The science behind RHCs liver thread

https://www.sciencealert.com/one-of...ut-black-holes-was-just-overturned-in-the-lab


One of Our Fundamental Assumptions About Black Holes Was Just Overturned in The Lab
Black holes are the most intense and mysterious cosmic phenomena in the Universe, and new research shows we understand even less about them than we thought we did.

A long-standing assumption about the physics taking place in the space immediately surrounding these matter-consuming voids has been found to be incorrect, and the discovery could derail decades of scientific theory.

To be fair, studying black holes is really, really hard. For starters, they’re pretty much invisible, given they pull in everything in their vicinity – even visible light, which is why we can’t see them – plus other forms of radiation, such as X-rays.

But just because they’re invisible to our eyes doesn’t mean we can’t tell they’re there.

“Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” explains physicist Guillaume Loisel from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called an accretion disk.”

That’s because when matter gets pulled in to the accretion disk around a black hole, it becomes intensely heated and produces a bright glow that can be seen by instruments that detect X-rays.

This kind of technique is what’s enabled scientists to discover things like matter wobbling around black holes, measure gas flows emanating from them, and record tidal disruption events – where black holes rip entire stars apart.

But there could be a problem with one aspect of the theory around black holes and their accretion disk emissions that might impact much research conducted in the past two decades.

“The catch is that the plasmas that emit the X-rays are exotic,” says one of the team, Jim Bailey, “and models used to interpret their spectra have never been tested in the laboratory till now.”

To physically recreate the conditions around a black hole as closely as possible, the researchers used Sandia’s Z machine – the planet’s most powerful X-ray generator.

Their aim was to test something called resonant Auger destruction – the notion that under a black hole’s immense gravity and intense radiation, highly energised iron electrons don’t emit light in the form of photons.

This assumption has been a mainstay of black hole theoretical physics for some 20 years, but in a massive five-year experiment at Sandia, the team found that resonant Auger destruction didn’t occur when they applied intense X-ray energies to a film of silicon.

According to the researchers, silicon experiences the Auger effect more frequently than iron, so the tests should have demonstrated the phenomenon at work if the assumption is true.

“If resonant Auger destruction is a factor, it should have happened in our experiment because we had the same conditions, the same column density, the same temperature,” says Loisel.

“Our results show that if the photons aren’t there, the ions must be not there either.”

The end result may be a victory for showing the power of the black-hole-mimicking Z machine, but it’s something of a whitewash for black hole science, because it could mean that some of the astrophysics research in the last two decades could be flawed.

As for what can explain the way we detect accretion disk emissions if resonant Auger destruction doesn’t apply, the researchers aren’t entirely sure.

“[One] implication could be that lines from the highly charged iron ions are present, but the lines have been misidentified so far,” says Loisel.

“This is because black holes shift spectral lines tremendously due to the fact that photons have a hard time escaping the intense gravitation field.”

With the lab work done for the time being, solving the puzzle will now fall back to theoretical models, which will need to accommodate or otherwise counter this implicit debunking of resonant Auger destruction.

Doing so might not be easy – nothing in theoretical physics really is – but the team is upbeat about our best scientists being up to the job.

“Our research suggests it will be necessary to rework many scientific papers published over the last 20 years,” Loisel explains.

“We are optimistic that astrophysicists will implement whatever changes are found to be needed.”

The findings are reported in Physical Review Letters.

 

Ahh, gotcha

 

Now actual scientists have the balls to yet again claim we have 5 years to save the planet or humans will go extinct, got it? by 2023 we are all DOOMED I TELL YOU DOOMED!

Remember in 2006 when we had 10 years to save the planet. WE DID IT BABY!
Then 18 months according to Prince Charles, of course 18 months came and went now he says 2035

And people wonder why I put 0 weight in titles such as "scientist"
"professor James G. Anderson of Harvard University"
There Is No Time Left
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/there-is-no-time-left/



What ever the truth on CO2, these retards are only harming science

 

Don't get me started

Carbon credits, good?
You would think that if a company didn't use all it's carbon credits that would be great because the less CO2 we produce the better right?
Nope, they can sell the credits they haven't used to other companies because, well it makes no difference really.

Have you seen all them Polar Bears surviving on small icebergs because their habitat is melting, or those glaciers/ice sheets that are breaking off and falling into the ocean because they are getting warm?
Well, I saw both in black and white when I was a kid, because there was no money to be made at the time they were explained as Polar Bears resting on blocks of ice after hunting or just enjoying the summer sun. The ice falls were explained as natural (imagine that) because at a certain point the air/climate is too warm for the ice to stay stable (that is why the ice doesn't just expand year after year and cover the earth).

 

Gore worked with Enron and Goldman Sachs in the 90s on cap and trade, and he is also the world's first renewable billionaire. He's made quite a lot of money, worth 50mil as Vice President, now worth over a billion thanks to "muh global warming"
Circa 2009, he is that billionaire now.
Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ear...d-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html

Stein et al. 2017
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2929/abstract
Sea ice at it's highest in the last 10000 years in the 19th and 20th century. This is extremely problematic for the "cause" as the polar bears came through that 10000 years without a problem
.

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Plus the population of polar bears as gone from 6000 in 1960 to 24000+ in 2015. This is also problematic and largely why the polar bear has been dropped as a mascot for the "cause".

Zoologist Susan Crockford

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Most mothers are found with 3 cubs, that is a good sign of population health
ALL polar bear doom comes from computer models, and those models don't even factor in thick spring ice which drastically effects bears, as they can't penetrate the ice and starve

Plus, ice Volume what matters, not ice area when talking ice decline records.
2008

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2017

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As you can see, sea ice area is less than 2008 but the ice is a lot thicker, multi-year ice is gained over years, sea ice area is entirely seasonal, it grows and retracts every year, and storms affect it because storms break up and compact ice, leaving as much sea ice volume but covering less area, this less sea ice area is then blamed on humans without a shred of scientific evidence to support the claims, often made by scientific institutions like NASA Climate and NOAA climate.

(Caveat, NASA and NOAA Climate divisions are tiny offices with eco scientists working in them and largely have nothing to do with the larger organisations, which is exactly the same for NASA GISS, it is not NASA, it was started by Gore, and he appointed James Hansen to run GISS and also recruited Gavid Schmidt, it's current head, who by his own admission, got into climate science because he could not cut it in his field of mathematics, yes, he has no physics degree or nothing, just mathematics.. and it's laughably called "Goddard institute for space studies" when they do not study space, but it does sound good, doesn't it.

NASA GISS is only connected to NASA by an internet connection, it's a tiny office in New York staffed by Goreites. NASA "over Tom's restaurant.. my arse"

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Sadly it was Karl Sagan who brought about the completely incorrect theory of Venus, and it was James Hansen that brought that incorrect theory to NASA GISS . That was the genesis of the completely incorrect theory on muh global warming that is entirely founded on computer models that have never been validated and cannot produce any accuracy over timescales we can measure, like 5 to 10 years, they claim they can only be accurate over 50 - 100 years, isn't that convenient

If you look at the chronology of science greats and you see that the list ends in Neil de Grasse Tyson (who never did anything for actual scientific advancement but was a good TV guy) one just has to shake their head at how all those great fundamental discoveries have all but dried up, and is it a surprise when we call a scientist who doesn't even work in his field (he manages a planetarium and I can't find one published paper from him) a great when he has done nothing to progress knowledge? I post on black holes just above makes 70% of what Tyson has been telling people.. complete nonsense.


I cannot say AGW is patently false, or that the theory is absolutely wrong, no one can provide proofs at all, on either side.
What I can do is prove testable claims are bollocks.


I like observational evidence, and testable science, empirical science.
We have a golden opportunity.
During the little ice age Europe froze as the low activity caused shifting patters and drove cold air from Siberia into Europe in periods from 1300s to 1700s ish, start and end is disputed.
It means winters get colder, not the whole year freezes, and some season shifting happens, as the one that caused the great famine 1315 to 1317, and causes drought and disease, black death 1348 I think.

Today we are experiencing the lowest solar minimum in a few thousand years and winters are again getting more extreme and we again see Siberian air blow into Europe and pressure changes that allow the polar vortex to move down, and the same high pressure blocking over Greenland. This process is known to be happening for at least 4000 years.
Atmospheric circulation causes natural variability in Arctic sea ice, and the Greenland ice sheet, not CO2. There was never any evidence our contribution to 0.04% of the atmosphere is causing what they claim it is
Influence of high-latitude atmospheric circulation changes on summertime Arctic sea ice
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3241

It does not matter what the evidence is, the IPCC have stated 2 things that are relevant.
1. They won't stop no matter what the science shows.. they stated it.
2. They said it's not about environment, it is about wealth distribution. This was said 8 YEARS AGO

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@Diego For you mate, no doubt you've heard all the lies about the Ross Ice shelf being all man made melty. Even the Eco mad Nat Geo had to admit it. Of course the Guardian probably remains silent, I can't find their article on it
Deep Bore Into Antarctica Finds Freezing Ice, Not Melting as Expected
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ross-ice-shelf-bore-antarctica-freezing/

 

Interesting read Sisu, cheers mate.

 

Don't call me that ****'s name

 

Engineering, what is forgotten when we create technology to do things for us.
Coral castles Florida, this really is a good 25 minutes watch on how they quarried and cut, moved and assembled coral limestone blocks to build the site.
Truly awesome

 

An amateur astronomer caught a supernova explosion on camera
The Argentine stargazer captured the star's death in series of nearly 100 images
BY
LISA GROSSMAN
1:00PM, FEBRUARY 21, 2018

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RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME In September 2016, an amateur astronomer was looking at spiral galaxy NGC 613 (shown), located about 65 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor, and caught a supernova exploding.

• An amateur astronomer caught a supernova on camera during the explosion’s earliest moments, giving physicists a glimpse of a long-sought phase of stellar death.

Víctor Buso spotted the supernova from his rooftop observatory in Rosario, Argentina, on September 20, 2016, when he aimed his telescope straight overhead at spiral galaxy NGC 613 to test a new camera. To avoid letting in too much light from the city sky — Rosario is a city of about 1.2 million people — he took a series of about 100 images that were each exposed for 20 seconds, spanning about an hour and a half.

Over the last half-hour of Buso’s observations, the supernova appeared and then doubled in brightness. In 2013, astronomers spotted a supernova within hours of its explosion (SN Online: 2/13/17), but this is one of the first to be spotted before it exploded.

Because there is no way to predict when and where a supernova will go off, this sort of observation is extremely rare, says astrophysicist Melina Bersten of the National University of La Plata in Argentina, who reports details of the supernova in the Feb. 22 Nature.

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NOW YOU SEE IT The black spot toward the bottom right of this image is a supernova going off near galaxy NGC 613. An amateur astronomer in Argentina captured the explosion in nearly 100 images taken with a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor camera.
VÍCTOR BUSO AND GASTÓN FOLATELLI


“This is completely unusual, and was something that many people were searching for around the world without success,” Bersten says. “It was incredible.”

Bersten and her colleagues analyzed the light from the supernova and found that it matches models of the first phase of a supernova called the shock breakout phase, in which a shock wave from a massive star’s collapse ricochets back from the star’s core and pushes stellar material outward.


Jammy twat

 

Something can be seen, then not seen = supernova
Quite a massive leap to call that a supernova

 

The quest to identify the nature of the neutrino’s alter ego is heating up
Physicists are trying to see if the particle’s matter and antimatter versions are the same
BY
EMILY CONOVER
7:00AM, FEBRUARY 26, 2018

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ANTIMATTER MYSTERY Physicists suspect that the neutrino may be its own antiparticle. Experiments such as GERDA (shown) are attempting to determine whether that hunch is correct by searching for a rare type of nuclear decay.

K. FREUND/GERDA COLLABORATION

Galaxies, stars, planets and life, all are formed from one essential substance: matter.

But the abundance of matter is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of physics. The Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, spawned equal amounts of matter and its bizarro twin, antimatter. Matter and antimatter partners annihilate when they meet, so an even stephen universe would have ended up full of energy — and nothing else. Somehow, the balance tipped toward matter in the early universe.

A beguiling subatomic particle called a neutrino may reveal how that happened. If neutrinos are their own antiparticles — meaning that the neutrino’s matter and antimatter versions are the same thing — the lightweight particle might point to an explanation for the universe’s glut of matter.

So scientists are hustling to find evidence of a hypothetical kind of nuclear decay that can occur only if neutrinos and antineutrinos are one and the same. Four experiments have recently published results showing no hint of the process, known as neutrinoless double beta decay (SN: 7/6/02, p. 10). But another attempt, set to begin soon, may have a fighting chance of detecting this decay, if it occurs. Meanwhile, planning is under way for a new generation of experiments that will make even more sensitive measurements.

“Right now, we’re standing on the brink of what potentially could be a really big discovery,” says Janet Conrad, a neutrino physicist at MIT not involved with the experiments.

A league of its own
Each matter particle has an antiparticle, a partner with the opposite electric charge. Electrons have positrons as partners; protons have antiprotons. But it’s unclear how this pattern applies to neutrinos, which have no electric charge.

Rather than having distinct matter and antimatter varieties, neutrinos might be the lone example of a theorized class of particle dubbed a Majorana fermion (SN: 8/19/17, p. 8), which are their own antiparticles. “No other particle that we know of could have this property; the neutrino is the only one,” says neutrino physicist Jason Detwiler of the University of Washington in Seattle, who is a member of the KamLAND-Zen and Majorana Demonstrator neutrinoless double beta decay experiments.

Neutrinoless double beta decay is a variation on standard beta decay, a relatively common radioactive process that occurs naturally on Earth. In beta decay, a neutron within an atom’s nucleus converts into a proton, releasing an electron and an antineutrino. The element thereby transforms into another one further along the periodic table.

Beta decays
The standard type of beta decay (left) occurs when a neutron in an atom’s nucleus converts into a proton and releases an electron (blue, e-) and an antineutrino (red). For certain species of atoms, two such decays can happen at once (middle). If the neutrino is its own antiparticle, those double beta decays could also occur without any emitted antineutrinos (right).

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C. CHANG
In certain isotopes of particular elements — species of atoms characterized by a given number of protons and neutrons — two beta decays can occur simultaneously, emitting two electrons and two antineutrinos. Although double beta decay is exceedingly rare, it has been detected. If the neutrino is its own antiparticle, a neutrino-free version of this decay might also occur: In a rarity atop a rarity, the antineutrino emitted in one of the two simultaneous beta decays might be reabsorbed by the other, resulting in no escaping antineutrinos.

Such a process “creates asymmetry between matter and antimatter,” says physicist Giorgio Gratta of Stanford University, who works on the EXO-200 neutrinoless double beta decay experiment. In typical beta decay, one matter particle emitted — the electron — balances out the antimatter particle — the antineutrino. But in neutrinoless double beta decay, two electrons are emitted with no corresponding antimatter particles. Early in the universe, other processes might also have behaved in a similarly asymmetric way.

On the hunt
To spot the unusual decay, scientists are building experiments filled with carefully selected isotopes of certain elements and monitoring the material for electrons of a particular energy, which would be released in the neutrinoless decay.

If any experiment observes this process, “it would be a huge deal,” says particle physicist Yury Kolomensky of the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the CUORE neutrinoless double beta decay experiment. “It is a Nobel Prize‒level discovery.”

Unfortunately, the latest results won’t be garnering any Nobels. In a paper accepted in Physical Review Letters, the GERDA experiment spotted no signs of the decay. Located in the Gran Sasso underground lab in Italy, GERDA looks for the decay of the isotope germanium-76. (The number indicates the quantity of protons and neutrons in the atom’s nucleus.) Since there were no signs of the decay, if the process occurs it must be extremely rare, the scientists concluded, and its half-life must be long — more than 80 trillion trillion years.

Three other experiments have also recently come up empty. The Majorana Demonstrator experiment, located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, S.D., which also looks for the decay in germanium, reported no evidence of neutrinoless double beta decay in a paper accepted in Physical Review Letters. Meanwhile, EXO-200, located in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, underground in a salt deposit near Carlsbad, N.M., reported no signs of the decay in xenon-136 in a paper published in the Feb. 16 Physical Review Letters.

Likewise, no evidence for the decay materialized in the CUORE experiment, in results reported in a paper accepted in Physical Review Letters. Composed of crystals containing tellurium-130, CUORE is also located in the Gran Sasso underground lab.

The most sensitive search thus far comes from the KamLAND-Zen neutrinoless double beta decay experiment located in a mine in Hida, Japan, which found a half-life longer than 100 trillion trillion years for the neutrinoless double beta decay of xenon-136.

That result means that, if neutrinos are their own antiparticles, their mass has to be less than about 0.061 to 0.165 electron volts depending on theoretical assumptions, the KamLAND-Zen collaboration reported in a 2016 paper in Physical Review Letters. (An electron volt is particle physicists’ unit of energy and mass. For comparison, an electron has a much larger mass of half a million electron volts.)

Neutrinos, which come in three different varieties and have three different masses, are extremely light, but exactly how tiny those masses are is not known. Mass measured by neutrinoless double beta decay experiments is an effective mass, a kind of weighted average of the three neutrino masses. The smaller that mass, the lower the rate of the neutrinoless decays (and therefore the longer the half-life), and the harder the decays are to find.

KamLAND-Zen looks for decays of xenon-136 dissolved in a tank of liquid. Now, KamLAND-Zen is embarking on a new incarnation of the experiment, using about twice as much xenon, which will reach down to even smaller masses, and even rarer decays. Finding neutrinoless double beta decay may be more likely below about 0.05 electron volts, where neutrino mass has been predicted to lie if the particles are their own antiparticles.

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NO NEUTRINOS? The KamLAND-Zen experiment uses the detector shown above to look for double beta decays of xenon-136. If those decays occur without any emitted neutrinos, the neutrino is its own antiparticle.
THE KAMLAND COLLABORATION
Supersizing the search
KamLAND-Zen’s new experiment is only a start. Decades of additional work may be necessary before scientists clinch the case for or against neutrinos being their own antiparticles. But, says KamLAND-Zen member Lindley Winslow, a physicist at MIT, “sometimes nature is very kind to you.” The experiment could begin taking data as early as this spring, says Winslow, who is also a member of CUORE.

To keep searching, experiments must get bigger, while remaining extremely clean, free from any dust or contamination that could harbor radioactive isotopes. “What we are searching for is a decay that is very, very, very rare,” says GERDA collaborator Riccardo Brugnera, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy. Anything that could mimic the decay could easily swamp the real thing, making the experiment less sensitive. Too many of those mimics, known as background, could limit the ability to see the decays, or to prove that they don’t occur.

In a 2017 paper in Nature, the GERDA experiment deemed itself essentially free from background — a first among such experiments. Reaching that milestone is good news for the future of these experiments. Scientists from GERDA and the Majorana Demonstrator are preparing to team up on a bigger and better experiment, called LEGEND, and many other teams are also planning scaled-up versions of their current detectors.

Antimatter whodunit
If scientists conclude that neutrinos are their own antiparticles, that fact could reveal why antimatter is so scarce. It could also explain why neutrinos are vastly lighter than other particles. “You can kill multiple problems with one stone,” Conrad says.

Theoretical physicists suggest that if neutrinos are their own antiparticles, undetected heavier neutrinos might be paired up with the lighter neutrinos that we observe. In what’s known as the seesaw mechanism, the bulky neutrino would act like a big kid on a seesaw, weighing down one end and lifting the lighter neutrinos to give them a smaller mass. At the same time, the heavy neutrinos — theorized to have existed at the high energies present in the young universe — could have given the infant cosmos its early preference for matter.

Discovering that neutrinos are their own antiparticles wouldn’t clinch the seesaw scenario. But it would provide a strong hint that neutrinos are essential to explaining where the antimatter went. And that’s a question physicists would love to answer.

“The biggest mystery in the universe is who stole all the antimatter. There’s no bigger theft that has occurred than that,” Conrad says.

 

These giant viruses have more protein-making gear than any known virus
The newly discovered duo was found in extreme environments in Brazil
BY
DAN GARISTO
2:06PM, FEBRUARY 27, 2018

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IT’S ALIVE? Tupanvirus soda lake, seen in this scanning electron microscope image, is one of two newly discovered giant viruses.

SPONSOR MESSAGE
Two newly discovered giant viruses have the most comprehensive toolkit for assembling proteins found in any known virus. In a host cell, the viruses have the potential to synthesize all 20 standard amino acids, the building blocks of life.

Researchers dubbed the viruses Tupanvirus deep ocean and Tupanvirus soda lake, combining the name of the indigenous South American god of thunder, Tupan, with the extreme environment where each type of virus was found. The giant viruses are among the largest of their kind — up to 2.3 micrometers in length — which is about 23 times as long as a particle of HIV, the scientists report February 27 in Nature Communications.

Tupanviruses can infect a wide range of hosts, such as protists and amoebas, but pose no threat to humans, the researchers say.

Viruses are considered nonliving, but the genetic complexity of giant viruses has some scientists questioning that categorization. Each Tupanvirus, for example, has a massive genetic instruction book with roughly 1.5 million base pairs of DNA, more than what some bacteria have, says coauthor Bernard La Scola, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University in France.

But other scientists say giant viruses aren’t so different from their smaller kin. Research by Frederik Schulz, with the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., suggests these microscopic behemoths are regular viruses that acquired extra genes from hosts and should not be classified as life.

Tupanviruses don’t settle the controversy, but they do challenge our preconceptions of what life is, La Scola says.

 

Two-way communication is possible with a single quantum particle
Studies show two people can simultaneously swap information using only one photon
BY
EMILY CONOVER
10:00AM, FEBRUARY 23, 2018

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DOUBLE DUTY Thanks to the phenomenon of quantum superposition, a single particle of light can send information in two directions at once, scientists report.


Communication is a two-way street. Thanks to quantum mechanics, that adage applies even if you’ve got only one particle to transmit messages with.

Using a single photon, or particle of light, two people can simultaneously send information to one another, scientists report in a new pair of papers. The feat relies on a quirk of quantum mechanics — superposition, the phenomenon through which particles can effectively occupy two places at once.

Sending information via quantum particles is a popular research subject, thanks to the promise of unhackable quantum communication (SN: 12/23/17, p. 27). The new studies specify a previously unidentified twist on that type of technique. “Sometimes you overlook a cool idea, and then it's just literally right in front of your nose,” says University of Vienna experimental physicist Philip Walther.

Theoretical physicists Flavio Del Santo of the University of Vienna and Borivoje Dakić from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences describe the theory behind the procedure in the Feb. 9 Physical Review Letters. Walther, Del Santo, Dakić and colleagues follow up with a demonstration of the technique in a paper posted at arXiv.org on February 14.

Imagine that two people, Alice and Bob, are stationed some distance apart. In standard classical physics, Alice and Bob would each require their own photon to send each other messages simultaneously, with each light particle transmitting a single bit, 0 or 1.

But if Alice and Bob possess a photon that is in a superposition — simultaneously located near Alice and near Bob — both of them can manipulate that photon to encode a 0 or 1, and then send it back to the other. How each manipulates the photon determines which of the two receives the photon in the end. If Alice and Bob put in the same bit — both 0s or both 1s — Alice receives the photon. If their bits don’t match, Bob gets it. Since Alice knows whether she sent a 0 or a 1, she immediately knows whether Bob encoded a 0 or 1, and vice versa.

To show that such communication is possible, Walther and colleagues sent single photons through an arrangement of mirrors and other optical devices. The setup put the photon in a superposition, sending it simultaneously to two stations that represented Alice and Bob.

By changing the phase of the light’s electromagnetic wave — shifting where the troughs and peaks of the wave fell — the researchers encoded the photon with a 0 or 1 at each station. Then, at each station, the photon — still in limbo between Alice and Bob — was sent to the opposite station. Along the way, the photon interacted with itself, interfering like water ripples combining to amplify their strength or cancel out. That interference determined whether the final photon was detected at Alice’s station or Bob’s.

“It’s a very nice idea,” says physicist Giulio Chiribella of the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the research. “This is another way in which quantum mechanics catches us off guard.”

 

This arti

I have only followed the links to one of the above cited papers so far, and this article^^ COMPLETELY misrepresents the paper.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.060503
Abstract
"In this Letter we show that communication when restricted to a single information carrier (i.e., single particle) and finite speed of propagation is fundamentally limited for classical systems. On the other hand, quantum systems can surpass this limitation. We show that communication bounded to the exchange of a single quantum particle (in superposition of different spatial locations) can result in “two-way signaling,” which is impossible in classical physics. We quantify the discrepancy between classical and quantum scenarios by the probability of winning a game played by distant players. We generalize our result to an arbitrary number of parties and we show that the probability of success is asymptotically decreasing to zero as the number of parties grows, for all classical strategies. In contrast, quantum strategy allows players to win the game with certainty."

The rest of the paper is paywalled

 

This one is interesting, and takes more reading, and a bit of research

The actual experiment. The other was just rambling about how to conduct the experiment and lends nothing to the theory.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05102.pdf


Cheers, this looks like a good read, cup o tea

 

Am very interested in the phenomenon of Group-Think

"**Rule One. A group of people come to share a common view or belief that in some way is not properly based on reality.
**Rule Two. Because their common view/belief cannot be subjected to external proof they have to reinforce its authority by claiming ‘consensus.’ The idea is to emphasize that all right-thinking people hold this view and that it is no longer open to challenge.
**Rule Three: Anyone who disputes this ‘consensus’ must be excluded from the discussion: at best marginalized; at worst openly attacked or discredited."

There are many real world examples of the above to cite all throughout history right up to today in politics and science.

I also think we see a new phenomena these days, pathological altruism.

A Case Study in Groupthink.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/02/Groupthink.pdf

 

That's not snow folks, Tony Montana's plane blew up over the UK



"‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’: According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’ "
https://web.archive.org/web/2013040...-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

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Then the floods came and that was also Muh global warming too

Any theory that is validated by everything observed (even observations that contradict each other) is by definition a pseudo-scientific theory.

Just sayin

 

A new species of tardigrade lays eggs covered with doodads and streamers
The newest of these tough little water bears was plucked from a parking lot in Japan
BY
SUSAN MILIUS
5:31PM, FEBRUARY 28, 2018

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ELEGANT EGG The elaborate surface (right) of a microscopic tardigrade egg (left) was one of the clues that it came from a new species of water bear.

D. STEC, K. ARAKAWA AND Ł. MICHALCZYK/PLOS ONE 2018

What a spectacular Easter basket tardigrade eggs would make — at least for those celebrating in miniature.

A new species of the pudgy, eight-legged, water creatures lays pale, spherical microscopic eggs studded with domes crowned in long, trailing streamers.

Eggs of many land-based tardigrades have bumps, spines, filaments and such, presumably to help attach to a surface, says species codiscoverer Kazuharu Arakawa. The combination of a relatively plain surface on the egg itself (no pores, for instance) plus a filament crown helps distinguish this water bear as a new species, now named Macrobiotus shonaicus, he and colleagues report February 28 in PLOS ONE.

With about 20 new species added each year to the existing 1,200 or so known worldwide, tardigrades have become tiny icons of extreme survival (SN Online: 7/14/17).

“I was actually not looking for a new species,” Arakawa says. He happened on it when searching through moss he plucked from the concrete parking lot at his apartment. He routinely samples such stray spots to search for tardigrades, one of his main interests as a genome biologist at Keio University’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences in Tsuruoka City, Japan.

STAR TURN The tardigrade species newly named Macrobiotus shonaicus (after the Shonai region of Japan where it was discovered) has a rare talent for growing under lab conditions. That allowed genome biologist and tardigrade fan Kazuharu Arakawa to capture water bear home movies. Here, M. shonaicus trundles along with its almost bearlike gait. In an event rarely shown on film, it excretes waste almost its body size.

These particular moss-loving creatures managed to grow and reproduce in the lab —“very rare for a tardigrade,” he says. He didn’t realize it was an unknown species until he started deciphering the DNA that makes up some of its genes. The sequences he found didn’t match any in a worldwide database.

His two coauthors, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, worked out that he had found a new member of a storied cluster of relatives of the tardigrade M. hufelandi. That species, described in 1834, kept turning up across continents around the world — or so biologists thought for more than a century. Realization eventually dawned that the single species that could live in such varied places was actually a complex of close cousins.

And now M. shonaicus adds yet another cousin to a group of about 30. Who knows where the next one will turn up. “I think there are lots more to be identified,” Arakawa says.

 

Human skin bacteria have cancer-fighting powers
The microbes make a compound that disrupts DNA formation in tumor cells
BY
AIMEE CUNNINGHAM
3:49PM, FEBRUARY 28, 2018

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SKIN WIN Staphylococcus epidermidis, a species of bacteria that lives on human skin, grows here in a dish. Strains of this bacteria make a cancer-fighting compound that stops DNA synthesis.

R. GALLO AND TERUAKI NAKATSUJI/UC SAN DIEGO

Certain skin-dwelling microbes may be anticancer superheroes, reigning in uncontrolled cell growth. This surprise discovery could one day lead to drugs that treat or maybe even prevent skin cancer.

The bacteria’s secret weapon is a chemical compound that stops DNA formation in its tracks. Mice slathered with one strain of Staphylococcus epidermidis that makes the compound developed fewer tumors after exposure to damaging ultraviolet radiation compared with those treated with a strain lacking the compound, researchers report online February 28 in Science Advances.

The findings highlight “the potential of the microbiome to influence human disease,” says Lindsay Kalan, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Staphylococcal species are the most numerous of the many bacteria that normally live on human skin. Richard Gallo and his colleagues were investigating the antimicrobial powers of these bacteria when the team discovered a strain of S. epidermidis that made a compound — 6-N-hydroxyaminopurine, or 6-HAP for short — that looked a lot like one of the building blocks of DNA. “Because of that structure, we wondered if it interfered with DNA synthesis,” says Gallo, a physician scientist at the University of California, San Diego. In a test tube experiment, 6-HAP blocked the enzyme that builds DNA chains and prevented the chains from growing.

Skin deep
Mice treated with a strain of S. epidermidis that does not make the compound 6-HAP and then exposed to ultraviolet rays developed UV-induced tumors (left). The skin of mice who got a strain with the compound remained largely normal (right).

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T. NAKATSUJI ET AL/SCI ADV 2018
Cancer cells have runaway growth, so the researchers thought the compound might inhibit those cells. Sure enough, 6-HAP stopped DNA formation in different tumor cells grown in the lab. But the compound was not able to do so in normal skin cells. Certain enzymes in normal skin cells deactivated 6-HAP, the researchers found, and the tumor cells tested appeared to lack those enzymes.

Gallo and colleagues found that the compound had an effect both when injected and when applied topically. Among mice injected with skin cancer cells, some received a shot of 6-HAP while others got a dummy shot. Tumors grew in all the mice, but the tumors in mice given the compound were about half the size of those in mice without the compound.

The researchers then spread S. epidermidis on the backs of hairless mice subjected to UV rays. Some mice got a strain that makes 6-HAP; others got a strain that does not. After 12 weeks of being exposing periodically to UV rays, the first group of mice developed only one tumor each, while mice in the second group were saddled with four to six tumors.

S. epidermidis strains might have gained the ability to stop DNA synthesis to prevent other bacteria from growing, Gallo says. In that way, the bacteria protect their homestead from other invading pathogens. “Perhaps we evolved to provide a safe haven for these organisms because they also benefit us when they’re doing this.” The researchers did a small study of existing genetic data from the human skin microbiome and estimate that 20 percent of the human population have S. epidermidis strains that make 6-HAP on their skin, Gallo says.

More work needs to be done to understand how S. epidermidis makes 6-HAP and how much of the compound is on the skin, Kalan says. “It is important to understand how the microbiome interacts with its human host before we can begin to manipulate it for disease treatment.” One approach could be to develop probiotics for the skin — adding helpful bacteria to ward off infection or maybe even prevent cancer, she says.

Along with skin cancer cells, 6-HAP was also able to block DNA synthesis in lymphoma cells, cancerous immune system cells. It’s too early to say, but there is potential for this secret weapon to slay more than one villain.