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Quantum Day

Quantum Day

The Best Of CES 2014 Another CES has come and gone and, after every CES, there is the inevitable reckoning. We went into this whole thing expecting very little in the way of amazing new products and we were pleasantly surprised. In fact, there was so much cool stuff on and off the show floor that we should have been embarrassed for doubting the creativity and skill of the makers, manufacturers, and builders who flock to Vegas every year. The big guys might be boring but it’s the little guys – like early mammals scuttling under the dinosaurs – that make the biggest impact. Here are our personal picks for Best of CES 2014 and, knowing the industry, we’ll be revisiting these amazing products this year as things slowly reach the market. The coolest thing I saw at CES was the Onewheel — a self-balancing, one-wheeled, motorized skateboard. -Ryan Lawler My favorite gadget at CES was the Urb-E electric scooter. -Jordan Crook Instant Onboard Image Post-Processing with Qualcomm Snapdragon -Darrell Etherington -Anthony Ha

BLACK HOLES by Ted Bunn What is a black hole? --------------------- Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull. Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail, but let's start of slow, by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances. Suppose that you are standing on the surface of a planet. You throw a rock straight up into the air. Assuming you don't throw it too hard, it will rise for a while, but eventually the acceleration due to the planet's gravity will make it start to fall down again. Now imagine an object with such an enormous concentration of mass in such a small radius that its escape velocity was greater than the velocity of light. In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. How big is a black hole?

Seeing without light Spelunkers who explore caves often say they can see their hands move in the dark. A new study suggests those cavers aren’t hallucinating. It finds evidence that the brain sometimes creates visual “images” without input from the eyes. The study based its conclusion on an experiment anyone can try. Find a dark place or put on a blindfold. Many people can, researchers report in a study published Oct. 30 in Psychological Science. By sensing the action, the brain “‘knows’ where a moving hand is and, as our results show, it actually generates the expected visual image,” Duje Tadin reported to Science News. Tadin’s team tested 129 volunteers. It didn’t matter what the volunteers had been told: About half claimed to see motion through the blindfold. The motion-vision connection was particularly strong for nine people. About half of the blindfolded people, however, saw nothing. Normally, when someone watches a moving object, her eyes will move smoothly to follow the action. Power Words

Amputee recovers feeling with robotic arm | euronews, science European researchers have created a robotic hand that gave an amputee a sense of touch he had not felt in a decade. With the artificial limb, the patient could “feel” the different objects – such as a bottle, some cotton or a piece of fruit – and was able to intuitively adjust his grasp. Amputee Dennis Aabo Sorensen lost his left hand in a firework accident. “That was truly amazing to suddenly feel something after nine years,” he said. Doctors at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital implanted tiny electrodes inside two nerves in the stump of Sorensen’s arm. The team put sensors on two fingers of a robotic hand, to detect information about what the artificial fingers touched. “The electrodes are really selective, in the sense that they are able to achieve a very precise contact with small fascicles in the nerves. “So the surgeon had to first create a surgical theatre where the two nerves were clearly put in evidence.

Chaos Theory for Beginners; An Introduction Life finds a way beauty of the unpredictable and display it in the most awesome patterns. Nature, when looked upon with the right kind of eyes, presents herself as one of the most fabulous works of art ever wrought. What is Chaos Theory? Chaos Theory is a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems. Complex systems are systems that contain so much motion (so many elements that move) that computers are required to calculate all the various possibilities. But there is another reason that Chaos Theory was born so recently, and that is the Quantum Mechanical Revolution and how it ended the deterministic era! Up to the Quantum Mechanical Revolution people believed that things were directly caused by other things, that what went up had to come down, and that if only we could catch and tag every particle in the universe we could predict events from then on. How Chaos Theory was born and why. Hold that thought (7): The Uncertainty Principle prohibits accuracy. Attractors

Researchers split water into hydrogen, oxygen using light, nanoparticles Researchers from the University of Houston have found a catalyst that can quickly generate hydrogen from water using sunlight, potentially creating a clean and renewable source of energy. Their research, published online Sunday in Nature Nanotechnology, involved the use of cobalt oxide nanoparticles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Jiming Bao, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UH, said the research discovered a new photocatalyst and demonstrated the potential of nanotechnology in engineering a material's property, although more work remains to be done. Bao said photocatalytic water-splitting experiments have been tried since the 1970s, but this was the first to use cobalt oxide and the first to use neutral water under visible light at a high energy conversion efficiency without co-catalysts or sacrificial chemicals.

New mini-lab could save lives as well as time | euronews, science It is roughly the size of a CD and can perform similar tests to a fully equipped laboratory. The new portable mini-lab is the brainchild of researchers at the Institute for Micro- and Information Technology in the German city of Freiburg. It produces results quicker than a traditional laboratory at a lower cost. Physicist Daniel Mark explained how it works: “The doctor takes a sample from the patient and loads it into the device. The way it works is simple: the patient’s DNA is extracted from the blood sample and analysed inside the mini-lab. The inventors say the mini-lab could be useful in the event of an infectious disease or a pandemic outbreak – to scan passengers in airports for example. They believe it could also be useful when it comes to testing food for safety. “In the future, the issue of food safety is going to require increasingly complex testing. The device is undergoing final tests before it is put on the market.

What is String Theory? For the past decade, physicists all over are focusing their attention on string theory. But what is string theory? A simple explanation to string theory is that it is the basic fundamental building block for everything. When all the matter in the universe is broken down to its most basic component, it will be tiny particles that look like strings; String Theory. That basically is the most simple answer to what String Theory is. But going one step further is where things get really complicated. When we look an object, we know it is made up of molecules. According to string theory, these quarks (including the electron) can still be broken up into smaller units. What string theory suggests is that the whole universe is made up of these strings. Based on the math, for these strings to exists, the universe has to be made up of not just three dimensions, but ten dimensions. Video: David Tong, a physicist at Cambridge University, explains String Theory Why is string theory important? Related Links

Nanoscale friction: High energy losses in the vicinity of charge density waves In collaboration with the University of Basel, an international team of researchers has observed a strong energy loss caused by frictional effects in the vicinity of charge density waves. This may have practical significance in the control of nanoscale friction. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Materials. Friction is often seen as an adverse phenomenon that leads to wear and causes energy loss. Conversely, however, too little friction can be a disadvantage as well -- for example, running on an icy surface or driving on a wet road. An understanding of frictional effects is therefore of great importance -- particularly in the field of nanotechnology, where friction has to be controlled at a nanoscale. In the experiment led by Prof. Energy losses in the vicinity of charge density waves The team observed this energy loss only at temperatures below 70° Kelvin (-203° C).

Beyond the subconscious | euronews, futuris We are only aware of about 10% of our brain activity, so scientists at a lab in Barcelona are working to increase that percentage. They hope to enable us to perform better in a world which is increasingly overwhelmed by data. Collecting data is easy. Jonathan Freeman, a psychologist and the project coordinator of the CEEDs (Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems) project, said: “What the science shows is that a lot of that background processing that we are not paying attention to can leak useful information about the environment. “You can use touch and vision and hearing to sense the environment and to make sense of the world around you,” he added. Scientists involved in this European Union research project hope to help us become smarter and more efficient by listening to and stimulating our subconscious so it can mobilize the power of our own creativity. According to Pedro Omedas, a computer scientist at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Researchers are also using robot technology.

How can parts of Canada be 'missing' gravity?" For more than 40 years, scientists have tried to figure out what's causing large parts of Canada, particularly the Hudson Bay region, to be "missing" gravity. In other words, gravity in the Hudson Bay area and surrounding regions is lower than it is in other parts of the world, a phenomenon first identified in the 1960s when the Earth's global gravity fields were being charted. Two theories have been proposed to account for this anomaly. But before we go over them, it's important to first consider what creates gravity. One theory centers on a process known as convection occurring in the Earth's mantle. A new theory to account for the Hudson Bay area's missing gravity concerns the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of present-day Canada and the northern United States. To get a better idea of what happened, think about what happens when you lightly press your finger into the surface of a cake or a piece of really springy bread. So which theory is correct?

The Life and Death of Cells +Enlarge image We may think of built-in obsolescence as a modern marketing trick, but biology got there first. Rather than being able to replicate indefinitely, most cells in our bodies divide only a finite number of times before they switch off. The aging of a cell (senescence) is the process of accumulative changes to its molecular structure that disrupt its function with time, leading to its degradation and death. A key factor in senescence is the shortening of the protective ends of a cell’s chromosomes, called telomeres. As reported in Physical Review Letters [1], Khanh Dao Duc and David Holcman at Ecole Normale Supérieure, France, have formulated a statistical mechanics model that describes how this process is regulated, providing a powerful method for predicting whether cells live or die. Cell fate is dictated by the stability of the chromosomes. In certain cell types, this progressive shortening is countered by the enzyme telomerase, which lengthens telomeres. References K.

Weather Whiplash, and What Does (The) Fox Say? Paul Douglas send me this photo: “Check out the piles of melting slush in the foreground; looks like half a foot (?) of dirty snow in that one clump. This takes weather whiplash to a new (and ridiculously jaw-dropping) level. Photo courtesy of Dana Cottingham Fricke, from Concord, Illinois.” The biggest loss of containers from a container ship (that didn’t just plain sink) happened a few days ago as the Svendborg Maersk was battered with hurricane like conditions including Waves Of Unusual Size generated in the Global Warming Enhanced megastorm, while at the same time tornadoes, some snownadoes, touched down in various places in the US. Fox News is lost and confused. Snowstorms and cold weather chills swept from the Midwest to the East Coast in January, closely followed by conservative media snow-trolls casting doubt on global warming. Read the rest here from Media Matters. And here’s the crazy Fox Newsers for your entertainment: And here’s a nice meme that describes the Fox Problem:

Codes Daniel Chandler Codes In 1972 NASA sent into deep space an interstellar probe called Pioneer 10. It bore a golden plaque. The art historian Ernst Gombrich offers an insightful commentary on this: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has equipped a deep-space probe with a pictorial message 'on the off-chance that somewhere on the way it is intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings.' The representation of humans is accompanied by a chart: a pattern of lines beside the figures standing for the 14 pulsars of the Milky Way, the whole being designed to locate the sun of our universe. Gombrich's commentary on this attempt at communication with alien beings highlights the importance of what semioticians call . Some theorists argue that even our perception of the everyday world around us involves codes. Images such as this are ambiguous concerning figure and ground. The principle of can be demonstrated thus: The principle also applies in the illustration below.

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