You know that phrase, “Do what’s most important first thing in the morning”? That doesn’t mean check your email or scroll through Twitter and Instagram. It means perform some morning exercises. Considering the fact your day is mostly going to be spent sitting in front of your screen, the best thing you can do when you open your eyes is get your blood flowing.
A new black hole search method has just yielded fruit, and boy is it juicy. Astronomers have found a stellar-mass black hole clocking in at around 70 times the mass of the Sun — but according to current models of stellar evolution, its size is impossible, at least in the Milky Way.
The chemical composition of our galaxy’s most massive stars suggests that they lose most of their mass at the end of their lives through explosions and powerful stellar winds, before the star’s core collapses into a black hole.
The hefty stars in the mass range that could produce a black hole are expected to end their lives in what is called a pair-instability supernova that completely obliterates the stellar core. So astronomers are scratching their heads trying to figure out how the black hole — named LB-1 — got so chonky.
How do you know you are real? A classic paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom argues you are likely a simulation.
NOTE FROM TED: This talk, which was filmed at a TEDx event, contains several assertions about diet that come from the speaker’s own understanding of nutrition. While some viewers may find advice provided in this talk to be helpful, please do not look to this talk for medical advice. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedx_content_guidelines.pdf
Can you cure your self from life threatening health problems? Can you reverse ageing? Darryl D’Souza, an expert in natural therapy and pioneer in integrated wellness and spirituality talks about how he reversed ageing by following simple laws of nature about food and nutrition. How the food that we eat today has become our poison and how we can reclaim our lives and good health. Darryl is the author of “Become Healthy or Extinct”, a book about reversing chronic illnesses with integrated natural therapy. The book has followers in over 150 countries. An engineer by profession, but drawn into the world of natural therapies after failed attempts by modern medicine to cure him of some serious illnesses at a young age. Darryl is a pioneer in Integrated Wellness & Spirituality and conducts life-transforming talks & workshops that expose the real causes of widespread sickness in society and he gives you breakthrough ideas on how to become part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
A pair of physicists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Russia recently proposed an entirely new view of the cosmos. Their research takes the wacky idea that we’re living in a computer simulation and mashes it up with the mind-boggling “many worlds” theory to say that, essentially, our entire universe is part of an immeasurably large quantum system spanning “uncountable” multiverses.
When you think about quantum systems, like IBM and Google’s quantum computers, we usually imagine a device that’s designed to work with subatomic particles – qubits – to perform quantum calculations.
Here might be cracks in space-time, but humanity’s telescopes can’t see them.
The cracks, if they exist, are old, remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang. But a new paper shows they might be too faint to detect.
When competing, it makes sense to compete on/with that worth competing (for). AI or not, it doesn’t matter.
The South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol has retired from professional play, telling Yonhap news agency that his decision was motivated by the ascendancy of AI.
“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” Lee told Yonhap. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
Continue reading “Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible” »
The FDA is helping to speed up the process of researching and approving psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance in magic mushrooms, to treat major depressive disorder (MDD).
For the second time in a year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated psilocybin therapy — currently being tested in clinical trials — as “breakthrough therapy,” an action that is meant to accelerate the typically sluggish process of drug development and review. It is typically requested by a drug company and granted only when preliminary evidence suggests the drug may be an enormous improvement over already available therapy, according to the FDA.
New books by a physicist and science journalist mount aggressive but ultimately unpersuasive defenses of multiverses.
Tohoku University researchers have developed a strategy that could help cells get rid of disease-related debris. Further research could lead to treatments for neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases, Down syndrome, and maybe even aging-related diseases. The findings were published in the journal Molecular Cell.
Cells have a natural ability to routinely rid themselves of unnecessary or dysfunctional proteins and organelles. During this process of “autophagy,” debris are tagged with a compound called ubiquitin and then degraded within tiny cellular vacuoles. Autophagy is impaired in some cancers, and neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases, so scientists have been working to develop drugs that can regulate this process. However, little is known about the details of autophagy, such as how the cell knows which components to tag with ubiquitin.
In previous research, Hirokazu Arimoto, a chemical biologist at Tohoku University, and colleagues found that autophagy is initiated against invading streptococci bacteria when they are tagged with the nucleic acid guanine. The researchers wondered if guanine tagging could also initiate autophagy against other cellular components.
