Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a world where super-strong, super-light, flexible, durable new materials, which don’t exist in nature could be made to order. New breakthroughs in the understanding of “spin”, a characteristic of subatomic particles — like mass and charge — mean we are on the brink of such a revolution.

“The ability to control spin, one of the fundamental properties of particles, is crucial to us being able to design advanced new materials that will change the world,” says Prof Alessandro Lunghi, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin, who heads up a team investigating the phenomenon.

The scientific concepts of particle mass and charge are widely understood and known, but the third property of particles — that of spin — remains mysterious to most. It’s a concept that even many scientists struggle to understand.

When Mohammad Javad Khojasteh arrived at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in 2020 to begin his postdoc appointment, he was introduced to an entirely new universe. The domain he knew best could be explained by “classical” physics that predicts the behavior of ordinary objects with near-perfect accuracy (think Newton’s three laws of motion). But this new universe was governed by bizarre laws that can produce unpredictable results while operating at scales typically smaller than an atom.

“The rules of quantum mechanics are counterintuitive and seem very strange when you first start to learn them,” Khojasteh says. “But the more you know, the clearer it becomes that the underlying logic is extremely elegant.”

As a member of Professor Moe Win’s lab, called the Wireless Information and Network Sciences Laboratory, or WINS Lab, Khojasteh’s job is to straddle both the classical and quantum realms, in order to improve state-of-the-art communication, sensing, and computational capabilities.

A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.

There is a lot of culture and philosophy built into the Big Bang theory as we understand it.

After the big bang, electricity and light filled the universe in what’s called the epoch of reionization. The James Webb Space Telescope is hunting for more clues to explain this time period.

Anyone who’s looked into high-voltage experiments is likely familiar with ion lifters — spindly contraptions made of wire and aluminum foil that are able to float above the workbench on a column of ionized air. It’s an impressive trick that’s been around since the 1950s, but the concept has yet to show any practical application as the thrust generated isn’t nearly enough to lift a more substantial vehicle.

It’s a bit early to suggest that [Jay Bowles] of Plasma Channel has finally found the solution to this fundamental shortcoming of electrostatic propulsion, but his recently completed multi-stage ion thruster certainly represents something of a generational leap for the technology. By combining multiple pairs of electrodes and experimentally determining the optimal values for their spacing and operational voltage, he’s been able to achieve a sustained exhaust velocity of 2.3 meters per second.

Continue reading “Multi-Stage Ion Thruster Holds Exciting Promise” »

Summary: Researchers have mapped four new areas of the human anterior prefrontal cortex that play critical roles in cognitive processing. Two of these newly mapped areas are larger in females than in males.

Source: Human Brain Project.

Researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) have mapped four new areas of the human anterior prefrontal cortex that plays a major role in cognitive functions. Two of the newly identified areas are relatively larger in females than in males.

Real superpowers based on advanced technology.

Other ERP studies have reported diverse neurophysiological responses to inconsistencies between the message meaning and the speaker’s representation, typically manifest as a modulation of the N400 and/or P600 components^15,16,17. Different patterns of ERP results reported in these studies are likely related to the nature of the mismatch manipulations used. For instance, whereas the P600 component is typically associated with a reanalysis/repair of syntactic incongruences and grammatical violations¹⁸, in experiments modulating the speaker’s voice it can also be elicited by the violations of the stereotypical noun roles in the absence of grammatical incongruencies as such (e.g., “face powder” or “fight club”, produced by male and female voices, respectively¹⁶) as well as the general assumptions based on the pronoun processing during sentence comprehension¹⁹. In contrast, the semantically-related N400 effect has been typically found for the semantic-pragmatic incongruences (e.g., “I am going to the night club” by child’s voice¹⁷).

Interestingly, these ERP effects offer support to two models of pragmatic language comprehension—the standard, two-step model and the one-step model. The two-step model claims that listeners compute meaning first, in isolation, and that the communicative context is considered at the second stage (speaker’s information, in particular^16,20), as reflected in the late P600 responses. More recent findings showed, however, that this pragmatic (extralinguistic) integration is likely happening in a single-step manner already during semantic processing, as reflected in the N400 effect^17,21. Nevertheless, other studies also reported the overlap of both processing stages, showing an N400 effect elicited by expectation error and a late P600 effect for overall reanalysis of this expectation²².

Understanding how gender information is integrated by the listeners is particularly important when one considers the differences in how different languages signal grammatical gender. In some languages, such as in English, Finnish or Mandarin, overt grammatical gender marking is almost completely absent. Many other languages, such as Slavic languages, explicitly mark grammatical gender in nouns, verbs, and adjectives, often in a complicated interdependent manner. Russian is one of such languages, offering an optimal testbed for investigating linguistic and extralinguistic gender integration. As far as we know, there is only one study addressing this question in a Slavic language: using Slovak, Hanulíková Carreiras²³ found that, during an active-listening task, the integration of speaker-related information and morphosyntactic information occurred rather late during complex sentence processing. Additionally, a conflict between the speaker’s and the word’s genders (e.g., “I– \(stole_{MASC}\) plums” in female voice) was reflected in the modulation of the N400 component. Given that N400/LAN modulations have been consistently found for morphosyntactic violations, in particular for number, person, and gender agreement, as well as in phrase structure violations (e.g.,²⁴, see also for review²⁵), this result may suggest that extralinguistic information is directly integrated during online (morpho)syntactic processing (such as speaker’s sex converted into subject’s gender in (morpho)syntactic processing). However, N400 is also known to be related to conscious top-down controlled integration of linguistic information^24,26. Indeed, in the study described above, the participant’s overt attention to the stimuli was required, and the effect generally appeared rather late in the comprehension processes. Thus, the question of whether such findings reflect the involvement of genuine online parsing mechanisms or secondary post-comprehension processes (such as repair and reanalysis^24,27) still remains unsolved. Importantly, syntactic parsing has been shown to commence much earlier and to take place in a largely automatic fashion, as demonstrated in studies focused on early left-anterior negativity (ELAN) or syntactic MMN. In particular, ELAN modulation around 200 ms or earlier has been reported during outright violations of the obligatory structure, reflecting an automatic early analysis of the syntactic structure like phrase structure errors^28,29,30,31, and it is considered to reflect the brain’s response to the word category violations.