Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 3939

While time may be a worldwide constant, it can be quite tricky. Several individuals have felt like childhood summers were extremely long in comparison to how they experience the same 3 months as adults. Though individuals can argue about time perception and the factors that dilate and compress time, it is possible to look into it experimentally.

Time Perception Is Different For Adults and Children

A team of researchers proceeded to do just that. According to Neuroscience News, the scientists looked into how eventfulness impacts estimates of duration across various cognitive development milestones.

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Google announced in last week’s earnings call that it would pay millions of dollars to consolidate office leases across the globe.

“In the first quarter of 2023, we expect to incur approximately $500 million of costs related to exiting leases to align our office space with our adjusted global headcount look,” Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said. “We will continue to optimize our real estate footprint.”

Many of the lease terminations will be in the Bay Area. “We’re ending leases for a number of unoccupied spaces, and will work to consolidate under-utilized spaces in the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont wrote SFGATE in an email. “Our campuses remain a cornerstone of our culture, but we’re working to ensure we invest in real estate efficiently and that our investments match the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce.”

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Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.

And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.

Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.

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Optical pulses, which appear as a flash of light, are used to transmit information in high speed optical fibers, and are increasingly used in Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for 3-dimensional imaging. Both of these applications demand light sensors or photodiodes that are capable of detecting very low levels of light intensity down to a few photons, where a single photon is the quantized energy unit of light.

A newly published paper, “Extremely low excess noise avalanche photodiode with GaAsSb absorption region and AlGaAsSb avalanche region,” in Applied Physics Letters, details a discovery by a Sheffield research team that has the capability to transform a single electron at its input to a cascade of electrons at its output.

This multiplication process is commonly known as avalanche breakdown, while a photodiode incorporating this process is called avalanche photodiode (APD). Though the application of reverse voltage, avalanche photodiodes (often referred to as APDs) have internal gain, which means that when compared to PIN-photodiodes they typically have a higher signal-to–.

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Of the respondents, 28 percent said they were more likely than not to use gene editing to make their babies smarter, and 38 percent said they’d use polygenic screening. The researchers also noted what they called a bandwagon effect, where people who were told something along the lines of “everyone else is doing it” were more likely to say they’d do it too. This is logical; our comfort with decisions is buoyed by a sense that others in our shoes would choose similarly.

It’s important to note, though, that the survey made it clear that genetically enhancing embryos didn’t come with a guaranteed result of a smarter kid. “In this study, we stipulated a realistic effect—that each service would increase the odds of having a child who attends a top-100 college by 2 percentage points, from 3 percent to 5 percent odds—and lots of people are still interested,” said Michelle N. Meyer, chair of the Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences at Geisinger and first author of the article.

The numbers—28 and 38 percent—don’t seem high. That’s a little below and a little above one-third of total respondents who would use the technologies. But imagine walking around in a world where one out of every three people had had their genes tweaked before birth. Unsettling, no? The researchers said their results point to substantial and growing interest in genetic technologies for offspring enhancement, and that now is the time to get a national conversation going around regulations.

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There are stark differences between metals, through which electrons flow freely, and electrical insulators, in which electrons are essentially immobile. And despite the obvious difficulties in finding a way to switch back and forth from a metal to an insulator within one material, physicists are trying to figure out how.

“Say you want to put billions of circuit elements on a tiny chip and then control, at that microscopic scale, whether just one of the elements is metallic or insulating in a controlled fashion,” said Debanjan Chowdhury, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It would be remarkable if you could control the microscopic device at the flick of a switch.”

Digging into recent past experimental results to try to reconcile experiment and theory, Chowdhury and doctoral candidate Sunghoon Kim found that even a tiny amount of imperfection, inherent in any real-life material, plays a key role in revealing the universal physics associated with the experimental metal-to-insulator transition (Physical Review Letters, “Continuous Mott Transition in Moiré Semiconductors: Role of Long-Wavelength Inhomogeneities”). Understanding the physics behind this mysterious phase transition could lead to new complex microscopic circuits, superconductors and exotic insulators that could find use in quantum computing.

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