Scientists supersize quantum mechanics
Nature.com reports on an article that put us in to a state of flux with a curious mention of Schrodinger’s cat.
Article as follows:
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.
Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical ‘ground state’ — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.
The work is simultaneously being published online today in Nature and presented today at the American Physical Society’s meeting in Portland, Oregon.
According to quantum theory, particles act as waves rather than point masses on very small scales. This has dozens of bizarre consequences: it is impossible to know a particle’s exact position and velocity through space, yet it is possible for the same particle to be doing two contradictory things simultaneously. Through a phenomenon known as ’superposition’ a particle can be moving and stationary at the same time — at least until an outside force acts on it. Then it instantly chooses one of the two contradictory positions.
Full article at Nature.com
Blind Soldier Able To ‘See’ With Tongue
“A soldier blinded by a grenade in Iraq has described how his life has been transformed by ground-breaking technology that enables him to ‘’see” with his tongue.
Lance Corporal Craig Lundberg, 24, from Walton, Liverpool, can read words, identify shapes and walk unaided thanks to the BrainPort device, despite being totally blind.
The Liverpool fan, who plays blind football for England, lost his sight after being struck by a rocket-propelled grenade while serving in Basra in 2007.
He was faced with the prospect of relying on a guide dog or cane for the rest of his life.
But he was chosen by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to be the first person to trial a pioneering device – the BrainPort, which could revolutionise treatment for the blind.
The BrainPort converts visual images into a series of electrical pulses which are sent to the tongue. The different strength of the tingles can be read or interpreted so the user can mentally visualise their surroundings and navigate around objects.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, KirstyJ)
Humans could regrow body parts like some amphibians
“Researchers have found that the gene p21 appears to block the healing power still enjoyed by some creatures including amphibians but lost through evolution to all other animals. By turning off p21, the process can be miraculously switched back on.
Academics from The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia found that mice lacking the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue. Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth. According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like regenerating embryonic stem cells rather than adult mammalian cells. This means they act as if they creating rather thane mending the body.
Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division. They turned off the gene in mice which had damaged ears and they regrew them. While they say it is early days, there is nothing theoretically different about applying the same process to humans. Professor Ellen Heber-Katz, the lead scientist, said: “Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring.”
Read more at The Telegraph
Pi Day: Five Tasty Facts About The Famous Ratio
“Mathematics enthusiasts will this weekend be celebrating Pi day, which falls on 14 March in honour of the famous ratio’s first few digits, 3.14. You probably know that pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, but here are some less familiar facts about the mathematical constant. We did consider giving you 3.14 facts but alas we had five…
Pi really is in the sky…
The stars overhead inspired the ancient Greeks, but they probably never used them to calculate pi. Robert Matthews of the University of Aston in Birmingham, UK, combined astronomical data with number theory to do just that.
Matthews used the fact that for any large collection of random numbers, the probability that any two have no common factor is 6/pi2. Numbers have a common factor if they are divisible by the same number, not including 1. For example, 4 and 15 have no common factors, but 12 and 15 have the common factor 3.”
Read more at New Scientist (thanks, SuZi)
Why Surprises Temporarily Blind Us
“Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.
New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.
The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.
‘The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated,” René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. “We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention.’
The researchers were also interested in what happens to us when our attention is captured by an unexpected event.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity On Display
“JERUSALEM — There are pasted-on half pages, numerous cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship and an open acknowledgment that some of the mathematics was beyond even him. Albert Einstein personally rewrote the laws of physics in a sparsely furnished central Berlin apartment nearly a century ago and the resulting manuscript, profoundly human and surprisingly moving to examine, has been put on display here for the first time.
Each of the 46 pages, labored over between November 1915 and their publication in May 1916, has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. There on Page 1 is the now familiar title in German: “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity.”
The display of the work, which forced a redefinition of gravity, predicted the existence of black holes and illuminated how galaxies are formed, is at the center of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Out of concern for the life of the documents, it will be up only for the next three weeks.”
Read more at the NY Times
Einstein’s Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale
“The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.
The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists’ imaginations.
For centuries Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See “Einstein and Beyond” in National Geographic magazine.)
This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury’s orbit around the sun, which Newton’s gravity couldn’t account for.
The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein’s gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.
Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.
But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.”
Read more at National Geographic
Acts Of Kindness Spread Quickly
“For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.”
Read more at Science Daily
All of life’s ingredients found in Orion nebula
The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.
By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their work produces can be seen in the image above. The peaks represent the presence of the molecule indicated.
The new data was collected by the Herschel Telescope, launched into space last year by the European Space Agency. Herschel’s HiFi instrument uses a new technique to do more-sensitive spectroscopy. It will enable scientists to better understand the chemistry of space.
The Orion Nebula is located about 1,300 light-years away. No very active star-forming region is closer to Earth. M42, as the nebula is also known, is 24 light-years across.
Wired (Thanks DG)
Motion and Emotion: Reaching Up To Remember The Good Times
“Simple motor actions, like moving marbles upward or downward between two cardboard boxes, may not seem meaningful. But a study published April 2010 in Cognition shows that motor actions can partly determine people’s emotional memories.
Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). ‘Meaningless’ motor actions can make people remember the good times or the bad.
When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them.”
Read more at Science Daily
