[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

For decades, the fields of physics and chemistry have maintained that the atoms and molecules that make up the natural world define the character of solid matter. [...]

A new paper published in Nature upends that paradigm, and argues that the character of many biological materials is actually created by the water that permeates these materials. [...] the authors group these and other materials into a new class of matter that they call "hydration solids," which they say "acquire their structural rigidity, the defining characteristic of the solid state, from the fluid permeating their pores." [...]

[...] "If you think of biological materials like a skyscraper, the molecular building blocks are the steel frames that hold them up, and water in between the molecular building blocks is the air inside the steel frames. We discovered that some skyscrapers aren't supported by their steel frames, but by the air within those frames."

"This idea may seem hard to believe, but it resolves mysteries and helps predict the existence of exciting phenomena in materials," [...]

[...] allowed them to describe the characteristics that familiar organic materials display with very simple math. [...]

The paper's findings apply to huge amounts of the world around us: [...] from 50% to 90% of the living world around us, including all of the world's wood, but also other familiar materials like bamboo, cotton, pine cones, wool, hair, fingernails, pollen grains in plants, the outer skin of animals, and bacterial and fungal spores that help these organisms survive and reproduce.

[...] any natural material that's responsive to the ambient humidity around it. [...]

"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place," [...] "It's really water's world."

Scientists discover that water molecules define the materials around us (phys.org)

'Water's world'... despite the (more and more frequent, wilder and wilder) fires.

Reminds me of the generic Air-gen effect (the power of solid materials utilizing the physics of water and ambient humidity...).

Wonder what practical applications the drastic simplification of the math may yield... simulations involving organic materials should require much less computing power ( Had we but computing power enough, and time...).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 07 June 2023 - 06:18 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?

[...] discovery of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague, in the dental pulp of three people who died about 4,000 years ago – two in Somerset and the other in Cumbria. This finding is astonishing in its own right because it pushes back the earliest evidence of plague in England by several millennia. But the discovery may also help to solve one of our greatest prehistoric mysteries[...]

[...] Violence may have played a role in the replacement of the Stonehenge builders [...] 90% of the steppe herders involved in the great westward migration were males, and domesticated horses and metal weapons would have provided them with a distinct advantage in conflict. But even taking all this into account, it is almost impossible to explain how a small group of nomadic herders was able to replace a large, well-established farming society.

[...] geneticist [...] suggests that the most similar historical parallel is the European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th century. Tiny numbers of Spanish conquistadors armed with guns and steel managed to vanquish vast and sophisticated empires. These seemingly miraculous victories were, of course, only possible because Old World germs – first smallpox, then others – raced ahead of the Spanish and devastated the enemy.

[...] Similarly, it is possible that a prehistoric plague pandemic cleared the way for the steppe herders to migrate across northern Europe. Evidence points to a catastrophic demographic crash about 5,000 years ago. The population fell by as much as 60% and remained at that level for centuries.

[...] steppe herders [...] DNA is the largest source of ancestry in northern Europe, accounting for slightly less than half of the genome of the British Isles.

Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?

Phrases like 'why did the people who introduced farming to the British Isles suddenly vanish' and 'Cheddar Man's foraging kinfolk were replaced' are misleading; while many of their specific cultural practices were eventually 'replaced' with new ones,

Quote

Modern-day British people share approximately 10% of their genetic ancestry with the European population to which Cheddar Man belonged

Cheddar Man

Similarly, while

Quote

the spread of the [steppe herders] [...] was associated with the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years

The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe

90% is a far cry from 100%....

[Tsundoku]

You spin me right round baby right round like a groundwater-shifting-affecting-rotation planet baby right round round round ...

https://www.scienced...30615183147.htm

We've pumped so much groundwater that we've nudged Earth's spin
The shifting of mass and consequent sea level rise due to groundwater withdrawal has caused the Earth's rotational pole to wander nearly a meter in two decades

Date:
June 15, 2023
Source:
American Geophysical Union
Summary:
By pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone, according to a new study.

[worry]

Does that help or hurt Santa?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

[...] human brain sometimes links events that have little or no causal connection. [...] “overfitting” — using irrelevant detail to construct a model. [...]

Exactly the same thing occurs with artificial neural networks. The networks learn relevant detail but also irrelevances. [...]

[New hypothesis that] dreaming evolved specifically to deal with this problem, which is common to all neural networks.

[...] The most common way to tackle overfitting is to add some noise to the learning process, to make it harder for the neural network to focus on irrelevant detail. [...]

[...] the overfitted brain hypothesis [...] plenty of evidence in its favor. [...] one of the best ways to trigger dreams is to embark on extensive sessions playing simple repetitive games such as Tetris. [...]

[...] These dreams are not replays of remembered Tetris games but tend to be sparse on detail with hallucinatory qualities. It is this “noise” that helps the brain generalize from the game. [...]

Hoel uses his new theory to make a number of testable predictions. [...]

[...] “If it is true that sleep-deprived brains are overfitted, they will be prone to make errors in stereotypical ways,” [...]

“The overfitted brain hypothesis suggests fictions, and perhaps the arts in general, may actually have an underlying cognitive utility in the form of improving generalization and preventing overfitting, since they act as artificial dreams.”

How Artificial Neural Networks Paved the Way For A Dramatic New Theory of Dreams

I'm pretty sure the idea that the randomness of dreams helps in generalization when learning from, or processing, experiences has been in circulation for a long time (I certainly remember thinking about it years ago, pretty sure I read about it somewhere), though IDK about specifically framing it in terms of overfitting by neural networks....

May still run into the 'but does this describe most dreams?' issue used against competing theories like memory consolidation or emotional processing. It's possible that---as so often in evolution---dreams ended up serving multiple 'purposes' when the situation calls for them, while also involving substantial 'waste'....

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Building robust optical structures made of darkness

[...] new techniques to exert control over points of darkness, rather than light, using metasurfaces.

[...] "Both of these studies introduce new classes of optical singularities—regions of designed darkness—using powerful but intuitive algorithms to inform the fabrication of metasurfaces," [...]

"I told the computer: Here's what I want to achieve in terms of dark spots, tell me what shape and diameter the nanopillars should be on this metasurface to make this happen," [...]

"These dark spots are exciting because they could be used as optical traps to capture atoms," [...]

"We've designed points of darkness that can withstand a wide range of perturbations—they are topologically protected," [...]

"This degree of control could be especially useful for imaging samples in 'hostile' environments, where vibrations, pressure, temperature, and stray light would typically interfere with imaging behavior," Spaegele said.

[...] implications for remote sensing and covert detection.

[...] "Objects or detectors placed at these dark positions will also not give away their position by scattering light, allowing them to be 'hidden' without affecting the surrounding light."


Building robust optical structures made of darkness

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 28 June 2023 - 07:37 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

New Research Finds That Houseplants Can Remove Nearly All Cancer-Causing Air Pollutants Indoors

[...] there is a common misconception that outdoor air quality is worse than indoor air[...]

[...] researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)– in collaboration with Ambius, a plantscaping solutions company– [...] found that houseplants can actually remove nearly all cancer-causing fumes from an indoor space.

[...] an Ambius small green wall– which contains a variety of indoor plants– was extremely effective when it came to removing carcinogenic air pollutants. In fact, within just eight hours, the greenery was found to remove 97% of the most toxic compounds from the surrounding air.

Past studies have also displayed similar results. However, this particular experiment is the first to show that plants have the ability to remove petrol (or gasoline) fumes– one of the leading sources of toxic compounds inside buildings around the globe.

New Research Finds That Houseplants Can Remove Nearly All Cancer-Causing Air Pollutants Indoors (msn.com)

Quote

Indoor air pollution levels are typically 2-5 times higher than outdoor pollution levels and can quickly become 100 times worse than outdoor air pollution.

Several reports by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have demonstrated that indoor air pollution levels in homes, workplaces, and school classrooms are typically 2-5 times higher than outdoor pollution levels and can quickly become 100 times worse than outdoor air pollution

In general, it's recommended to regularly let in lots of outdoor air to decrease concentrations of indoor pollutants and toxic gases, such as ultrafine particles and carbon dioxide (CO2).

But your exposure to outdoor PM10 and PM2.5 increases significantly when polluted outdoor air infiltrates your home or office in such large amounts [...]

If you're wondering "at what AQI should I close the windows," according to the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline it's best to avoid exposure to an hourly average of PM2.5 over 15 µg/m3. That translates to a U.S. AQI of 57. However, it's equally important to remember that no amount of air pollution exposure is safe.

How does outdoor air pollution affect indoor air quality? | IQAir

Guess we'll just have to breathe the air from the metaverse (too bad it's still too hot---for our current physical bodies...).

In the meantime, best to practice sleeping in my spacesuit... and pray nobody shoots me to let the terrible air in.

Or maybe people will be walking around inside bulletproof spacesuits stuffed full of bioengineered superhouseplants (perhaps they could even feed off all our excretions... right up the orifices)?...

In all seriousness though I'm glad I'll be picking up my top-rated new air purifier and CO2 monitor today. Might wear one of my P100 masks while I'm letting the outside air in if the outdoor air quality reading is sufficiently dire.

[Tsundoku]

Whoa, this is cool.

All Kinds of Trash is Turned into Valuable Graphene That Can Cut Environmental Impact of Concrete by a Third

https://www.goodnews...ete-by-a-third/

Self-healing metals and lithium ion batteries, oh my!

Stunned Researchers Discover that Metals Can Heal Themselves ‘Without Human Intervention’

https://www.goodnews...n-intervention/

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 21 July 2023 - 07:40 AM

[worry]

From reddit thread: What statistically improbable thing happened to you?

Quote

Took a summer time Organic Chemistry class, one month of classes 5 days a week then a three week break then another month for the second semester. After the break I reached into the box in my closet to grab the textbook where I had hidden it and felt a sharp stab in the corner of my little finger at the cuticle of the nail bed. I was running late to class so I thought nothing of it.

I became ill with profuse sweating and nausea during the day then violently ill into the night with vomiting and diarrhea and swollen adenoids. Went to the ER the next morning and they ran every test they could. Two days later I started having trouble breathing and went to the ER again. My heart was swollen up half again it normal size, my lungs were swollen, and my kidneys too. Doctors kept me for two days with batteries of tests and after two days let me go as everything was going back to normal. Then I began shitting what appeared to be a white paste and this went on for two days. At the end of which I noticed that my tongue and the lining of my mouth was almost purple in color and I had a red streak from the tip of my little finger that during the day extended up to my bicep by that evening. Went back to the ER and the doctor said he had no clue but maybe I had been bitten by something venomous.

I then thought about the day that the symptoms started and went to that box in my closet and sure enough there was a little black spider in the box. I asked one of my professors about it and he told me the county Health Department had a entomology office not far from campus so I captured the little spider and went on over.

The doctor there told me it was just a grass spider and there was absolutely no way it could have envenomated me for 3 reasons. He said they have curved mandibles so they cant hit the human skin, they have soft mandibles so even when they manage to strike the skin the mandible will turn and not break the surface but most importantly their venom which digests the proteins that stretch between the cell walls of animals gets bound to Platelets in the human bloodstream and is almost instantly neutralized.

I showed him where the bite was as evidenced by the red streak and sure enough it was in the corner of the nail bed in very soft tissue of the cuticle where the spider could actually get a strike. He asked if I had some kind of platelets disorder. I made a quick call to the Cancer Research hospital I worked at in the evenings at that time and sure enough I had donated platelets the evening before being bitten. A process where they put you on a platelet phoresies machine and extract almost all of your platelets for donation to kids who are in need of them due to having low counts from the chemotherapy.

It was at this point that the entomologist started hyperventilating and asking all kinds of questions. He was low key freaking out. He kept repeating that this was a billion to billion to one event and he'd never heard of it before. He ended up getting me to sign some papers so he could have my medical records and published a paper on it. Fun for him but not so much for me. The white paste that I pooped for 3 days was the epithelial lining of my entire digestive tract which came out as white pasty looking individual cells. By the end of the month everything was back to normal like none of it had ever happened. Interesting side note. When some spiders inject their victims and turn them into liquid that they can then drink this venom dissolves the proteins that hold cells together by running between the cell walls. These proteins re the only things binding the cells together. Without these proteins we would be reduced to a nasty white almost liquidy paste.

[Tsundoku]

This would be nice, but I also can't help thinking what the bad guys would do with it.

That's if it's legit. I'll believe it when Science Daily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/) gives it the thumbs up.

Viral room-temperature superconductor claims spark excitement and scepticism
South Korean scientists claim to have developed superconductor material that operates at room temperature — which would be huge.

https://www.news.com...617fd0baf5b4bca

[Tsundoku]

Speaking of Science Daily ... sounds like fun:

Sun 'umbrella' tethered to asteroid might help mitigate climate change

Date: July 31, 2023
Source: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Summary: Earth is rapidly warming and scientists are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the effects of climate change. An astronomer has proposed a novel approach -- a solar shield to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth, combined with a tethered, captured asteroid as a counterweight. Engineering studies using this approach could start now to create a workable design that could mitigate climate change within decades.

https://www.scienced...30731151552.htm

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster

[...] Most machine learning programs today rely heavily on [gradient descent], and other fields also use it to analyze data and solve engineering problems.

[...] Gradient descent algorithms feel their way to the bottom by picking a point and calculating the slope (or gradient) of the curve around it, then moving in the direction where the slope is steepest. Imagine this as feeling your way down a mountain in the dark. You may not know exactly where to move, how long you'll have to hike or how close to sea level you will ultimately get, but if you head down the sharpest descent, you should eventually arrive at the lowest point in the area.

[...] Grimmer found that the fastest sequences always had one thing in common: The middle step was always a big one. Its size depended on the number of steps in the repeating sequence. [...] showed that this sequence can arrive at the optimal point nearly three times faster than it would by taking constant baby steps. "Sometimes, you should really overcommit," [...]

[...] "This intuition, that I should think not step by step, but as a number of steps consecutively — I think this is something that many people ignore," [...] "It's not the way it's taught."

[...] The results also raise an additional theoretical mystery that has kept Grimmer up at night. Why did the ideal patterns of step sizes all have such a symmetric shape? Not only is the biggest step always smack in the center, but the same pattern appears on either side of it: Keep zooming in and subdividing the sequence, he said, and you get an "almost fractal pattern" of bigger steps surrounded by smaller steps. The repetition suggests an underlying structure governing the best solutions that no one has yet managed to explain.

Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster | Quanta Magazine

Quote

Pondering the Bits That Build Space-Time and Brains

Vijay Balasubramanian investigates whether the fabric of the universe might be built from information, and what it means that physicists can even ask such a question.

[...] "it from qubit," since quantum bits, or qubits — complex combinations of 0s and 1s — are more general than classical bits.

One important advance has been the understanding that a universe that curves like a saddle — AdS space — where gravity operates in the familiar but poorly understood way, can be seen as equivalent to a lower-dimensional world that's free from pesky gravity. This is the famous AdS/CFT duality. This concept opens the possibility that space is not fundamental. Rather, it could be emergent. A lot of my work has been concerned with that: developing a theory that doesn't contain space.

[...] if two regions in the volume of space are connected, then in the "flat world" boundary, the corresponding variables are entangled quantumly. That means they contain information about each other; measuring one tells you something about the other. It's a very beautiful idea, and a specific realization of Wheeler's it-from-bit notion: If these bits of quantum information were not connected through entanglement, then there'd be no space.

Are you saying that our 3D universe might really be an optical illusion generated by entangled 1s and 0s in some flat land?

It's completely fair to think about that literally. [...]

[...] Up close, you have every reason to expect that space itself, like everything in quantum mechanics, is fluctuating like crazy, bouncing around and ripping apart. In that case, what does it even mean to say A is next to B?

[...] We must be willing to open our minds to more subtle ideas of space, which is hard because our imaginations are closely tied to our daily experience as large animals.

[...] An apparent information paradox can be avoided if you agree that the rules for computation in quantum gravity let disconnected universes become momentarily linked.

Pondering the Bits That Build Space-Time and Brains | Quanta Magazine

Quote

Using advanced mathematics and light, researchers are able to develop "synthetic dimensions" [...] Conventional materials are limited to only three dimensions with an X, Y and Z axis [...] But now we are building materials in the synthetic dimension, or 4D, [...] to manipulate the energy wave path to go exactly where we want it to go [...] The new metamaterial represents a breakthrough in the field of mathematics known as topology [...] "allows waves to navigate a sample undisturbed by disorders and defects." [...] breakthrough could have implications for everything from quantum computing to developing earthquake-proof structures.
Scientists Use 4D to Reach Metamaterial Breakthrough | Watch (msn.com)

Quote

Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature

Experts closing in on potentially identifying new force after surprise wobble of subatomic particle

[...] fifth, fundamental force of nature.


Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature | Particle physics | The Guardian

Quote

"Demons have been theoretically conjectured for a long time, but experimentalists never studied them," [...] "In fact, we weren't even looking for it. But it turned out we were doing exactly the right thing, and we found it."

[...] "At first, we had no idea what it was. Demons are not in the mainstream. The possibility came up early on, and we basically laughed it off," [...] "But, as we started ruling things out, we started to suspect that we had really found the demon."

[...] Its discovery could help resolve the mystery of how superconductors work.

Bizarre 'demon' particle found inside superconductor could help unlock a 'holy grail' of physics | Space

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 12 August 2023 - 03:29 PM

[Tsundoku]

So Bavarian wild boars are ... radioactive?

https://www.news.com...147f84941112101

Bizarre reason Germany’s wild boars are radioactive
Scientists have finally discovered why German wild boars are so radioactive, and it’s due to their taste for a fancy treat.

(Here's a superhero/villain origin story if I ever heard one)

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Scientists Say There May Have Been a Second Big Bang

[...] "Dark Big Bang" may have "occurred when the universe was less than one month old."

[...] could've formed several different kinds of dark matter, including "darkzillas" — yes, that's a "Godzilla" reference — which are monstrously sized particles 10 trillion times the mass of a single proton.

However, if the event was more gradual instead of forceful and abrupt, the Dark Big Bang would've produced lighter "dark cannibal" particles that would absorb each other with each collision.

[...]

Freese is now hoping that studying gravitational waves emerging from the universe's gravitational wave background could shed more light on her Dark Big Bang theory.

[...] "darkzillas" or "dark cannibals" might account for a good portion of the stuff that surrounds us.

Scientists Say There May Have Been a Second Big Bang (msn.com)

[worry]

Yeah it's called Young Sheldon.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

A radical theory that consistently unifies gravity and quantum mechanics while preserving Einstein's classical concept of spacetime has been announced in two [peer reviewed] papers [...]

The prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or "quantized," in order to fit within quantum theory. [...]

[...] Instead of modifying spacetime, the theory—dubbed a "postquantum theory of classical gravity"—modifies quantum theory and predicts an intrinsic breakdown in predictability that is mediated by spacetime itself. This results in random and violent fluctuations in spacetime that are larger than envisaged under quantum theory, rendering the apparent weight of objects unpredictable if measured precisely enough.

[...] an experiment to test it: to measure a mass very precisely to see if its weight appears to fluctuate over time.

[...] "Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are mathematically incompatible with each other, so it's important to understand how this contradiction is resolved. Should spacetime be quantized, or should we modify quantum theory, or is it something else entirely? Now that we have a consistent fundamental theory in which spacetime does not get quantized, it's anybody's guess."

[...] "In both quantum gravity and classical gravity, spacetime must be undergoing violent and random fluctuations all around us, but on a scale which we haven't yet been able to detect. But if spacetime is classical, the fluctuations have to be larger than a certain scale, and this scale can be determined by another experiment where we test how long we can put a heavy atom in superposition of being in two different locations."

[...] The postquantum theory has implications beyond gravity. The infamous and problematic "measurement postulate" of quantum theory is not needed, since quantum superpositions necessarily localize through their interaction with classical spacetime.

The theory was motivated by Professor Oppenheim's attempt to resolve the black hole information problem. [...] The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability.

New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics (phys.org)

Quote

A physicist says it's possible to determine if our universe is a giant simulation [...]

There is some evidence suggesting that our physical reality could be a simulated virtual reality [...]

Any virtual reality world will be based on information processing. That means everything is ultimately digitized or pixelated down to a minimum size that cannot be subdivided further: bits. This appears to mimic our reality according to [...] quantum mechanics [...]

The laws of physics that govern everything in the universe also resemble computer code [...] a simulation would follow ...]

Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our universe, which is the speed of light. In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit. We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, [...] time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.

Quantum "entanglement" also allows two particles to be spookily connected [...] while we may think two particles are millions of light years apart, they wouldn't be if they were created in a simulation.

[...] detecting these information bits will prove the simulation hypothesis.

[...] I've even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. These studies led to the publication, in 2022, of an experimental protocol to test these predictions.

The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles [...] annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting "photons" [...]

I have predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics. The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools

Physicists' Experiment Could Test If Universe Is a Simulation (businessinsider.com)

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

On those prior two articles: perhaps I should have made it clear that if space-time is classical then it is continuous, and can't be reduced to discrete units or bits as in the second theory. Here's hoping the experiments they propose really do prove feasible in the near (or not too distant) future.

Quote

in any attempt to define life, we're inherently constrained by human intuition [...] The only life we know is life on Earth. Some scientists call this the n=1 problem, where n is the number of examples from which we can generalize. We have no idea if earthly life is average in the cosmos or some sort of freak outlier. With all the varied chemistries of other planets, all the contingencies that drive evolution, all the ways that matter and energy interact—who knows how strange life on another world might be? What if life as we know it is the wrong life to be looking for?

[...] Life brings complexity into the universe[...] because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.

[...] Assembly Theory[...] measures the complexity of an object—say, a molecule—by calculating the number of steps necessary to put the object's smallest building blocks together in that certain way. [...] when testing a wide range of molecules, that those with an "assembly number" above 15 were exclusively the products of life. [... base on Earthly samples ...]

No one expects to find an alien cellphone in Mars's Jezero Crater. [... Technically an Earth cellphone would be an alien cellphone on Mars ...] Walker would use the theory to predict what life on a given planet might look like. It would require knowing a lot about the planet—information we might have about Venus, but not yet about a distant exoplanet—but, crucially, would not depend at all on how life on Earth works, what life on Earth might do with those materials. Without the ability to divorce the search for alien life from the example of life we know, Walker thinks, a search is almost pointless. "Any small fluctuations in simple chemistry can actually drive you down really radically different evolutionary pathways," she told me. "I can't imagine [life] inventing the same biochemistry on two worlds."

An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life - The Atlantic (msn.com)

Quote

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. [...] But unfortunately for the standard model[...] When we measure the expansion rate using nearby galaxies and supernovas (exploding stars), it is 10% larger than when we predict it based on the CMB [and the standard model].

In our new paper [...] we present one possible explanation: that we live in a giant void in space (an area with below average density). We show that this could inflate local measurements through outflows of matter from the void. Outflows would arise when denser regions surrounding a void pull it apart—they'd exert a bigger gravitational pull than the lower density matter inside the void.

[...]

Such a large and deep void is unexpected in the standard model—and therefore controversial. The CMB gives a snapshot of structure in the infant universe, suggesting that matter today should be rather uniformly spread out. However, directly counting the number of galaxies in different regions does indeed suggest we are in a local void.

[...] the bulk flow of galaxies on this scale has quadruple the speed expected in the standard model. It also seems to increase with the size of the region considered—opposite to what the standard model predicts. The likelihood of this being consistent with the standard model is below one in a million.

[...] This prompted us to see what our study [using MOND instead of General Relativity for gravity] predicted for the bulk flow. We found it yields a quite good match to the observations. That requires that we are fairly close to the void center, and the void being most empty at its center.

Do we live in a giant void? That could solve the puzzle of the universe's expansion, research suggests (phys.org)

If we are in a local void, and that is highly unusual, then perhaps conditions on Earth---and life on Earth---is more likely to be an outlier relative to the universe; and perhaps regions with higher density will also be denser with life?... Of course there are so many variables that it could also go the other way, with the higher matter (or energy) density disrupting the formation of life (an obvious and extreme counterexample would be inside of a star---assuming there's no life there---but I'd assume that's not the level of 'density' they mean).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 05 December 2023 - 07:10 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Over 70 years ago, Solomon Asch conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments that fundamentally changed our understanding of conformity. [...] a group task where they had to match line lengths.

[...] Astonishingly, Asch found that a significant number of people chose to conform to the obviously wrong group decision rather than rely on their own perceptions.
[...]

“[...] Since the results of Asch look very impressive we were often wondering whether they still hold today [in Bern] or whether it is a phenomenon of the United States during the 1950s.

“There was also a lot of discussion about replicability in psychology [...]

When we started the study, we could not imagine to be able to replicate the original findings as close as it turned out[...] We thought Asch’s findings were overstated. We also believed that providing incentives for correct answers would wipe out the conformity effect. Both did not happen. The replication turned out to be very close to the original results and providing monetary incentives did not eliminate the effect of social pressure.”

[...] In the non-incentivized group, the average error rate in the line judgment task was 33%, closely mirroring Asch’s findings. However, in the incentivized group, the error rate dropped to 25%.

Scientists revisit Solomon Asch's classic conformity experiments -- and are stunned by the results (psypost.org)

Quote

For years now, GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: [...] around 6,000 people in rural Kenya [...] Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.

[...]

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. [...]

[...] the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.

[...] the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol [...]

[...] People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. [...] long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment in Kenya are in - Vox

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

A whiff of tears reduces male aggression, says study

[...] according to a new study published Thursday, human tears themselves contain a chemical signal that reduces brain activity linked to aggression.

[...] Numerous studies have shown rodent tears contain chemicals serving as social signals they emit on demand—female mice tears for example reduce fighting among males; and subordinate male mole rats smear themselves in their own tears so that dominant males attack them less.

[...] "We note that crying often occurs in very close-range interactions, to the extent that 'kissing teary cheeks' is a recurring theme across cultures,"

A whiff of tears reduces male aggression, says study (phys.org)

... can we put these into spray bottles?... hoses maybe....

Diffuse it through our indoor atmospheres... at least in shared public spaces.

I guess headbutts might also work. Get in their face with your tears.

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[...] Whether it is the waft of clove-studded oranges or the crisp fragrance of a fir tree, the festive season is filled with aromas that conjure Christmases past. Now researchers say our sense of smell, and its connection to our memory, could be used to help fight dementia.

[...] “Although it can have other causes, losing your sense of smell can be an early sign of dementia,” [...]

[...] Neurons involved in the olfactory system are also involved in other systems in the brain. [...] As a result, if the sense of smell becomes dysfunctional, cognitive processing might also be affected.

A number of studies have found that exposure to certain odours can either boost or hinder cognition, while work by Hummel and colleagues has suggested smell training in older people can improve their verbal function and subjective wellbeing.

[...] a small study published last year, by researchers in Korea, revealed that intensive smell training led to improvements in depression, attention, memory and language functions in 34 patients with dementia compared with 31 participants with dementia who did not retrieve such training.

“We’ve already seen some early studies suggesting that ‘training’ our sense of smell, through repeated exposure to strong-smelling substances, could have benefits in improving cognitive performance in certain tasks,” [...]

Among other problems, intensive scent training takes time and effort. In an attempt to solve this problem, [...] and his team have come up with a device called “Memory Air that emits 40 different smells twice a night, while people are sleeping – an approach Leon says allows “universal compliance”.

Bolstering our sense of smell may reduce the risk of dementia | Health | The Guardian

Wonder if it could also influence what they dream about... for sweeter dreams, or to enhance particular memories. Perhaps try pairing particular things to remember with distinctive scents?...

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Quantum Batteries Could Provide a New Kind of Energy Storage by Messing With Time

[...] In classical physics and everyday life, events can only occur in a linear fashion or fixed order. Think cause before effect, or event A (flicking a switch) before event B (the light turns on).

In the quantum realm, however, that linear order breaks down and superposition allows for events to unfold along two parallel paths at once. In a way, this messes with time because an event that follows another can also influence the event's outcome as if it came before, because both orders of events, A before B and B before A, are simultaneously true.

"Putting it simply, it has been found that the laws of quantum mechanics allow for quantum superposition of causal orders," [...]

"We demonstrated that the way you charge a battery made up of quantum particles could drastically impact its performance," says Chen. "We saw huge gains in both the energy stored in the system and the thermal efficiency."

"Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive effect that a relatively less powerful charger guarantees a charged battery with more energy at a higher efficiency,"

Quantum Batteries Could Provide a New Kind of Energy Storage by Messing With Time : ScienceAlert

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer

[...] Few of us have contemplated what a world without deer would look like.

[...] deer transmit through direct contact or by shedding prions into the environment. Ingested or inhaled, the prions slowly eat away at the animal's brain and spinal cord. A deer can take well more than a year to show symptoms, but at some point the disease will leave it confused and weak. The deer's body wastes away, and eventually, it dies. There is no treatment. Most ominously of all, the prions can bind with soil, where they can remain viable for more than a decade [...]

[...] and can even be taken up by plants, time bombs in the leaves waiting to infect more animals. Any member of the cervid family, which includes elk and moose, can be infected.

It's the deer equivalent of mad-cow disease, and though it's never been known to jump to a human, the possibility lurks like a black cloud in the back of many studies, articles, and public notices about CWD. COVID, ebola, swine flu—all sorts of recent pathogens are suspected to have come from animals. CWD "seems like a juggernaut of a disease," [...] "It's a very insidious and scary thing."

[...] Because the disease can be transmitted by a positive animal long before it causes symptoms, it's especially hard for wildlife agencies to get a handle on what's happening [...] "We can't see them until it's too late," [...] "I wish the disease would evolve to make them sicker, faster."

[...] It's hard to fathom how large numbers of seemingly healthy animals could vanish, just as it was hard to imagine historic flooding and wildfires devastating many chunks of the country until it became the norm.

[...] you can sometimes see CWD plainly. Near death, deer look and act weird. Their front legs splay out; they lose the alertness and wariness that is their very essence. [...] "I started walking toward it and it just kind of stared. It was very skinny. Cars were driving a foot away from it and it wasn't even flinching."

An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer - The Atlantic

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Probability Theory: The logic of Science I

This book (available as a free pdf here) is one of the foundational texts for Rationalists[...] we also think the book's target audience are graduate physics students. [...] The book is basically 50% high level math and 50% cool stories and rants that you can mostly understand without the math.

[...] Part 1: A new Foundation of Probability Theory

[...] Here the goal is to extend the rules of formal logic such that they also apply to probabilistic reasoning. This is a complicated task: going from strict binary truth values to continuous probabilities without assuming anything about what a probability is. This is also where the book gets its name, the logic of science, because [...] Jaynes views reasoning under uncertainty as the foundation of science.

Jaynes is a physicist and therefore cares about the real world, not the idealized world of mathematical models. If you are drawing from a real urn then the size and shapes of the balls and urn matter for inference, so should we model the physics of the balls? Here is Jaynes's thoughts on the matter:

In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by:

making it still harder;
redefining what we mean by 'solving' it, so that it becomes something we can do;
inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
In the case of sampling with replacement, we apply this strategy as follows.

Suppose that, after tossing the ball in, we shake up the urn. However complicated the problem was initially, it now becomes many orders of magnitude more complicated, because the solution now depends on every detail of the precise way we shake it, in addition to all the factors mentioned above.
We now assert that the shaking has somehow made all these details irrelevant, so that the problem reverts back to the simple one where the Bernoulli urn rule applies.

We invent the dignified-sounding word randomization to describe what we have done. This term is, evidently, a euphemism, whose real meaning is: deliberately throwing away relevant information when it becomes too complicated for us to handle. [...]

For some, declaring a problem to be 'randomized' is an incantation with the same purpose and effect as those uttered by an exorcist to drive out evil spirits; i.e. it cleanses their subsequent calculations and renders them immune to criticism. We agnostics often envy the True Believer, who thus acquires so easily that sense of security which is forever denied to us. … Shaking does not make the result 'random', because that term is basically meaningless as an attribute of the real world; it has no clear definition applicable in the real world [except for quantum processes and their effects? which for macroscopic balls would usually be negligible...]. The belief that 'randomness' is some kind of real property existing in Nature is a form of the mind projection fallacy which says, in effect, 'I don't know the detailed causes – therefore – Nature does not know them.' What shaking accomplishes is very different. It does not affect Nature's workings in any way; it only ensures that no human is able to exert any wilful influence on the result. Therefore, nobody can be charged with 'fixing' the outcome.

[...] Jaynes's version of (Bayesian) statistics is grounded in information theory instead of gambling, and epistemologically it is much easier to ask the question "how does this information change my beliefs", rather than: "If I was a betting man applying the principle of indifference to the outcomes, what odds would I then put on my prior beliefs so nobody can Dutch book me?"

[...] He does not think "if I was a betting man [...] then I would naturally use this adaptive weird prior so I do not lose money when betting with my coworkers".

E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The logic of Science I — LessWrong

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researchers carefully removed tentacles, waited for the regeneration process to kick in, then euthanized and dissected the animals, using different stains to label the different cells.

Jellyfish actually have stem cells hanging out in and near their tentacles all the time. These are cells that don't yet have an assigned function, and can grow into whatever type of cell the body needs. They are used for ongoing maintenance and repair of the jellyfish's body during their lifetime.

However, the repair-specific proliferative cells only appear when the jellyfish is injured – they are specific to repairing and regenerating injured body parts.

Jellyfish Can Regrow Their Tentacles, And We Finally Know How : ScienceAlert