Tag: science

Future computers could grow their own memory – from mushrooms

Computers run on silicon and metal. Mushrooms grow in soil. Yet now, scientists are finding that one could stand in for the other.

Fungi might replace parts of the machines that shape our digital world. The idea sounds strange until you realize how intelligent and resilient these organisms are.

Mushrooms in computing

At The Ohio State University, researchers found that edible mushrooms such as shiitake could act like organic memory chips. When connected to circuits, the mushrooms stored and processed information like a living brain.

Study lead author John LaRocco is a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don’t need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn’t being used,” said LaRocco.

The fungal chips performed surprisingly well. Each could switch electrical states thousands of times per second with high accuracy.

These organic systems did not rely on costly rare-earth minerals or energy-intensive factories, which makes them an appealing alternative to traditional semiconductors.

Learning from nature

Fungi already form vast underground networks that pass signals between roots and trees. The researchers realized these same biological systems could be repurposed to store information.

The mycelium – the thread-like part of a fungus – responds to electrical pulses by changing its resistance. Those shifts act like memories.

In tests, mushrooms adjusted their conductivity when exposed to repeated voltage cycles. Their ability to change behavior after each signal mirrored how neurons in the brain learn.

Over time, the fungi “remembered” patterns of stimulation and became more stable in performance. That self-tuning nature could one day lead to energy-efficient devices that learn continuously, much like biological systems.

Testing mushrooms for computers

To explore this, the team grew shiitake and button mushrooms on organic materials such as wheat germ, hay, and farro seeds.

Once the fungal mats reached maturity, they were dried in sunlight to maintain shape and later sprayed with water to restore conductivity.

“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said LaRocco.

Each part responded differently to signals, showing that the internal structure of mushrooms influences how electricity flows.

At specific frequencies, the fungi displayed classic memory loops known as hysteresis curves, confirming their potential as memristors.

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Quantum teleportation between photons from two distant light sources achieved

Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises more effective protection. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles.

Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the quantum repeater. They report their results in Nature Communications.

Nanometer-sized semiconductor islands for information transfer

“For the first time worldwide, we have succeeded in transferring quantum information among photons originating from two different quantum dots,” says Prof. Peter Michler, head of the IHFG and deputy spokesperson for the Quantenrepeater.Net (QR.N) research project.

What is the background? Whether WhatsApp or video stream, every digital message consists of zeros and ones. Similarly, this also applies to quantum communication, in which individual light particles serve as carriers of information.

Zero or one is then encoded in two different directions of polarization of the photons (i.e., their orientation in the horizontal and vertical directions or in a superposition of both states). Because photons follow the laws of quantum mechanics, their polarization cannot always be completely read out without leaving traces. Any attempt to intercept the transmission would inevitably be detected.

Making the quantum internet ready for the fiber-optic infrastructure

Another challenge: An affordable quantum internet would use optical fibers—just like today’s internet. However, light has only a limited range. Conventional light signals, therefore, need to be renewed approximately every 50 kilometers using an optical amplifier.

Because quantum information cannot simply be amplified or copied and forwarded, this does not work in the quantum internet. However, quantum physics allows information to be transferred from one photon to another as long as the information stays unknown. This process is referred to as quantum teleportation.

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Top MIT scientist blasts ‘climate hysteria,’ says global warming fears are driven by money… not evidence

Skepticism about climate change has resurfaced, as some experts claim the exact causes of global warming remain unclear and that the policies addressing it are motivated more by money than by science.

Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spent decades studying atmospheric science. He told the Daily Mail that the public hysteria surrounding global warming isn’t actually based on realistic data.

Climate change is the term used to describe Earth’s warming, mainly as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas.

Scientists and climate activists have warned that this extra warmth could cause more extreme storms, rising seas that flood cities, and hotter summers that make it harder to grow food worldwide – all within the next 25 years.

However, Lindzen said the financial implications of controlling the multi-trillion-dollar energy industry have been the true motivation for politicians to support flawed research that argues small temperature increases will lead to immediate disasters.

‘The fact that you have a multi-trillion dollar industry and you have an opportunity to completely overturn it had a great appeal to a lot of politicians,’ he explained. ‘They go wild on it. Another half degree and we’re doomed, and so on. The public knows this is nonsense.’ 

Lindzen explained the basic math behind what he called ‘climate alarm.’ He said the emphasis on lowering specific emissions like carbon dioxide (CO₂) simply doesn’t produce the worldwide temperature changes advocates say it will.

The scientist noted that the planet’s temperature has fluctuated significantly throughout recorded history and science still can’t definitively prove what the exact cause of both extreme warming and cooling events has been.

‘We don’t understand the glaciation that occurred in the 15th century. You know, so what was going on then? Inadequate CO₂?’ Lindzen said of the event in the Northern Hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age.

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Satellite Communications Breakthrough Could Pave the Way Toward ‘Quantum Energy’

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed a new method for sending once-impossible Earth-to-space quantum light transmissions, which could enable ultra-secure satellite communications in the future.

The technology produces a beam of entangled light particles, a feat previously achieved only in the space-to-ground direction. The UTS team revealed their advances in a paper recently published in Physical Review Research.

Quantum Communications

China has been operating space-based quantum communications for almost a decade, beginning with the Micius satellite in 2016. Subsequently, the Jinan01 satellite, launched this year, established a 12,900-kilometer quantum link connecting China to South Africa.

“Current quantum satellites create entangled pairs in space and then send each half of the pair down to two places on Earth – called a ‘downlink, ‘” said co-author Professor Alexander Solntsev. “It’s mostly used for cryptography, where only a few photons (particles of light) are needed to generate a secret key.”

In previous estimates, scientists believed that moving in the opposite direction would be impossible, as signal loss, interference, and scattering would degrade the uplink. Despite these issues, ground station transmitters have many advantages over satellite-based ones. They have easier access to power, enabling them to produce stronger signals while also being far easier to maintain. 

By developing uplink technology, the researchers believe it will allow satellite-connected quantum computer networks, pushing them to overcome the challenges involved. Their first step was to create a testable concept that addressed the interference issues, which they did.

“The idea is to fire two single particles of light from separate ground stations to a satellite orbiting 500 km above Earth, travelling at about 20,000 km per hour, so that they meet so perfectly as to undergo quantum interference,” said co-author Professor Simon Devitt. “Is this even possible?”

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Scientists Say They Have Proof the Universe Isn’t a Simulation—The Math Makes It Impossible

For decades, philosophers, technologists, and even billionaires like Elon Musk have toyed with the idea that our universe might be a highly sophisticated computer simulation. The idea represents one of modern science’s most haunting and enduring hypotheticals, a kind of digital cosmology.

However, according to a study by an international team of theoretical physicists, the mathematics itself may finally settle the debate. Their conclusion? It’s impossible that we’re living in a simulation.

In a paper published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, researchers argue that the same mathematical principles that limit what computers can calculate also limit what any simulation of the universe could ever reproduce. In short, the universe contains truths that no algorithm—no matter how advanced—can ever compute.

“It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated. If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation,” lead author and theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Mir Faizal, said in a statement. “This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation.”

“This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed.”

The idea that reality could be computed—sometimes called “It from Bit,” after physicist Dr. John Archibald Wheeler’s phrase—has long fascinated scientists. In this view, the cosmos itself could be described as a vast informational process: every atom, photon, and galaxy, a pixel in a cosmic program.

Yet Dr. Faizal and his co-authors—renowned cosmologist Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss, Dr. Francesco Marino of Italy’s National Institute of Optics, and researcher Arshid Shabir—argue that this idea collapses under the very laws of logic itself.

Using the mathematical frameworks of Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, and Gregory Chaitin, researchers demonstrated that any “Theory of Everything” built entirely on computation must, by definition, be incomplete.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, for example, proved that in any sufficiently complex mathematical system, there are true statements that can never be proven using the rules of that system.

Tarski’s theorem showed that truth itself cannot be defined entirely within a formal language. And Chaitin’s work revealed that some mathematical truths are fundamentally uncomputable—they contain more information than any algorithm can encode.

The researchers argue that these theorems also apply to the foundations of physics. Any theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought framework that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics—would be a kind of algorithmic system. And just like mathematics, it would inevitably face its own unprovable truths.

“Together, the Gödel–Tarski–Chaitin triad delineates an insurmountable frontier for any strictly computable framework,” the researchers write.

In other words, if the laws of physics can’t be reduced to pure computation, then neither can the universe.

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Scientists Use Novel Materials That Mimic Wormholes and Multiple Realities to “Transcend the Limitations of Physical Dimensions”

In Erwin Schrödinger’s most famous thought experiment, a cat is seemingly able to be alive and dead simultaneously, as it exists in superposition within a closed box alongside a radioactive atom, a detector, a hammer, and a vial of poison.

Now, reaching into similar mind-bending territory that blurs the lines between practical science and science fiction, researchers in China report in a new study that they have successfully used nonlocal artificial materials to create what they call “photonic parallel spaces,” emulating the effects of wormholes, and even multiple realities.

At the heart of the new research are optical systems, in which a single material is able to perform the role of two distinct optical devices at the same time—not unlike the bizarre “superposition” of Schrödinger’s cat—whereby light is able to display multiple properties at once.

The experiments, detailed in a new paper in Nature Communications, allowed the researchers to produce invisible pathways and other optical effects that could pave the way toward the creation of a range of new technological applications in the coming years.

Photonic Parallel Spaces

“The concepts of the multiverse and wormholes in dimensions beyond our physical space have long captivated curiosity and imagination,” the authors of the new paper write. However, demonstrating such ideas in an experimental setting has long been challenging.

To overcome such hurdles, the research team relied on special artificial materials that allowed them to develop what they characterize as a “photonic analogy” of parallel spaces, which they describe as conditions where “two distinct effective optical media coexist within a single artificial material,” each of which is accessible using different boundaries in the respective material.

The team’s method, which was complemented with machine learning for their study, successfully helped them to create analogies for what they call “photonic wormholes,” which function as invisible optical tunnels, as well as “photonic multiple realities” where the independent function of two different optical devices occurred within a single location. The effect, the researchers describe, produced optical scatterers that functioned “as if they exist in separate dimensions.”

“Higher-Dimensional Phenomena” in the Lab

When light enters one boundary in the artificial materials used by the team, it experiences an entirely different set of optical effects compared with light entering from another boundary. Surprisingly, each of these optical experiences can occur without any interference between them.

The researchers liken this effect to C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where different “doors” could lead to entirely separate worlds located in a single place.

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Thousands of potential UFOs spotted in 1950s photos — before satellites even dotted the sky: studies

A pair of new peer-reviewed scientific papers claim to have detected the presence of UFOs in photographs taken in the 1950s.

Astronomer Beatriz Villarroel from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics claimed in two papers that “transients” — fleeting star-like objects of unknown origin — which appear in “historic photographic plates” of the night sky could represent visitors from a far-off planet.

“We speculate that some transients could potentially be [unidentified aerial phenomena] in Earth orbit that, if descending into the atmosphere, might provide the stimulus for some [unidentified aerial phenomenon] sightings,” the paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports claimed.

There was a “small positive correlation” between UAP sightings and transients that was “well beyond chance,” she argued in the paper published on Oct. 20.

Researchers analyzed roughly 2,000 photographic plates which were taken between 1949 to 1958 at the Palomar Observatory in California for one of the first detailed astronomical surveys of the sky, called the Palomar Sky Survey, Scientific American reported.

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The Study That Changes Everything: McCullough Foundation Drops Bomb on Autism Debate

The most comprehensive analysis of autism risk factors ever conducted just landed, and it’s about to blow up decades of carefully constructed lies. The McCullough Foundation Report titled “Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder” reviewed more than 300 studies across every known risk domain—genetic, environmental, and vaccine-related—and the conclusion is devastating for the vaccine cartel: combination routine childhood vaccination is the dominant modifiable risk factor for autism.

Let me be blunt: This isn’t another small study you can dismiss. This is 80 pages of systematically integrated evidence spanning epidemiologic, clinical, mechanistic, and molecular domains. This is Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist and epidemiologist. This is Dr. Andrew Wakefield returning to the scientific literature after years of being crucified by the pharmaceutical industry. This is a team of researchers who had the guts to do what the CDC has refused to do for decades—actually compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

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The Geometric Code: Genome’s 3D Shape Functions as the Living Computer that Enabled Complex Life

New research reveals the second language of the human genome – one not written in its chemical letters but in its physical shape.

Scientists have long thought of DNA as an instruction manual written in the four- chemical bases—A, C, T, and G—that make up the genetic code. The prevailing belief was that by decoding these sequences, we could unlock how cells and organisms fundamentally work. Now, research from Northwestern Engineering’s Vadim Backman reveals a second “language” of life: the “geometric code” embedded in the genome’s physical shape. Like a blueprint for making living microprocessors, the geometric code helps cells store and process information. 

“Rather than a predetermined script based on fixed genetic instruction sets, we humans are living, breathing computational systems that have been evolving in complexity and power for millions of years,” Backman said.

Backman is the Sachs Family Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering. He also is an associate director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University.

The study, led by Backman in collaboration with Igal Szleifer, Christina Enroth-Cugell Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering; Luay Almassalha, of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology within the Feinberg School of Medicine; and Kyle MacQuarrie, assistant professor of pediatrics within the department of hematology, oncology, and stem cell transplantation at Feinberg, titled “Geometrically Encoded Positioning of Introns, Intergenic Segments, and Exons in the Human Genome,” published Oct. 27 in Advanced Science, decodes this language, showing how cells can perform computations through the physical shape of their genomes.

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Lawsuit Targeting Decades-Old Journal Article Triggers Renewed Scrutiny of Fraudulent Scientific Studies

A lawsuit demanding the retraction of a decades-old peer-reviewed article that claimed the antidepressant paroxetine, sold as Paxil, is safe and effective has put the issue of fraud in scientific and medical journals back in the spotlight, Paul D. Thacker wrote today in The Disinformation Chronicle.

The lawsuit, filed last month against the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and its publisher, Elsevier, demands the retraction of a 2001 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP).

The article was based on Study 329, which the suit claims distorted data to claim Paxil was effective.

The complaint alleges that JAACAP editors and Elsevier refused to retract the article “in an apparent attempt to shield at least five of the … authors who are prominent members of the AACAP from possible ramifications of retraction.”

Study 329 was ghostwritten by Paxil manufacturer GSK — which Thacker discussed in a 2011 report he republished today.

Several of the journal article’s co-authors worked for GSK or went on to hold key positions within the AACAP.

According to Thacker, one of the co-authors, Stan Kutcher, is now a member of the Canadian Senate and co-founded “Science Up First,” an initiative that purportedly targets scientific “misinformation.”

During a roundtable discussion on the weaponization of science that the MAHA Institute organized last week, Thacker cited Study 329 as an example of fraud in scientific and medical publishing.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, spoke at the roundtable. He said the discussion, in which “panelists described horror stories of their own scientific research under attack through targeted retractions of papers, denial of research funding, and disciplinary actions,” was “stunning.” He added:

“There is a huge cost in falling out of line with established institutions in science and medicine, whether corporate, university or private organizations. And these highly credentialed panelists paid a huge cost for ‘doing the right thing’ in exposing malfeasance and bad science.”

Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., also participated in the roundtable. He said it “explored how science-like activities have been systematically re-engineered to serve political and corporate interests rather than truth.” He said:

“Study 329 exemplifies the collapse of accountability that follows when industry, regulators and journals form a closed feedback loop of self-validation. What’s marketed as ‘misinformation control’ today is often a continuation of that same pattern — protecting narratives, not people.”

‘One of the best documented case studies of corruption in modern biomedicine’

Study 329, completed in 1998 and funded by GSK, revealed serious safety risks — including suicidal behavior — associated with Paxil. Later studies confirmed those risks.

However, the study showed a few minor positive results that suggested possible efficacy, as it met 15% of the outcomes the researchers had initially said would prove Paxil’s effectiveness.

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