In a ground-breaking experiment, scientists have successfully created the fifth form of matter, known as the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), for a remarkable duration of six minutes.
This major accomplishment has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of quantum mechanics and open the door to new technological advancements. In this article, we will explore the significance of this achievement, the nature of BECs, and the potential applications of this newfound knowledge.
Scientists had a hard time reconstructing how complex molecular parts are being held together. However, that was before SISSAâs Cristian Micheletti and his team studied how the DNA double helix unzips when translocated at high velocity through a nanopore.
DNA Double Helixâs Unzipping
DNA has a double helix structure because it consists of two spiral chains of deoxyribonucleic acid. Its shape is reminiscent of a spiral staircase.
Our brains arenât limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.
The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimerâs â a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone â may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who donât have the disease.
In a series of past studies, MIT researchers demonstrated a deceptively simple way to increase the power and synchronization of these waves in mouse models of Alzheimerâs: expose the animals to lights flickering and/or sounds clicking at a frequency of 40 Hz.
Organoids are an incredible tool for research into the brain. Cerebral organoids are created by growing human stem cells in a bioreactor. They might be the key to unlocking the answers to many of our questions about the brain. We explain how theyâre made and some of the discoveries theyâve helped with so far!
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â Thumb by âBrokenâ Bran â https://twitter.com/BranGSmith.
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REFERENCES:
Where 99% of mass comes from: https://youtu.be/KnbrRhkJCRk.
ElectroWeak Unification: https://youtu.be/u05VK0pSc7I
Symmetry Breaking: https://youtu.be/yzqLHiA0uFI
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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Sources of mass.
2:33 Blinkist Free Trial.
3:51 Particles are excitations in Fields.
6:09 How Mass comes from interaction with Higgs.
10:42 Why do some particles interact and others donât?
11:31 How our universe would not exist without Higgs.
SUMMARY:
How does the Higgs give mass to particles? How do elementary particles gain mass? All mass is Energy. 99% of the mass of an atom is contained in the binding energy within the nucleus. But about 1% of your mass is contained in the mass of the subatomic particles that make up the atoms, electrons and quarks.
How do these subatomic particles get an intrinsic mass? This is due to the Higgs Field. To understand how it works, letâs look at the standard model of particle physics.
Fresh on the heels of GPT-4âs public release, a team of Microsoft AI scientists published a research paper claiming the OpenAI language model â which powers Microsoftâs now somewhat lobotomized Bing AI â shows âsparksâ of human-level intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Emphasis on the âsparks.â The researchers are careful in the paper to characterize GPT-4âs prowess as âonly a first step towards a series of increasingly generally intelligent systemsâ rather than fully-hatched, human-level AI. They also repeatedly highlighted the fact that this paper is based on an âearly versionâ of GPT-4, which they studied while it was âstill in active development by OpenAI,â and not necessarily the version thatâs been wrangled into product-applicable formation.
Disclaimers aside, though, these are some serious claims to make. Though a lot of folks out there, even some within the AI industry, think of AGI as a pipe dream, others think that developing AGI will usher in the next era of humanityâs future; the next-gen GPT-4 is the most powerful iteration of the OpenAI-built Large Language Model (LLM) to date, and on the theoretical list of potential AGI contenders, GPT-4 is somewhere around the top of the list, if not number one.
Posted in genetics
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In the search for the genes that make us human, some of the most important answers were hiding not in the genes themselves, but in what was once considered genomic junk.
Thanks to Riley J. Mangan, Ph.D. Candidate, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Duke University for his help with this episode!
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Itâs a long-debated flaw in CRISPR: When you try to give Cas9 to a patient to snip its DNA, that personâs immune system may recognize that the protein comes not from us but from our ancient microbial foes. And it might then attack.
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Itâs incredibly rechargeable, made from safe materials, andâget thisânot going to catch on fire.
