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John Lemke

New Theory Suggests Parallel Universes Interact With And Affect Our Own Universe | IFLS... - 0 views

  • This new theory suggests that all of these infinite multiple worlds overlap and occupy the same region of time and space simultaneously, just like a quantum state. 
  • Under this new interpretation, some worlds in parallel universes would be nearly identical. In others, the “Butterfly Effect” is responsible for completely different outcomes. Each universe is equally real; it isn’t that one universe is the truth while others are bizarre copies or lesser in any way. Wiseman also believes that the quantum forces responsible for driving this shared existence are also responsible for causing quantum interactions between the worlds.
John Lemke

Scientists May Have Decoded One of the Secrets to Superconductors | Science | WIRED - 0 views

  • “In the same way that a laser is a hell of a lot more powerful than a light bulb, room-temperature superconductivity would completely change how you transport electricity and enable new ways of using electricity,” said Louis Taillefer, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.
  • ripples of electrons inside the superconductors that are called charge density waves. The fine-grained structure of the waves, reported in two new papers by independent groups of researchers, suggests that they may be driven by the same force as superconductivity. Davis and his colleagues directly visualized the waves in a study posted online in April, corroborating indirect evidence reported in February by a team led by Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.
  • Taken together, the various findings are at last starting to build a comprehensive picture of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity. “This is the first time I feel like we’re making real progress,” said Andrea Damascelli, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia who led two recent studies on charge density waves. “A lot of different observations which have been made over decades did not make sense with each other, and now they do.”
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  • The community remained divided until 2012, when two groups using a technique called resonant X-ray scattering managed to detect charge density waves deep inside cuprates, cementing the importance of the waves. As the groups published their findings in Science and Nature Physics, two new collaborations formed, one led by Damascelli and the other by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, with plans to characterize the waves even more thoroughly. Finishing in a dead heat, the rival groups’ independent studies appeared together in Science in January 2014. They confirmed that charge density waves are a ubiquitous phenomenon in cuprates and that they strenuously oppose superconductivity, prevailing as the temperature rises.
  • y applying Sachdev’s algorithm to a new round of data, Davis and his group mapped out the structure of the charge density waves, showing that the d-wave distribution of electrons was, indeed, their source.
  • The waves’ structure is particularly suggestive, researchers say, because superconducting pairs of electrons also have a d-wave configuration. It’s as if both arrangements of electrons were cast from the same mold. “Until a few months ago my thought was, OK, you have charge density waves, who cares? What’s the relevance to the high-temperature superconductivity?” Damascelli said. “This tells me these phenomena feed off the same interaction.”
  • In short, antiferromagnetism could generate the d-wave patterns of both superconductivity and its rival, charge density waves.
John Lemke

DNA from maggot guts used to identify corpse in criminal case | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • It had already been suggested by other researchers that the gastrointestinal contents of maggots could be used to identify the subjects they feed on. However, never before has the theory been trialed in a legal, criminal case. Pathologists at Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico, led by María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones and Marta Ortega-Martínez, carried out short tandem repeat typing tests (a common method of DNA profiling) on the matter extracted from three dissected maggots found on the victim's face and neck, and separately on the alleged father of the missing woman. Preliminary results showed that the body was female, and the final outcome was a 99.685 percent probability of positive paternity—the victim had been identified.
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    "It had already been suggested by other researchers that the gastrointestinal contents of maggots could be used to identify the subjects they feed on. However, never before has the theory been trialed in a legal, criminal case. Pathologists at Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico, led by María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones and Marta Ortega-Martínez, carried out short tandem repeat typing tests (a common method of DNA profiling) on the matter extracted from three dissected maggots found on the victim's face and neck, and separately on the alleged father of the missing woman. Preliminary results showed that the body was female, and the final outcome was a 99.685 percent probability of positive paternity-the victim had been identified."
John Lemke

Ain't No Science Fiction, Suspended Animation Is FDA Approved and Heading To Clinical T... - 0 views

  • The Food and Drug Administration has already approved his technique for human trials, and he has secured funding from the Army to conduct the feasibility phase. Dr. Rhee is currently lobbying for funds to conduct a full trial. If he’s successful human trials could begin as early as next year.
  • What Dr. Rhee hopes to test on humans is a method he worked out for the past couple decades on pigs. Patients would be injected with a cold fluid to induce severe hypothermia. Clinically hypothermia is characterized by the drop of a person’s body temperature from its normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celcius) to lower than 95 degrees (35 C). Below 95, the heart, nervous system and other organs begin to fail. The strict range is indicative of a metabolic system with strict temperature requirements for proper function (death waits only a few degrees the other way as well). Dr. Rhee’s method involves injecting patients with a cold fluid that would bring the body’s temperature down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 C). Sounds chilling, but when he induced the extreme hypothermia in pigs they came out just fine. Heart function, breathing, and brain function was completely normal.
  • Dr. Rhee is no stranger to high-stakes medicine. The native South Korean was trained at the Uniformed Services University Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland. Following a fellowship in trauma and critical care at the University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center he served in the US Navy as director of the University of South California’s Navy Trauma Training Center at Los Angeles County. He was then sent to Afghanistan where he was one of the first surgeons at Camp Rhino. Later he started the first surgical unit at Ramadi, Iraq. His cool under fire was on display nationally as he performed surgery on US Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot through the skull in the Tucson shootings this past January. His experience with induced hypothermia came into play the night of the shootings when Dr. Rhee removed part of the congresswoman’s skull. The wound had raised her body temperature and began “cooking the brain.” He used a device to cool Rep. Giffords’ skin.
John Lemke

Bacteria from bees possible alternative to antibiotics - Lund University - 0 views

  • Raw honey has been used against infections for millennia, before honey - as we now know it - was manufactured and sold in stores. So what is the key to its’ antimicrobial properties? Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have identified a unique group of 13 lactic acid bacteria found in fresh honey, from the honey stomach of bees. The bacteria produce a myriad of active antimicrobial compounds. 
  • While the effect on human bacteria has only been tested in a lab environment thus far, the lactic acid bacteria has been applied directly to horses with persistent wounds. The LAB was mixed with honey and applied to ten horses; where the owners had tried several other methods to no avail. All of the horses' wounds were healed by the mixture.
John Lemke

Signature of long-sought particle that could revolutionize quantum computing - 0 views

  • A Purdue University physicist has observed evidence of long-sought Majorana fermions, special particles that could unleash the potential of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
John Lemke

So What Can The Music Industry Do Now? | Techdirt - 0 views

  • The past was, and the future is going to be, much more about performance. In this new world, recordings often function as more as ads for concerts than as money-makers themselves. (And sometimes are bundled with concert tickets, as Madonna's latest album was.) As a result, copying looks a lot less fearsome. A copied ad is just as effective--and maybe much more so--than the original.
  • Just ask pop singer Colbie Caillat. Caillet's music career began in 2005 when a friend posted several of her home-recorded songs to MySpace. One song, Bubbly, began to get word of mouth among MySpace users, and within a couple of months went viral. Soon Colbie Caillat was the No. 1 unsigned artist on MySpace. Two years after posting Bubbly, Caillet had more than 200,000 MySpace friends, and her songs had been played more than 22 million times. Caillet had built a global fan base while never leaving her Malibu home. In 2007, Universal Records released her debut album, Coco, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard charts and reached platinum status.
  • The problem of piracy in music is, of course, very different from the problem in comedy. Stand-up comics worry most about a rival, not a fan, copying their jokes. Still, the reduction of consumer copying of music via norms may be possible, and will become more imaginable if the music industry experiences ever-greater fragmentation and communication. There is already an interesting example of norms playing a substantial role in controlling copying in music. In the culture of jambands, we see the fans themselves taking action to deter pirates. What are jambands? In a fascinating 2006 paper, legal scholar Mark Schultz studied the unique culture of a group of bands that belong to a musical genre, pioneered by the Grateful Dead, characterized by long-form improvisation, extensive touring, recreational drug use, and dedicated fans. Although acts like Phish, Blues Traveler, and the Dave Mathews Band vary in their styles, they are all recognizably inspired by the progenitors of jam music, the Dead. But the Dead's influence is not only musical. Most jambands adhere to a particular relationship with their fans that also was forged by the Dead.
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  • it turns out that by killing the single, the record labels made the Internet piracy problem, when it arrived, even worse. One of the major attractions of filesharing was that it brought back singles. Consumers wanted the one or two songs on the album that they liked, and not the ten they didn't.
John Lemke

Feathered dinosaur death site is an "animal Pompeii" | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The fossils of the Jehol Biota are from the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago, and they comprise a wide variety of animals and plants. So far, about 60 species of plants, 1,000 species of invertebrates, and 140 species of vertebrates have been found in the Jehol Biota.
  • One of the most remarkable discoveries to arise from these fossils came in 2010, when Michael Benton of the University of Bristol found color-banding preserved in dinosaur fossils. These stripes of light and dark are similar to stripes in modern birds, and they provided further evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Benton also found that these fossils had intact mealnosomes—organelles that make pigments. This discovery allowed paleontologists to tell the colors of dinosaurs' feathers for the first time.
John Lemke

Ask Ethan #55: Could a Manned Mission to Mars Abort? - Starts With A Bang! - Medium - 0 views

  • No humans have ever traveled farther away from Earth than the crew of Apollo 13 did, as they circled around the far side of the Moon close to lunar apogee, achieving a maximum distance of 400,171 km above the Earth’s surface on April 15, 1970. But when the first manned spaceflight to another planet occurs, that record will be shattered, and in a mere matter of days.
  • The way we currently reach other worlds with our present technology — or any remote location in the Universe — involves three distinct stages:The initial launch, which overcomes the Earth’s gravitational binding energy and starts our spacecraft off with a reasonably large (on the order of a few km/s) velocity relative to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.On-board course corrections, where very small amounts of thrust accelerate the spacecraft to its optimal trajectory.And gravity assists, where we use the gravitational properties of other planets in orbit around the Sun to change our spacecraft’s velocity, either increasing or decreasing its speed with every encounter.It’s through the combination of these three actions that we can reach any location — if we’re patient and we plan properly — with only our current rocket technology.
    • John Lemke
       
      How we can do it now, if we plan right.
  • The initial launch is a very hard part right now. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to overcome the Earth’s gravitational pull, to accelerate a significant amount of mass to the Earth’s escape velocity, and to raise it all the way up through the Earth’s atmosphere.
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  • The most optimal one for a one-way trip to Mars, for those of you wondering, that minimizes both flight time and the amount of energy needed, involves simply timing your launch right.
    • John Lemke
       
      The cheapest and the fastest. The one way ticket option.
  • When a planet orbits the Sun, there’s a lot of energy in that system, both gravitational energy and kinetic energy. When a third body interacts gravitationally as well, it can either gain some energy by stealing it from the Sun-planet system, or it can lose energy by giving it up to the Sun-planet system. The amount of energy performed by the spacecraft’s thrusters is often only 20% (or less) of the energy either gained-or-lost from the interaction!
    • John Lemke
       
      The transfer of energy involved to change speeds.
John Lemke

Colliding Atmospheres: Mars vs Comet Siding Spring - NASA Science - 0 views

  • "We hope to witness two atmospheres colliding," explains David Brain of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).  "This is a once in a lifetime event!"
  • Everyone knows that planets have atmospheres.  Lesser known is that comets do, too.  The atmosphere of a comet, called its "coma," is made of gas and dust that spew out of the sun-warmed nucleus.  The atmosphere of a typical comet is wider than Jupiter.
  • The timing could scarcely be better.  Just last year, NASA launched a spacecraft named MAVEN to study the upper atmosphere of Mars, and it will be arriving in Sept. 2014 barely a month before the comet. MAVEN is on a mission to solve a longstanding mystery: What happened to the atmosphere of Mars?  Billions of years ago, Mars had a substantial atmosphere that blanketed the planet, keeping Mars warm and sustaining liquid water on its surface. Today, only a wispy shroud of CO2 remains, and the planet below is colder and dryer than any desert on Earth. Theories for this planetary catastrophe center on erosion of the atmosphere by solar wind.
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  • the comet could spark Martian auroras.
John Lemke

Stealing Encryption Keys Just by Touching a Laptop - 0 views

  • A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally.
  • In order to victimize any computer, all you need to do is wear a special digitizer wristband and touch the exposed part of the system. The wristband will measure all the tiny changes in the ground electrical potential that can reveal even stronger encryption keys, such as a 4,096-bit RSA key.
  • in some cases, you don't even have to touch the system directly with your bare hands. You can intercept encryption keys from attached network and video cables as well. Researchers called it a side-channel attack.
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  • The actual attack can be performed quickly. According to the research, "despite the GHz-scale clock rate of the laptops and numerous noise sources, the full attacks require a few seconds of measurements using medium frequency signals (around 2 MHz), or one hour using low frequency signals (up to 40 kHz)."
John Lemke

Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record | University of Cambridge - 0 views

  • three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
  • Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.
  • Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.
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