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Interview with Prof. Sean Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We mainly talk about quantum spacetime: the idea that our familiar spacetime might be actually emergent from some complex quantum mechanical system. We cover entanglement, decoherence, entropic gravity, the AdS/CFT correspondence, string theory, black holes, along with several philosophical questions concerning these topics, including reduction and emergence, substantivalism vs. relationalism, monism, and much more.

Sean’s website: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/
His recent book concerning these topics: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/
His papers on these topics can be found here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/research/annotated-publications/
His podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
And his Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/

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Hong Kong plans to let retail investors trade digital tokens. It’s being seen as a major step toward its goal of becoming a crypto hub. Joanna Ossinger reports on Bloomberg Television.
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Scientists from The Ohio State University have a new theory about how the building blocks of life—the many proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids that compose every organism on Earth—may have evolved to favor a certain kind of molecular structure.

It has to do with a concept called chirality. A geometric property inherent to certain , chirality can dictate a molecule’s shape, chemical reactivity, and how it interacts with other matter. Chirality is also sometimes referred to as handedness, as it can be best described as the dichotomy between our hands: Though they are not identical, the right and the left hand are mirror images of each other, and can’t be superimposed, or exactly overlaid on one another.

In the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, researchers now propose a new model of how the molecules of life may have developed their “handedness.”

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Scientists try to unravel the birth, growth and power of black holes, some of the most forceful yet difficult-to-detect objects in our universe.

It was only last year that astronomers were finally able to unveil the first pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But you couldn’t actually see the black hole itself, not directly. That’s because it is so dense that its gravitational pull prevents even light from escaping.

But the image of Sagittarius A, as our galaxy’s black hole is known, revealed a glowing halo of gas around the object—an object that we now know has a million times more mass than our sun.

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Session kindly contributed by Silvester Sabathiel in SEMF’s 2021 Numerous Numerosity Workshop: https://semf.org.es/numerosity/

ABSTRACT
With the rise and advances in the field of artificial intelligence, opportunities to understand the finer-grained mechanisms involved in mathematical cognition have increased. A vast scope of related research has been conducted on machine learning systems that learn solving differential equations, algebraic equations and integrals or proofing complex theorems, all for which the preprocessed symbolic representations form the input and output types. However on the search for cognitive mechanisms that match the scope of humans when it comes to generalizability and applicability of mathematical concepts in the external world, a more grounded approach might be required. This involves starting with fundamental mathematical concepts that are earliest acquired in the human development and learning these within an interactive and multimodal environment. In this talk we are going to examine how artificial neural network systems within such a framework provide a controlled setup to discover possible cognitive mechanisms for intuitive numerosity perception or culturally acquired numerical concepts, such as counting. First we review impactful research results from the past, before I present the contributions of the work myself was involved in. Finally we can discuss the upcoming challenges for the field of numerical cognition and where this research journey could evolve to.

SILVESTER SABATHIEL
NTNU Trondheim.
Personal website: https://silsab.com/
NTNU profile: https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/silvester.sabathiel.
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvester-Sabathiel-3
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silvester-sabathiel-03368b117

SEMF NETWORKS
Website: https://semf.org.es.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/semf_nexus.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/semf-nexus.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/semf.nexus.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/semf.nexus

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Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA.

In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable.

DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.

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A research team from LKS Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed) has developed thyroid hormone (TH)–encapsulated nanoparticles modified with an adipose-homing peptide, which selectively transports TH to adipose tissues. This will advance the treatment of obesity-related medical complications with TH by overcoming the severe adverse effects caused by systemic administration. The new findings are now published in Nature Communications.

Obesity is a major risk factor for multiple life-threatening such as diabetes and cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders. TH is an ancient hormone with therapeutic potential for obesity and its related medical complications by promoting energy expenditure. However, despite enormous research efforts in the past decades, have failed to demonstrate obvious clinical benefits of chronic systemic administration of TH on in obese individuals.

Furthermore, due to widespread expression of TH receptors, systemic administration of TH often leads to serious deleterious effects on multiple organs, including tachycardia, , muscle wasting, and osteoporosis. Skeletal muscle and adipose tissues are thought to be the two major target organs where TH exerts its stimulatory actions on metabolic rate and energy expenditure. However, whether selective delivery of TH to adipose tissues is sufficient to induce weight loss remains unclear.

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