Lifeboat Foundation

Let’s say you typically eat eggs for breakfast but were running late and ate cereal. As you crunched on a spoonful of Raisin Bran, other contextual similarities remained: You ate at the same table, at the same time, preparing to go to the same job. When someone asks later what you had for breakfast, you incorrectly remember eating eggs.

This would be a real-world example of a false memory. But what happens in your brain before recalling eggs, compared to what would happen if you correctly recalled cereal?

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists show for the first time that electrical signals in the human hippocampus differ immediately before recollection of true and false memories. They also found that low-frequency activity in the hippocampus decreases as a function of contextual similarity between a falsely recalled word and the target word.

Wide distribution of findings shows how analytical choices drive conclusions.

And that’s where the trouble really starts. Down there, nature is governed by quantum mechanics. This amazingly powerful theory has been shown to account for all the forces of nature, except gravity. When physicists try to apply quantum theory to gravity, they find that space and time become almost unrecognizable. They seem to start fluctuating wildly. It’s almost like space and time fall apart. Their smoothness breaks down completely, and that’s totally incompatible with the picture in Einstein’s theory.

(01:54) As physicists try to make sense of all of this, some of them are coming to the conclusion that space and time may not be as fundamental as we always imagined. They’re starting to seem more like byproducts of something even deeper, something unfamiliar and quantum mechanical. But what could that something be? Joining me now to discuss all this is Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist who hosts his own podcast, Mindscape. Sean spent years as a research professor of physics at Caltech [California Institute of Technology], but he is now moving to Johns Hopkins as the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy. He’s also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. But no matter where he is, Sean studies deep questions about quantum mechanics, gravity, time and cosmology. He’s the author of several books, including his most recent, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. Sean, thank you so much for joining us today.

Do you think human beings are the last stage in evolution? If not, what comes next?

I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process. Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology.

Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. As the physiologist J. Scott Turner writes in “The Extended Organism”: “Animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as kidneys, heart, lungs or livers.” This is true for termites, for example, who form a single organism in symbiosis with their nests. The extended body of the organism is created by the extended mind of the colony.

Researchers investigated how cancer antigenicity drives unique forms of T cell exhaustion and hypofunctionality.

Your phone may have more than 15 billion tiny transistors packed into its microprocessor chips. The transistors are made of silicon, metals like gold and copper, and insulators that together take an electric current and convert it to 1s and 0s to communicate information and store it. The transistor materials are inorganic, basically derived from rock and metal.

But what if you could make these fundamental electronic components part biological, able to respond directly to the environment and change like living tissue?

This is what a team at Tufts University Silklab did when they created transistors replacing the insulating material with biological silk. They reported their findings in Advanced Materials.

Art and science combine in this engineering course to let students turn their brainwaves into creative works.

A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics.

The study carried out by Kyu-Hyun Chae, professor of physics and astronomy at Sejong University in Seoul, used up to 26,500 wide binaries within 650 light years (LY) observed by European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope. The study was published in the 1 August 2023 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

For a key improvement over other studies Chae’s study focused on calculating gravitational accelerations experienced by binary stars as a function of their separation or, equivalently the orbital period, by a Monte Carlo deprojection of observed sky-projected motions to the three-dimensional space.

Dark energy, one of the most controversial physics ideas, is getting another challenge. After all, if this force is supposed to make up about 68% of the mass-energy of the universe, where exactly is it? A new paper by a pair of Russian astrophysicists says dark energy simply doesn’t exist. Instead, they point to the mysterious Casimir effect as the explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The study, from Professor Artyom Astashenok and undergraduate student Alexander Teplyakov of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, takes issue with the fact that as far as dark energy’s suggested role, “no one knows what is it and how it works,” as remarks Astashenok in a press release.