Researchers have pulled off a quantum feat that defies traditional expectations—they’ve created Schrödinger cat states not from ultra-cold ground states, but from warm, thermally excited ones.
Using a superconducting qubit setup, the team demonstrated that quantum superpositions can exist even at higher temperatures, overturning the long-held belief that heat destroys quantum effects. This breakthrough not only validates Schrödinger’s original “hot cat” concept but also paves the way for more practical and accessible quantum technologies.
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Panpsychism is the theory that consciousness is irreducible and exists fundamentally at the foundations of reality. Panpsychism forms include ‘micropsychism,’ where fundamental particles or fields are in some sense conscious, and ‘Cosmopsychism,’ where the entire universe is in some sense conscious. What are the arguments for and against Panpsychism like the ‘combination problem’?
Closer To Truth is now on BlueSky! Follow us for updates, new videos, musings, and more: https://bsky.app/profile/closertotrut… Kastrup is a Brazilian-born Dutch philosopher and computer scientist best known for his work in the field of consciousness studies, particularly his development of analytic idealism, a form of metaphysical idealism grounded in the analytic philosophical tradition. Make a tax-deductible donation of any amount to help us continue exploring the world’s deepest questions: https://closertotruth.com/donate/ Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Bernardo Kastrup is a Brazilian-born Dutch philosopher and computer scientist best known for his work in the field of consciousness studies, particularly his development of analytic idealism, a form of metaphysical idealism grounded in the analytic philosophical tradition.
Make a tax-deductible donation of any amount to help us continue exploring the world’s deepest questions: https://closertotruth.com/donate/
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What can not finding life beyond Earth tell us about the universe? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an | Space
Kawasaki Heavy Industries has pulled the covers off perhaps the most outrageous concept vehicle we’ve ever seen. The Corleo is a two-seater quadruped robot you steer with your body, capable of picking its way through rough terrain thanks to AI vision.
I mean look, sure, you could go buy yourself a horse. But some horses are very cheeky, and have you seen what comes out the back end of those things? All that’ll come out the back of the Corleo robot is fresh, clean water as a combustion product from its clean-burning, 150cc, hydrogen-fueled generator engine. Possibly chilled water, from an underslung dispenser – that’d be nice on a mountain picnic.
This is the latest concept vehicle from Kawasaki Heavy Industries – not the motorcycle division specifically, and I’m OK with that. I think the parent company would be wise to keep this machine far from any “Ninja” stickers that might give its AI brain the idea that it should learn martial arts.
A primary goal of microbial genome-wide association studies is identifying genomic variants associated with a particular habitat. Existing tools fail to identify known causal variants if the analyzed trait shaped the phylogeny. Furthermore, due to inclusion of allochthonous strains or metadata errors, the stated sources of strains in public databases are often incorrect, and strains may not be adapted to the habitat from which they were isolated. We describe a new tool, aurora, that identifies autochthonous strains and the genes associated with habitats while acknowledging the potential role of the habitat adaptation trait in shaping phylogeny.
So-called “memristors” consume extremely little power and behave similarly to brain cells. Researchers from Jülich, led by Ilia Valov, have now introduced novel memristive components that offer significant advantages over previous versions: they are more robust, function across a wider voltage range, and can operate in both analog and digital modes. These properties could help address the problem of “catastrophic forgetting,” where artificial neural networks abruptly forget previously learned information.
The problem of catastrophic forgetting occurs when deep neural networks are trained for a new task. This is because a new optimization simply overwrites a previous one. The brain does not have this problem because it can apparently adjust the degree of synaptic change; something experts call “metaplasticity.”
They suspect that it is only through these different degrees of plasticity that our brain can permanently learn new tasks without forgetting old content. The new memristor accomplishes something similar.
Using computational tools and virtual screening, researchers at the Center for Redox Processes in Biomedicine (Redoxoma) have identified new inhibitors of the enzyme human 15-lipoxygenase-2 (h15-LOX-2). This protein plays an important role in inflammatory and metabolic processes and contributes to cellular homeostasis.
The discovery, described in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, could open up new avenues for investigating the biological and pathological functions of the enzyme and provide promising candidates for the development of new drugs.
“Although h15-LOX-2 is a potential biological target, it’s scarcely been explored for this purpose. Our work contributes to new inhibitors that have structural diversity among themselves and with respect to inhibitors already described in the literature. What’s more, they have similar drug properties according to predictions based on computational models,” says Lucas Gasparello Viviani, first author of the article.
What if the key to the universe was discovered over a century ago—and then forgotten?
In the late 19th century, a young math prodigy named William Clifford proposed a radical idea: that reality itself is woven from the same fabric as the mind. Long before Einstein, long before quantum theory, Clifford envisioned a world where matter, consciousness, and geometry are one.
His ideas were largely overlooked, seen as too speculative for the science of his time. Today, they look like the missing blueprint for a true Theory of Everything.
Is Clifford’s path one that science is only now catching up to?
Based on the original research by idb.kniganews “Clifford’s Path”
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