Implications of the existence of a ‘conscious’ quantum particle.
I know this story is going to be weird in many ways but this is something worth thinking about. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once stated.
“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”
Remnants from the space rock may help explain how often these cosmic explosions occur—and the threat they pose to Earth.
If you had to describe Rich Uncle Pennybags—the Monopoly mascot—would you mention his top hat? His mustache? How about his monocle?
The face of the famous board game has, in reality, never worn a monocle. Yet, many people confidently list the accessory when recalling his features—an example of a phenomenon of false visual memories.
A forthcoming paper by University of Chicago scholars, currently available in preprint, found that people have consistent, confident, and widespread false memories of famous icons—also known as the Visual Mandela Effect. Co-authored by University of Chicago scholars, the paper is the first scientific study of the internet phenomenon.
The LHCb detector was originally designed to study a particle known as the beauty quark. But now researchers are also using the experiment to search for dark matter:
Researching subatomic particles is an involved process. It can take hundreds—if not thousands—of scientists and engineers to build an experiment, keep it up and running, and analyze the enormous amounts of data it collects. That means physicists are always on the lookout for ways to do more for free: to squeeze out as much physics as possible with the machinery that already exists. And that’s exactly what a handful of physicists have set out to do with the LHCb experiment at CERN.
The LHCb detector was originally designed to study a particle known as the beauty quark. “But as time has gone on, people have seen just how much more we can do with the detector,” says Daniel Johnson, an LHCb collaborator based at MIT.
Johnson, along with a team of around 10 researchers from MIT, the University of Cincinnati and CERN, are leading LHCb’s search for dark matter, a hypothesized type of matter that, so far, has evaded detection.
How can the “root causes” of outliers be identified once they are detected? At ICML, Amazon scientists address this in their paper, “Causal structure-based root… See more.
Amazon ICML paper proposes information-theoretic measurement of quantitative causal contribution.
Brain-computer interfaces have become a practical (if limited) reality in the US. Synchron says it has become the first in the country to implant a BCI in a human patient. Doctors in New York’s Mount Sinai West implanted the company’s Stentrode in the motor cortex of a participant in Synchron’s COMMAND trial, which aims to gauge the usefulness and safety of BCIs for providing hands-free device control to people with severe paralysis. Ideally, technology like Stentrode will offer independence to people who want to email, text and otherwise handle digital tasks that others take for granted.
Surgeons installed the implant using an endovascular procedure that avoids the intrusiveness of open-brain surgery by going through the jugular vein. The operation went “extremely well” and let the patient return home 48 hours later, according to Synchron. An ongoing Australian trial has also proven successful so far, with four patients still safe a year after receiving their implants.
It may take a long time before doctors can offer Synchron’s BCIs to patients. The company received FDA approval for human trials in July 2021, and it’s still expanding the COMMAND trial as of this writing. Still, the US procedure represents a significant step toward greater autonomy for people with paralysis. It also represents a competitive victory — Elon Musk’s Neuralink has yet to receive FDA permission for its own implant.
In a new world record, China’s “artificial sun” project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes, reports Anthony Cuthbertson for the Independent. In the latest experiment, superheated plasma reached 126 million degrees Fahrenheit—that’s roughly five times hotter than the sun, which radiates a scorching 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface and about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core.
Coal and natural gas are the primary energy sources currently used around the world, but these materials come in limited supply. Nuclear fusion could be the cleanest energy source available because it replicates the sun’s physics by merging atomic nuclei to generate large amounts of energy into electricity. The process requires no fossil fuels, leaves behind no radioactive waste, and is a safer alternative to fission nuclear power, per the Independent.
“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” says Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
Posted in robotics/AI
Babies rapidly develop this ability by soaking up data from their external environments, forming a sort of “common sense” about the dynamics of the physical world. When things don’t move as expected—say, in magic tricks where objects disappear—they’ll show surprise.
For AI, it’s a completely different matter. While recent AI models have already trounced humans from game play to solving decades-old scientific conundrums, they still struggle at developing intuition about the physical world.
This month, researchers at Google-owned DeepMind took inspiration from developmental psychology and built an AI that naturally extracts simple rules about the world through watching videos. Netflix and chill didn’t work on its own; the AI model o nly learned the rules of our physical world when given a basic idea of objects, such as what their boundaries are, where they are, and how they move. Similar to babies, the AI expressed “surprise” when shown magical situations that didn’t make sense, like a ball rolling up a ramp.
Astronomers hope to explain how galaxies like this one can grow magnetic fields that stretch for thousands of light-years — and what affect they have on galactic evolution.
The finding came out of a project to study radio signals from spiral galaxies that are tilted so we see them edge-on from Earth’s point of view. For these galaxies, astronomers can more easily separate what’s happening outside of the galaxies’ disks, in the gas-filled “haloes” that surround them.
Using observations from a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, the astronomers measured properties of the radio emission coming from the halo of the galaxy NGC 4631. They’d known from past observations that there were large-scale magnetic fields that extended out of the disk into the halo of this galaxy.
But with the new data, they could see the directions these fields pointed across multiple dimensions. Their measurements revealed that the fields pointed alternately in and out of the galaxy’s disk along the flat view of the sky from Earth’s point of view. Another measurement showed that the fields also alternated in pointing toward and away from Earth along our line of sight to the galaxy.
In a new world record, China’s “artificial sun” project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes, reports Anthony Cuthbertson for the 