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A 58-year-old patient with terminal heart disease became the second patient in the world to receive a historic transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart on September 20. He is recovering and communicating with his loved ones. This is only the second time in the world that a genetically modified pig heart has been transplanted into a living patient. Both historic surgeries were performed by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) faculty at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).

The first historic surgery, performed in January, 2022, was conducted on David Bennett by University of Maryland Medicine surgeons (comprising UMSOM and UMMC), who are recognized as the… More.

After world’s first successful transplant in 2022, also performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), this groundbreaking transplant team per.

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Channeling light from one location to another is the backbone of our modern world. Across deep oceans and vast continents, fiber optic cables transport light containing data ranging from YouTube clips to banking transmissions—all within fibers as thin as a strand of hair.

University of Chicago Prof. Jiwoong Park, however, wondered what would happen if you made even thinner and flatter strands—in effect, so thin that they’re actually 2D instead of 3D. What would happen to the light?

Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.

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Ali Rogin:

With the cost of owning a car out of reach for many today ride sharing gives commuters an alternative. And a handful of U.S. cities, self-driving taxis are getting the green light to pick up passengers. Several companies including Waymo Cruise and Motional are touting driverless taxis as the way of the future.

But the rollout of these robo cabs has hit some speed bumps. Not everyone is comfortable with autonomous cars on the road. And major technical questions remain. Aarian Marshall is a staff writer for WIRED, and she covers transportation. Aarian, thank you so much for joining us.

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A single protein can self-assemble to build the scaffold for a biomolecular condensate that makes up a key nucleolar compartment.

Inside all living cells, loosely formed assemblies known as biomolecular condensates perform many critical functions. However, it is not well understood how proteins and other biomolecules come together to form these assemblies within cells.

MIT.

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Blog post with show notes, audio player, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/02/11/epis…omplexity/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.

Reality is a tricky thing. Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world’s acknowledged experts. He and his collaborators have been championing a view known as “structural realism,” in which real things are those that reflect true, useful patterns in the underlying reality. We talk about that, but also about a couple of other subjects in the broad area of philosophy of science: the history and current status of materialism/physicalism, and the nature of complex systems. This is a deep one.

James Ladyman obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has worked broadly within the philosophy of science, including issues of realism, empiricism, physicalism, complexity, and information. His book Everything Must Go (co-authored with Don Ross) has become an influential work on the relationship between metaphysics and science.

Continue reading “Episode 33: James Ladyman on Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity” | >

Peter Atkins, James Ladyman, and Joanna Kavenna argue over the existence of physical reality.

Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/the-world-that-disappeared?utm_source=Y…escription.

No-one who has ever stepped on a Lego brick could doubt the reality of physical objects. Yet from Heraclitus to George Berkeley, many philosophers claimed to have disproven the existence of things. Now even high-energy particle physicists are inclined to agree and describe material stuff as energy, or even as mathematical constructs. Could the world truly be made up of fields and processes, rather than physical stuff? Or is science trapped in a philosophical fantasy from which it needs to escape?

#PhysicalRealityDebate #MaterialistWorld.

Continue reading “Is physical reality a hoax | Peter Atkins, James Ladyman, Joanna Kavenna” | >