Magnetars: Most powerful magnets in the universe A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) now believe they’ve found the partner star of a magnetar for the first time. This discovery helps to explain how magnetars form — a conundrum dating back 35 years — and why this particular star didn’t collapse into a black hole as astronomers would expect. When a massive star collapses under its own gravity during a supernova explosion it forms either a neutron star or black hole. The Westerlund 1 star cluster [1], located 16 000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar), hosts one of the two dozen magnetars known in the Milky Way. “In our earlier work (eso1034) we showed that the magnetar in the cluster Westerlund 1 (eso0510) must have been born in the explosive death of a star about 40 times as massive as the Sun. Astronomers proposed a solution to this mystery. It seems that being a component of a double star may therefore be an essential ingredient in the recipe for forming a magnetar.
Your Brain Isn't a Computer — It's a Quantum Field The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with "fine" or "good." But if someone followed up about a specific event — "How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?" — suddenly, we refine our "good" or "fine" responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent. In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re "good" but feel awful about how the meeting went. Enter quantum cognition: A team of researchers has determined that while our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a "quantum" level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy. The quantum-cognition theory opens the fields of psychology and neuroscience to understanding the mind not as a linear computer, but rather an elegant universe. In the example of the meeting, if someone asks, "Did it go well?" [D]ecision-making and opinion-forming are a lot like Schrödinger’s cat.
Like Climate Denial, Climate Defeatism Threatens Human Survival By Michael Hoexter Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In the next few years, human beings will have the choice whether, on the one hand, to preserve the better shreds of current civilizations or hold onto the possibility to found entirely new, hopefully better civilizations, or, on the other hand, to destroy the possibility for human civilization to continue and head towards human self-extinction. We possess then an awful and, for many, unwanted power at this time. We will be facing opportunities for growth and advancement while at the same time facing compromises that will leave a good number of people dissatisfied and unhappy, as happiness is now conceived. To opt for the first choice, humanity will need to set itself within a very few years upon a new evolutionary course that some may resist and that others may embrace. The “throwaway society” concept has been around since the 1950’s but rarely has a figure of a political magnitude of Pope Francis made it his or her own.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension: September 2011 "Why isn't there nothingness? Nothingness would have been decidedly elegant. In the Ultimate Multiverse, a universe consisting of nothing does exist. As far as we can tell, nothingness is a perfectly logical possibility and so must be included in a multiverse that embraces all universes." At the end of the Introductory chapter of my book, I said this: "...the point of this exercise will be that by imagining all ten dimensions, we will have imagined a fabric that can account for all aspects of reality. How do we get to the tenth dimension from the ninth? "...if we’re going to imagine the tenth dimension as continuing the cycle, and being a line, then we’re going to have to imagine a different point that we can draw that line to. But is our journey really done? 1. Another way of showing this equivalence is to say that M-Theory proposes ten spatial dimensions plus time. 2. 3. 4. In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. 5.
Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. So I sat rapt during the neuroscientists’ talks as they described how our minds perceive the past, present, and future. McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based. Alas, they couldn’t.
How Facebook Makes Us Dumber Why does misinformation spread so quickly on the social media? Why doesn’t it get corrected? When the truth is so easy to find, why do people accept falsehoods? A new study focusing on Facebook users provides strong evidence that the explanation is confirmation bias: people’s tendency to seek out information that confirms their beliefs, and to ignore contrary information. Confirmation bias turns out to play a pivotal role in the creation of online echo chambers. The new study, led by Michela Del Vicario of Italy’s Laboratory of Computational Social Science, explores the behavior of Facebook users from 2010 to 2014. Del Vicario and her coauthors explored how Facebook users spread conspiracy theories (using 32 public web pages); science news (using 35 such pages); and “trolls,” which intentionally spread false information (using two web pages). In sum, the researchers find a lot of communities of like-minded people. Can anything be done?
E’ IL NOSTRO UNIVERSO UNA SIMULAZIONE? – Filosofia Urbino corso di laurea “Beate le marionette, – sospirai -, su le cui teste di legno il finto cielo si conserva senza strappi! Non perplessità angosciose, né ritegni, né intoppi, né ombre, né pietà: nulla! E possono attendere bravamente e prender gusto alla loro commedia e amare e tener se stesse in considerazione e in pregio, senza soffrir mai vertigini o capogiri, poiché per la loro statura e per le loro azioni quel cielo è un tetto proporzionato. ” Uno strappo nel cielo di carta – Il fu Mattia Pascal Il Novecento costituisce, dal punto di vista culturale, uno strappo nel cielo di carta intessuto dall’uomo nel corso dei secoli precedenti; è il periodo in cui, più che in ogni altro, si demolisce l’ordine metafisico del mondo in favore del disordine che anima l’essere umano e la mancanza di senso degli eventi quotidiani. E’ forse l’universo una gigantesca simulazione? Egli afferma che almeno una delle seguenti affermazioni è probabilmente vera: Determinando così il seguente teorema: [aggiungere immagine 1]
Introduction | Portraits of European Neuroscientists