival; separately, other molecules are seen as the ‘muscle’, building structures needed for survival.

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As one of the few schools on Long Island offering the AP Capstone program in their curricula, Patchogue-Medford High School provides various STEM opportunities for its students.

From Brookhaven National Laboratory to Stony Brook University right at our fingertips, the possibilities are endless. For instance, on December 8 th, four AP Research students joined Dr. Gatz in spending the day at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to conduct the necessary experiments for their research papers.

Senior, Carlo Costigliola, and Junior, Isaac Varghese, have decided to focus their research on DNA barcoding. According to International Barcode of Life, “DNA barcoding is a method of specimen identification using short, standardized segments of DNA.”

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Natasha and Max also appear in a recent video titled “Transhumanism. What it is not” in conversation with David Wood and two representatives of the anti-transhumanist camp, Alexander Thomas and Émile Torres. I’m not familiar with the work of Thomas. I’m more familiar with the work of Torres. I very strongly disagree with most of what Torres says, but I must concede that Torres seems an intelligent and perceptive person, not without a certain endearing grace. However, BS is BS.

I’ve watched and listened again to the awesome conversation between Lex Fridman and Guillaume Verdon aka Beff Jezos, the founder of the movement called effective accelerationism (e/acc) and the company Extropic AI. This long conversation (almost 3 hours) touches a lot of things including physics, quantum, thermodynamics, Artificial Intelligence, LLMs, space, e/acc philosophy & metaphysics, and of course the meaning of life & all that. This is the most complete talk on e/acc so far and is likely to remain so for some time. Watch it all, and let’s accelerate the fuck away from mediocrity toward unlimited extropian and cosmist greatness.

See my previous posts on e/acc (1, 2). I see e/acc as the new kid on the historic block of futurism, cosmism, and extropy. The next Terasem Colloquium on July 20, the (alas 55th!) anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, and the next issue of Terasem ’s Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology, to be published in July, will explore the old and new futurisms on the block: parallels, differences, philosophical foundations.

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A recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters investigates the potential existence of Mars-sized free-floating planets (FFPs)—also known as rogue planets, starless planets, and wandering planets—that could have been captured by our sun’s gravity long ago and orbit in the outer solar system approximately 1,400 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. For context, the farthest known planetary body in the solar system is Pluto, which orbits approximately 39 AU from the sun, and is also part of the Kuiper Belt, which scientists estimate extends as far out as 1,000 AU from the sun.

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In 1,868, Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist at the Hôpital de Salpétrière in France, first coined the disease “la sclérose en plaques,” which means multiple sclerosis (MS) — to distinguish it from another type of movement disorder later known as Parkinson’s disease.

Though described in 1,868, the cause of MS puzzled scientists for more than a century. This is until a 2022 breakthrough study finally enlightens us that the cause is, oddly, the seemingly innocent Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common childhood virus that causes typical fever and sore throat.

Let’s see how one study single-handedly proves what we thought couldn’t be proved; how one study truly deserves to be called a breakthrough; and how thorough and near-perfect science is done.

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