Tag: science

ENTANGLEMENT ON-DEMAND ACHIEVED IN BREAKTHROUGH STUDY POINTING TO “NEW FRONTIER” IN QUANTUM SCIENCE

Physicists at Princeton University report the successful on-demand entanglement of individual molecules, a significant milestone that they say leverages quantum mechanics to achieve these unusual states, according to new research.

Quantum entanglement remains one of the great enigmas in contemporary physics. Essentially, the phenomenon entails particles that are bound together in such a manner that any alteration in the quantum state of one particle instantaneously influences its entangled counterpart.

Remarkably, this connection persists even over vast distances, an effect initially labeled as “spooky action at a distance” following its introduction in a seminal 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.

While remaining mysterious, recent years have seen substantial progress in unraveling the mysteries of entanglement, with the additional promise for its practical application in diverse fields such as quantum computing, cryptography, and communication technology.

Now, the Princeton team’s recent success can be counted among these developments, in the application of quantum entanglement toward producing beneficial future technologies. The team’s work was recently described in a paper that appeared in the journal Science. 

Lawrence Cheuk, assistant professor of physics at Princeton and the paper’s senior author, says the achievement helps to pave the way toward the construction of quantum computers and related technologies, which will inevitably overtake their classical counterparts in speed and efficiency in the coming years.

Significantly, the new research also achieves “quantum advantage,” whereby quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously exist in multiple states, unlike classical binary computer bits which are limited to assuming values of either 0 or 1.

“This is a breakthrough in the world of molecules because of the fundamental importance of quantum entanglement,” Cheuk said in a statement.

“But it is also a breakthrough for practical applications because entangled molecules can be the building blocks for many future applications,” Cheuk added.

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BREAKTHROUGH REVEALS FLAWS IN DIAMONDS COULD LEAD TO NANOSCALE MAGNETIC AND THERMAL SENSORS

Cambridge researchers report a new breakthrough that could lead to the development of highly sensitive quantum sensors, which they say was achieved by exploiting tiny flaws in diamond fragments.

The discovery could pave the way toward innovative new applications that could help offer a deeper glimpse at neuron activity within living cells through magnetic imagery and other technologies.

Specifically, nanoscopic detectors capable of measuring temperature and magnetic fields could be inserted into living cells, allowing scientists an unprecedented glimpse at chemical reactions that occur on the cellular level. Beyond biology, the achievement also could have applications for helping scientists better understand the way certain unique materials gain their magnetic properties.

Flaws in diamonds that occur at the atomic scale can lead to unique and often beautiful color variations in certain rare kinds of diamonds. However, apart from their generation of precious stones, scientists view these impurities as a significant avenue for research in quantum physics.

An example of the kinds of flaws that interest scientists is what is known as the Nitrogen-vacancy Center, or NVC, where a gap exists in the crystal lattice of a diamond alongside nitrogen atoms. When this occurs, electrons become tightly contained, and scientists have learned that their spin states can be precisely manipulated.

In the past, scientists have succeeded in achieving electron coherence in the NVCs of larger diamonds. This phenomenon refers to the degree of interference between electrons emitted from a source such as an electron gun, which plays a key role in ultrafast chemistry and physics research.

Coherence times of up to one second—a significant amount for research in this field and the longest amount ever observed in any known solid material—have been achieved in the NVCs of larger diamond samples, whereas finding any amount of coherence in tiny diamonds measuring just a few nanometers has previously remained unattainable.

Achieving coherence in smaller diamonds, however, presents several advantages. One is the precision they would allow for applications at the nanoscale, as well as their ability to be inserted into living cells.

Now, researchers at Cambridge University say that the elusiveness of coherence in smaller diamonds has been identified as a concentration of nitrogen impurities instead of interactions with spins on the surfaces of the diamond.

The discovery, according to researchers at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, was made by observing the spin dynamics in nanodiamond NVCs. Independent control of the nitrogen impurities allowed the researchers to raise coherence times to 0.07 milliseconds longer than any previous attempt. The figure may sound minuscule, but it is orders of magnitude greater than past studies had ever achieved, paving the way toward nanodiamonds becoming a key material in the development of new quantum sensing technologies.

Researcher Helena Knowles, who participated in the study, said the results could ultimately lead to the development of the world’s smallest magnetic field detector, as well as the tiniest temperature detector ever made.

“Nanodiamond NVCs can sense the change of such features within a few tens of nanometres,” Knowles said in a statement. “[N]o other sensor has ever had this spatial resolution under ambient conditions.”

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Climate Scientist Says It’s ‘Unreasonable’ To Call Climate Change An Existential Threat

An MIT scientist has said that although the global temperature rise owing to a greenhouse effect is real, the increase is small and does not pose any existential threat.

The greenhouse effect is primarily caused by water vapor and clouds, said Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide are minor constituents of the greenhouse effect, Mr. Lindzen told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview.

“If all other things are kept constant, and you double CO2, you would get a little under one degree of warming,” Mr. Lindzen said. Some climate models estimate the highest warming at three degrees, but “even three degrees isn’t that much,” he added.

“We’re dealing with changes for a doubling of CO2 on the order of between breakfast and lunch,” he said.

According to NASA, the greenhouse effect is “the process through which heat is trapped near Earth’s surface by substances known as ‘greenhouse gases.’ Greenhouse gases consist of carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor.”

Politicians, universities, international organizations, and media have called climate warming an existential threat to humanity.

President Joe Biden said at a press conference in Vietnam in September that, “The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next … 10 years.”

The Climate Change Working Group at Western Michigan University has warned that the “global temperature has risen at least 1°C since mid-20th century” and said that “climate change is an existential threat to the quality of life on this planet.”

Bruce Aylward, assistant director General at the World Health Organization (WHO), said in November that climate change poses an existential threat to all people, in particular pregnant women and children.

Mr. Lindzen asserted that calling climate change an existential threat comes from propaganda.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the United Nations body for assessing the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts, and options to mitigate—does not call it an existential threat, Mr. Lindzen said.

In its report, the IPCC talks about a reduction in GDP by 3 percent by 2100 owing to climate change, Mr. Lindzen added. “Assuming the GDP has increased several times by then, that doesn’t sound existential to most people.”

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Study Finds ‘No Evidence’ That Medical Marijuana Causes Cognitive Impairment In Patients With Chronic Health Problems

Findings of a study examining marijuana’s neurocognitive effects “suggest that prescribed medical cannabis may have minimal acute impact on cognitive function among patients with chronic health conditions”—which may come as a relief to long-term cannabis patients who are concerned about potential neurological drawbacks of the drug.

Authors of the report, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal CNS Drugs, wrote that they found “no evidence for impaired cognitive function when comparing baseline with post-treatment scores.”

To conduct the study, researchers had 40 people in Australia self-administer a single dose of medical marijuana in a laboratory setting, following instructions on the product label. Participants were then tested on an array of neuropsychological metrics—including multitasking, pattern recognition memory, reaction time, rapid visual information processing and spatial working memory, among others—and surveyed on their subjective experience.

“The absence of evidence for cognitive impairment following medical cannabis self-administration was surprising,” the study says, “given prior and substantive evidence that non-medical (‘recreational’) cannabis use reliably impairs a range of cognitive functions. At the same time, these findings are consistent with two systematic reviews published in the last year that suggest that medical cannabis, when used regularly and consistently for a chronic health concern, may have little if any impact on cognitive function.”

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Trannysaurus Rex: The Activist Academics ‘Queering’ Dinosaurs

Recently, I wrote about North Hertfordshire Museum’s pathetic attempts to imply the ancient (male, moustachioed) Roman Emperor Elagabalus was actually a transgender woman. If you thought this was ridiculous, there is a museum in the United States which possesses a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton which came out as nonbinary back in 2017, proudly announcing it was now a user of they/them pronouns on Twitter.

The Chicago Field Museum, where the T. rex lives and tweets, justified this lunacy on the spurious grounds that it is quite difficult to determine the sex of old dinosaur specimens (it’s not even certain if such creatures had true external genitalia at all). Therefore, as curators did not know for sure whether the specimen was a boy-lizard or a girl-lizard, they made the insane leap in logic that it was actually a trans one.

Do please further note from the above tweet that, although museum staff profess not to know whether their T. rex is male or female, they have somehow managed to accurately determine its star sign.

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BREAKTHROUGH IN QUANTUM STORAGE OF ENTANGLED PHOTONS MAY USHER AGE OF SOLID STATE-BASED QUANTUM NETWORKS

Chinese researchers report the successful quantum storage of entangled photons at telecom wavelengths within a crystal, in a breakthrough achievement that reportedly lasted 387 times longer than past similar experiments.

The research team, based at Nanjing University, says their findings could potentially “pave the way for realizing quantum networks based on solid-state devices.”

Experts have differing opinions on how soon we may see a global quantum internet. However, no one disputes that once it is achieved, it will revolutionize how information is processed and secured. In the move toward that reality, researchers are currently focusing on ensuring that processes that include quantum storage and distribution of entangled photons will be compatible with existing telecommunications networks.

In the case of entangled photons, entanglement describes the quantum phenomenon where particles remain connected, which effectively allows actions performed on one to affect its entangled counterpart even from across great physical distances.

However, making sure that quantum networks work reliably using fiber-based systems, like those the Internet currently uses, presents a number of challenges, namely signal loss due to the limitations of optical fiber systems that are presently in use.

One way of overcoming these problems involves the use of devices called quantum repeaters, which can help extend the range of these systems by storing the quantum state of photons into matter. Successful quantum repeaters must accomplish three primary tasks: 1) they must match the standard telecom wavelength, which is around 1.55 μm; 2) they must be capable of storing data for long periods; and 3) they have to be able to handle multiple data streams simultaneously.

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The alien hunter: has Harvard’s Avi Loeb found proof of extraterrestrial life?

Avi Loeb has a chip on his shoulder. For years, the Harvard astrophysicist has been trying to find aliens. He’s in the middle of trying to record the entire sky with an international network of telescopes and recently travelled to Papua New Guinea to find out if a meteor detected in 2014 was actually part of an interstellar spaceship. Meanwhile, academics and pundits snipe at him in the media, and he’s sick of it.

“I hear that the scientists say: ‘Why would you go to the Pacific Ocean? It’s a waste of time, waste of energy.’ And I say: ‘I’m not taking any of your research money; I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m doing the heavy lifting.’ Why would they be negative about it?” Loeb complains as he shows me around his mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts, one of the richest boroughs in the US. He’s busy rehearsing for a one-man show about his life and work, which he’ll perform in his attic tomorrow. Apparently, I’m the “only journalist to be invited”, apart from the camera crew filming a documentary.

Loeb, 61, has just finished a five-mile run, which he does every day at about 5am before knuckling down to work. Small, suited, bespectacled and well groomed, he looks a bit like Jeffrey Archer in a schoolboy uniform. After a very brief tour of his office – blink and you’ll miss it – we arrive in his immaculately tidy living room. He offers me sparkling water and a bowl of chocolates. Loeb is slender, but he loves chocolate, consuming 800 calories a day from it. “I cannot give up,” he says. “I’m addicted.”

Is he nervous about his show? “No, no,” he says. “Because I’m playing myself – there’s no difference.” Netflix will be filming it; in June documentary-makers accompanied him on his trip to Papua New Guinea where he recovered debris from a fireball that landed in the sea to the north of Manus Island. “There were over 50 film-makers and producers that wanted to document what I’m doing. They wanted to be on the ship, but I said I had a contract just with one.”

A distinguished scientist, Loeb has published hundreds of papers, as well as a bestselling book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. He’s the Frank B Baird Jr professor of science at Harvard, the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, and the director of the Galileo project at Harvard. But he was relatively unknown until a peculiarly shaped object zoomed through our solar system in 2017. Astronomers described it as having “extreme dimensions” and concluded it must be interstellar. Officially known as 1I/2017 U1, it was given the nickname ’Oumuamua – Hawaiian for “scout” or “first distant messenger” and pronounced like a child startled by a cow: Oh mooer mooer.

’Oumuamua was long, thin and flat, like a pancake. After further analysis, astronomers spotted more anomalies. They determined that before telescopes detected the object, it had accelerated while travelling past the sun. This is normal for comets, rocky icebergs that melt in the heat and release gases that act like booster rockets. This is what gives comets their signature tail, but this asteroid didn’t have one. According to Loeb: “No tail, no comet.” In a paper co-written with Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which investigates UFOs for the US Department of Defense, Loeb later hypothesised that ’Oumuamua could be a solar sail from an interstellar craft, using sunlight to accelerate through space. In other words, it belonged to aliens.

In what was a big year for UFO-hunters, 2017 was the year that the Pentagon admitted to investigating UFOs. The $22m budget was reportedly also used to investigate alleged UFO sightings and all manner of unexplained goings on. Loeb rode the wave of interest to international fame.

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NASA TO LAUNCH STADIUM-SIZED CRAFT OVER ANTARCTICA IN NEW MISSION TO EXPLORE COSMIC PHENOMENA

A long-duration aerial mission soon to be carried out by NASA over Antarctica will launch stadium-sized craft in support of a series of record-breaking science missions, the agency announced this week.

The Antarctic Long Duration Balloon (LDB) Campaign, which includes a trio of scientific balloon flights equipped to study a range of different phenomena, will launch at the beginning of December, according to a press release NASA issued on Monday.

The mission will employ a series of massive zero-pressure balloons, which the American space agency says will support five missions in total.

Equipped with open ducts through which gas can escape, thereby eliminating the buildup of pressure within, zero-pressure balloons expand as they accumulate heat from the rising Sun as they are being carried aloft. Conversely, as the Sun sets, heat is lost, which results in a loss of gas, which causes zero-pressure balloons to have a shorter flight duration than other inflatable systems.

However, long-duration missions can be achieved during the polar summer, a period during which the balloons remain in constant sunlight for extended periods.

One of the missions aims to break a previous long-duration balloon flight record of just over 55 days. The balloons will launch from NASA’s facility for balloon launches located close to McMurdo Station, the largest community on Earth’s southernmost continent located on the southern edge of Ross Island, Antarctica.

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EXPLORING INFANT CONSCIOUSNESS DEVELOPMENT: NEW RESEARCH REVEALS BABIES LIKELY DEVELOP CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE WOMB

Recent scientific advances are bringing us closer to understanding infant consciousness development and answering a question that has puzzled scientists, parents, and philosophers alike for centuries: when does consciousness begin? 

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in Cognitive Science, an international team of researchers says empirical evidence suggests infants possess consciousness before birth, by at least the third trimester of pregnancy. 

Researchers say the findings and pinpointing the moment when consciousness first appears could have significant clinical, ethical, and legal implications. 

Historically, the question of when consciousness first emerges has been a topic of much speculation and debate. 

It is generally accepted that the growing human fetus lacks the neural cells required for consciousness during the first trimester of pregnancy. However, traditional viewpoints differ widely on when consciousness first emerges. 

Some recent studies have proposed that consciousness emerges 24-26 weeks after conception when thalamocortical connections activate the neural cortex. 

Others have argued that infants lack the higher-order thought necessary for self-awareness until around the first birthday or even later. 

In this recent study, a team of neuroscientists and philosophers from Monash University, the University of Tübingen, the University of Minnesota, and Trinity College Dublin conducted a meta-analysis of the latest empirical findings and methodological advancements in infant consciousness development research. 

A vital component of the meta-analysis was accepting the complex nature of consciousness as a subjective phenomenon characterized by a unique experiential point of view.

Unlike adults and older children, infants cannot verbalize their experiences. Instead, researchers had to rely on indirect markers to gauge the presence of consciousness. These markers include behavioral responses, neural activities, and developmental milestones.

Examining these indirect markers, researchers found that several lines of evidence pointed to the early emergence of consciousness. 

One key piece of evidence was the development of intrinsic connectivity networks in the brain, such as the default mode network (DMN), which are active early in development.

These networks, typically associated with higher cognitive functions, are present in newborns and preterm infants, suggesting the early onset of consciousness.

Researchers also examined the role of attention in consciousness development. It’s generally understood that top-down (voluntary) attention develops around 3 to 6 months of age, while bottom-up (involuntary) attention is evident from birth. This distinction is crucial as it indicates that the emergence of consciousness might be linked to the development of attentional capabilities.

Another intriguing line of evidence came from the study of multisensory integration in infants. Certain complex forms of multisensory integration, thought to occur only when stimuli are consciously perceived, have been observed in infants as young as four months. This further supports the early-onset theory of consciousness.

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Three Graphs That Show There Is No “Climate Crisis”

As the West fitfully weakens industrial civilisation by trying to eliminate oil, coal and natural gas as energy sources, the scientific basis for Net Zero is based more on ‘general agreement’ than hard data. Climate scientists nevertheless sound optimistic about the progress that’s being made in destroying society’s carbon energy base.  

There are of course criticisms of the idea of a carbon-dioxide-induced apocalypse, largely supported as it is by general circulation (i.e., whole-earth) planetary models. There are too many different GCMs all with too many free parameters (aka ‘fudge factors’), as well as wildly divergent readings of historical climate records: Are violent climate events really more frequent, and how does weather actually relate to climate? The popular press cries havoc, but the data are not so clear. The looming economic costs of a Net Zero target are leading to some political pushback. Nevertheless, the recent jury acquittal of nine Extinction Rebellion vandals shows that passionate belief in the imminent dangers of CO2 is not limited to activists.

Climate science is complicated, but the key question is simple. The climate does seem to be getting warmer, but are we responsible? Does the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide have a major effect on the temperature of the earth? The standard answer is “yes, of course”. But in fact there are good reasons for doubt. 

Popular accounts of the ‘climate emergency’ rarely show quantitative data. Yet there are widely available graphs that anyone can understand. Here are three graphs which suggest that the answer to the question is probably “no”. It is likely that beyond a certain point, carbon dioxide has a relatively minor effect on planetary temperature. 

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