Octopus Overlords

stessier wrote: Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:14 am Pretty neat.

Isgrimnur wrote: Mon Sep 05, 2022 10:49 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: Sun Oct 18, 2020 6:22 pm It's time for Good News / Bad News in the world of superconductors

Good News:

Spoiler:

Scientists have reported the discovery of the first room-temperature superconductor, after more than a century of waiting.

Bad News:

Spoiler:

At a pressure about 2.6 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere, and temperatures below about 15° C, the electrical resistance vanished.

On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data issues other scientists have raised over the past 2 years that have undermined confidence in one of two key signs of superconductivity Dias’s team had claimed. “There have been a lot of questions about this result for a while,” says James Hamlin, an experimental condensed matter physicist at the University of Florida. But Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and longtime critic of the study, says the retraction does not go far enough. He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct.

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real. “Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; “local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. “It is fantastic news. It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-deserved.”

Through studying the mother’s blood sample, along with a number of others, scientists were able to unpick exactly what made her blood different, and in the process confirmed a new set of blood grouping—the “Er” system, the 44th to be described.

You’re probably familiar with the four main blood types—A, B, O, and AB. But this isn’t the only blood classification system. There are many ways of grouping red blood cells based on differences in the sugars or proteins that coat their surface, known as antigens. The grouping systems run concurrently, so your blood can be classified in each—it might, for instance, be type O in the ABO system, positive (rather than negative) under the Rhesus system, and so on.
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But so rare were the mysterious antibodies in the latest work that when the team started their investigation, they had historical blood samples from just 13 people—gathered over 40 years—to analyze. Other recently established systems have been found thanks to similarly small numbers of people. Back in 2020, Thornton and her colleagues described a new blood group called MAM-negative that at the time was confirmed in just 11 people worldwide. And some of the most recently discovered blood groups have been found in single families, she adds. Both “MAM” and “Er” are obscure references to the names of the patients whose blood samples first sparked the possibility of a new blood group discovery.

stessier wrote: Wed Oct 12, 2022 8:59 am If you are at 10 drinks per day (on average!), how are you even able to complete the survey??

Unagi wrote: Wed Oct 12, 2022 6:57 am How could they possibly know that / reverse engineer that far back.

The practice of adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth’s rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world’s foremost metrology body has decided.

The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have drifted apart by more than 0.9 seconds, a leap second has been added.

Stopping the adjustments is “a leap forward” for researchers who work on time and frequency, says Georgette Macdonald, director general of the Metrology Research Centre in Halifax, Canada. “I’m pleased their efforts got us to this moment.”

Leap seconds aren’t predictable, because they depend on to Earth’s natural rotation. They disrupt systems based on precise timekeeping, Macdonald says, and can wreak havoc in the digital age. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google are among the tech companies that have called for leap seconds to be scrapped.

The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to put on how much they be allowed to diverge.

When Mount Vesuvius unleashed its fury in A.D. 79, Herculaneum was just one of several towns smothered by ash and savaged by superheated volcanic avalanches. But three centuries after excavations began, experts are still unsure as to what precisely killed the victims of this once bustling metropolis.

Along with collapsing buildings, flying debris, and stampedes of fleeing residents, various studies have blamed the inhalation of ash and volcanic gases, a sudden heat shock, and even the vaporization of people’s soft tissues.

Now, two studies add a couple twists to the tale.

One concludes that those taking cover in the town’s boathouses were not really burned or vaporized, but instead baked as if inside a stone oven. The second has found a victim in a different portion of the city whose brain appears to have melted before being frozen into glass, as if afflicted by sorcery.

For the first time ever in a laboratory, researchers were able to generate more energy from fusion reactions than they used to start the process. The total gain was around 150%.

Researchers say that fusion energy could one day provide clean, safe electricity without greenhouse gas emissions. But even with this announcement, independent scientists believe that dream remains many decades away.

Unless there's an even larger breakthrough, fusion is unlikely to play a major role in power production before the 2060s or 2070s, says Tony Roulstone, a nuclear engineer at Cambridge University in the U.K., who's done an economic analysis of fusion power.
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For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it's still only around one percent of the total energy used.

Moreover, it would take many capsules exploding over and over to produce enough energy to feed the power grid. "You'd have to do this many, many times a second," McBride says. NIF can currently do around one laser "shot" a week.

Unagi wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 1:51 pm Yeah. I feel like this should be ‘bigger news’.

Scientists have invented a new way to destroy toxic substances known as “forever chemicals” that have become widespread in waterways around the world, presenting risks to human health and biodiversity, reports a recent study. The technique successfully broke down 95 percent of the pernicious chemicals, called perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), in just 45 minutes.
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The basic concept removes PFAS by infusing a contaminated source with hydrogen, which causes water to release electrons and other particles that can weaken the strong molecular bonds in PFAS. The UV light pulses supercharge these reactions, speeding up the time it takes for the toxic chemicals to fall apart into harmless components.

The laser diverts lightning bolts by creating an easier path for the electrical discharge to flow down. When laser pulses are fired into the sky, a change in the refractive index of the air makes them shrink and become so intense that they ionise air molecules around them. This leads to a long chain of what the researchers call filaments in the sky, where air molecules rapidly heat up and race away at supersonic speeds, leaving a channel of low density, ionised air. These channels, which last for milliseconds, are more electrically conductive than the surrounding air, and so form an easier path for the lightning to follow.

Unagi wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 2:11 pm I realize it (in its current state) is currently a tiny little achievement, but it’s also a bit of a first ‘spark’ that lit the first fire. Probably a hundred years off, if we can make it.

noxiousdog wrote: Mon Jan 23, 2023 12:08 pm

Unagi wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 2:11 pm I realize it (in its current state) is currently a tiny little achievement, but it’s also a bit of a first ‘spark’ that lit the first fire. Probably a hundred years off, if we can make it.

I'm getting on the fusion is a waste of time and money train. We already have a fusion reactor. The sun. With advances in battery and collection technology, it's very, very unlikely we'll need fusion for general use in 30 years.

It's definitely a cool technology, but solar seems way more practical.

stessier wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 4:29 pm New Boston Dynamics robot video.

https://twitter.com/BostonDynamics/stat ... 0969710592

Hyena wrote: Mon Jan 23, 2023 1:34 pm and I'm also aware that this is most likely just a pre-recorded set of instructions vs. the robot problem solving, but still...wow.

A sugar replacement called erythritol – used to add bulk or sweeten stevia, monkfruit and keto reduced-sugar products – has been linked to blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study.

“The degree of risk was not modest,” said lead study author Dr. Stanley Hazen, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

People with existing risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke if they had the highest levels of erythritol in their blood, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

In response to the study, the Calorie Control Council, an industry association, told CNN that “the results of this study are contrary to decades of scientific research showing reduced-calorie sweeteners like erythritol are safe, as evidenced by global regulatory permissions for their use in foods and beverages,” said Robert Rankin, the council’s executive director, in an email.

The results “should not be extrapolated to the general population, as the participants in the intervention were already at increased risk for cardiovascular events,” Rankin said.

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2023 9:44 pm The results “should not be extrapolated to the general population, as the participants in the intervention were already at increased risk for cardiovascular events,” Rankin said.

Isgrimnur wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 4:12 pm https://xkcd.com/1688/

Unagi wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 4:34 pm I love the route into the "2023 or later" maps.

TheMix wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 4:08 pm

Unagi wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 4:34 pm I love the route into the "2023 or later" maps.

Wait... What? I live in Colorado... Should I be concerned?