It will protect ocean habitats beyond the boundaries of coastal waters that fall under the governance of national governments.
For fans of bioethical nightmares, it’s been a real stonker of a month. First, we had the suggestion that we use comatose women’s wombs to house surrogate pregnancies. Now, it appears we might have a snazzy idea for what to do with their brains, too: to turn them into hyper-efficient biological computers.
Lately, you see, techies have been worrying about the natural, physical limits of conventional, silicon-based computing. Recent developments in ‘machine learning’, in particular, have required exponentially greater amounts of energy – and corporations are concerned that further technological progress will soon become environmentally unsustainable. Thankfully, in a paper published this week, a team of American scientists pointed out something rather nifty: that the walnut-shaped, spongy computer in your skull doesn’t appear to be bound by anything like the same limitations – and that it might, therefore, provide us with something of a solution.
The human brain, the paper explains, is slower than machines at performing basic tasks (like mathematical sums), but much, much better at processing complex problems that involve limited, or ambiguous, data. Humans learn, that is, how to make smart decisions quickly, even when we only have small fragments of information to go on, in a way that computers simply can’t. For anything more sophisticated than arithmetic, sponge beats silicon by a mile.
And yet the scientific consensus is that 1.5℃ is the real upper limit we can risk. Beyond that, dangerous tipping points could spell even more frequent disasters.
Luckily, the IMO will revise its strategy this July. I and many others expect far more ambition—because zero shipping emissions by 2050 is a necessity to keep the 1.5℃ limit credible. That gives us less than three decades to clean up an industry whose ships have an average life of 25 years. The 2050 timeline conceals that our carbon budget will likely run out far more quickly—requiring urgent action for all sectors, including shipping.
In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast we meet three scientists who are trying to answer a question that humanity has long pondered: does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe?
Peter Ma and Leandro Rizk of the University of Toronto and Cherry Ng of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Orleans are part of a team that has used machine learning to identify eight potential “technosignatures” in data from the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope. The trio explain how they look for signs of intelligent life in radio-telescope data and how machine learning gives a helping hand.
Ng also talks about her research on how signals from pulsars could be used to detect gravitational waves.
A new test finally ignited a nuclear fusion reaction that unleashed more energy than it took in. This raises hopes that someday the reaction that powers the sun could also cleanly power activities here on Earth.
The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif. The U.S. Department of Energy announced its achievement on December 13.
“This is a monumental breakthrough,” says Gilbert Collins. This physicist works at the University of Rochester in New York and did not take part in the new research. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away,” Collins says. “With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”
For the first time, an experiment was able to demonstrate that it isn’t just identical quantum particles that can become entangled, but particles with opposite electric charges, too. (The π+ and the π–, for what it’s worth, are one another’s antiparticle.) The technique of passing two heavy nuclei very close to one another at nearly the speed of light allows for photons, arising from the electromagnetic field of each nucleus, to interact with the other nucleus, occasionally forming a rho particle that decays into two pions. When both nuclei do this at once, the entanglement can be seen, and the radius of the atomic nucleus can be measured.
It’s also remarkable that measuring the size of the nucleus through this method, which uses the strong force rather than the electromagnetic force, gives a different, larger result than one would get by using the nuclear charge radius. As lead author on the study, James Brandenburg, put it, “Now we can take a picture where we can really distinguish the density of gluons at a given angle and radius. The images are so precise that we can even start to see the difference between where the protons are and where the neutrons are laid out inside these big nuclei.” We now have a promising method to probe the internal structure of these complex, heavy nuclei, with more applications, no doubt, soon to come.
Patients with leaking tricuspid valves in a research trial saw improvements with a procedure that does not require a risky open-heart surgery.
Quantum physics shows that there is no such thing as ‘nothing.’ Even in a vacuum, particles can blink into and out of existence.
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For more than 250 years, mathematicians have wondered if the Euler equations might sometimes fail to describe a fluid’s flow. A new computer-assisted proof marks a major breakthrough in that quest.
