Science News
Donuts, math, and superdense teleportation of quantum information
University of Illinois College of Engineering
Putting a hole in the center of the donut -- a mid-nineteenth-century invention -- allows the deep-fried pastry to cook evenly, inside and out. As it turns out, the hole in the center of the donut also holds answers for a type of more efficient and reliable quantum information teleportation, a critical goal for quantum information science.
Quantum teleportation is a method of communicating information from one location to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached. Instead, the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) share a pair of entangled elementary particles -- in this experiment, photons, the smallest units of light -- that transmit information through their shared quantum state. In simplified terms, Alice encodes information in the form of the quantum state of her photon. She then sends a key to Bob over traditional communication channels, indicating what operation he must perform on his photon to prepare the same quantum state, thus teleporting the information.
Quantum teleportation has been achieved by a number of research teams around the globe since it was first theorized in 1993, but current experimental methods require extensive resources and/or only work successfully a fraction of the time.
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Memory alloy bounces back into shape 10 million times
By Jonathan Webb
Engineers have produced an alloy that springs back into shape even after it is bent more than 10 million times.
"Memory shape alloys" like this have many potential uses, but present incarnations are prone to wearing out.
The new material - made from nickel, titanium and copper - shatters previous records and is so resilient it could be useful in artificial heart valves, aircraft components or a new generation of solid-state refrigerators.
The work appears in Science Magazine.
Memory alloys are already used in some situations, including surgical operations. A stent, for example, might be squashed into a small space and then spring into its designed shape to prop open a blood vessel.
But the alloys have never entirely fulfilled their promise and entered the world of "high cycle fatigue" applications.
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Technology News
Google Cardboard Is VR’s Gateway Drug
David Pierce
You open your eyes, and you’re standing in the middle of the street in Tokyo. Click: You’re on 7th Avenue, in New York City. Click, click, click, and you’re traveling around the world at warp speed. It all sounds a little Magic School Bus-y when you read about it, but that’s the thing about VR: Once you try it, you get it.
That’s why it’s so exciting that Google announced a new version of Cardboard today at its I/O developer conference. The new version doesn’t come with lots of new tech or spec upgrades. The big change is that virtually everyone can try it. There’s a Cardboard app for iOS, so you can drop any iPhone into the slot and start playing around. It also supports phones with screens up to six inches, which accounts for basically all of them. It has a new button that works with any phone you try. It’s also absurdly easy to set up now, too, not that it was ever difficult. You slide it out of its case, you fold one part back and the other one down, and you’re done. You can’t screw this thing up.
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Lenovo phone features virtual keyboard
BBC
Chinese electronics giant Lenovo has unveiled a phone with a built-in laser projector that can be used to display a virtual keyboard or display.
The interactive display can replicate the phone's touch screen, a full-size computer keyboard or even piano keys.
The laser projector can also be used to beam images and videos onto walls.
The Smart Cast phone was unveiled at the company's Tech World conference in Beijing, where the firm also unveiled a new type of smartwatch.
The laser projector measures just 34mm by 26mm by 5mm and, said Lenovo, does not need focussing to project sharp images onto walls or other flat surfaces.
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Environmental News
Federal Dollars Are Financing the Water Crisis in the West
ProPublica examination shows that the scarcity of water is as much a man-made crisis as a natural one
By Abrahm Lustgarten, Naveena Sadasivam and ProPublica
State Route 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted occasionally by rock and saguaro cactus. It’s not unusual for summer temperatures to top 116 degrees. And there is almost no water; this part of Arizona receives less than nine inches of rainfall each year.
Then Route 87 tacks left and the dead landscape springs to life. Barren roadside is replaced by thousands of acres of cotton fields, their bright, leafy green stalks and white, puffy bolls in neat rows that unravel for miles. It’s a vision of bounty where it would be least expected. Step into the hip-high cotton shrubs, with the soft, water-soaked dirt giving way beneath your boot soles, the bees buzzing in your ears, the pungent odor of the plants in your nostrils, and you might as well be in Georgia.
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How the U.S. West Can Live with Fire
The West is adapting to more wildfires but this season may test its resilience
By John Upton and Climate Central
Homes and stables were evacuated during a rattling evening southeast of Los Angeles last month, as tall flames licked property lines while they chewed through pine needles, dead leaves and other fuels that had built up in scrub and forest during a decades-long absence of fire.
Firefighters eventually prevailed against the Highway Fire—so-named because it began near a highway—by corralling it and watching as it burned out. But the 1,000-acre conflagration was an anxiety-inducing prelude to what's projected to be a wild season of wildfires up and down the West Coast, mostly affecting parched seaside states well west and north of storm-soaked Texas. Unseasonable blazes are already afflicting the region.
“Things are stacking up badly,” Max Moritz, a fire scientist on faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, said.
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Medical News
Scientists retrieve lost memories using optogenetics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Memories that have been "lost" as a result of amnesia can be recalled by activating brain cells with light.
In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers at MIT reveal that they were able to reactivate memories that could not otherwise be retrieved, using a technology known as optogenetics.
The finding answers a fiercely debated question in neuroscience as to the nature of amnesia, according to Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor in MIT's Department of Biology and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, who directed the research by lead authors Tomas Ryan, Dheeraj Roy, and Michelle Pignatelli.
Neuroscience researchers have for many years debated whether retrograde amnesia -- which follows traumatic injury, stress, or diseases such as Alzheimer's -- is caused by damage to specific brain cells, meaning a memory cannot be stored, or if access to that memory is somehow blocked, preventing its recall.
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Implicit social biases made to drop away during sleep
Northwestern University
Can we learn to rid ourselves of our implicit biases regarding race and gender? A new Northwestern University study indicates that sleep may hold an important key to success in such efforts.
Building on prior research, the Northwestern investigators aimed to find out whether learning to alter habitual reactions to other people could be enhanced during sleep.
Other researchers have documented many unsavory consequences of common social biases. When playing a videogame with instructions to shoot only people carrying weapons, players were more likely to shoot unarmed targets when they were Black versus White.
Bias also can be demonstrated in hiring decisions. For instance, scientists were more likely to hire male than equally qualified female candidates for research positions.
Even well-meaning people can be influenced by these biases without even realizing it.
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Space News
Big Bang aftermath: Ancient stars from birth of the universe
Heidelberg University
An international team, including researchers from the Centre for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH), has discovered three "cosmic Methusalems" from the earliest years of the universe. These unusual stars are about 13 billion years old and experts assign them to the first generations of stars after the "dark ages." The chemical qualities of these extremely rare stellar bodies enable new insights into the events that must have led to the origins of the stars. The first stars have been assumed to be high-mass and to shine especially brightly. However, the latest observations point to hitherto unknown phenomena in the young universe, allowing for the emergence of much smaller stars. This conclusion is suggested by analyses in part conducted at the State Observatory K&oumi;nigstuhl and at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, both of which belong to the ZAH.
The universe emerged approximately 13.8 billion years ago through the big bang. The initially extremely hot gas of the "explosion cloud" expanded and grew colder and colder. As the cosmic expanses were completely empty of stars at the time, scientists talk of the "dark ages" of the universe. About 400 million years after the big bang, the first stars formed out of the gases created by the explosion. Due to the chemical composition of the initial gases -- mainly hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium -- the stars' mass must have been 10 to 100 times greater than that of the sun, and therefore they must have emitted an extremely brilliant light. They rapidly exhausted their nuclear fuel and so these stars only shone for a few million years. They disintegrated in gigantic explosions, during which heavy chemical elements were released and "recovered" by subsequent stellar generations. An exact chemical investigation of this second generation of stars can enable conclusions to be drawn regarding the properties of the very first stars.
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Astronomy: Link between mergers and supermassive black holes with relativistic jets
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
In the most extensive survey of its kind ever conducted, a team of scientists have found an unambiguous link between the presence of supermassive black holes that power high-speed, radio-signal-emitting jets and the merger history of their host galaxies. Almost all of the galaxies hosting these jets were found to be merging with another galaxy, or to have done so recently. The results lend significant weight to the case for jets being the result of merging black holes and will be presented in the Astrophysical Journal.
A team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) have conducted a large survey to investigate the relationship between galaxies that have undergone mergers and the activity of the supermassive black holes at their cores.
The team studied a large selection of galaxies with extremely luminous centres -- known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs) -- thought to be the result of large quantities of heated matter circling around and being consumed by a supermassive black hole. Whilst most galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole, only a small percentage of them are this luminous and fewer still go one step further and form what are known as relativistic jets [1]. The two high-speed jets of plasma move almost with the speed of light and stream out in opposite directions at right angles to the disc of matter surrounding the black hole, extending thousands of light-years into space. The hot material within the jets is also the origin of radio waves.
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Odd News
Lil Bub Decoded: 'LilBubome' Studies Genes of Famed Internet Cat
by Devin Coldewey
If you love cats, and love the Internet, there's a good chance you're already familiar with Lil Bub, the cute and unique cat at the center of a veritable media empire. You may have even seen her movie.
Her short stature, protruding tongue, and extra toes (a condition known as polydactylism) have delighted millions, but they're also the product of a number of rare genetic mutations. A project called the LilBubome aims to decode the cat's genome and figure out just what it is that makes her so weirdly cute. And raise awareness about rare genetic conditions and genome sequencing in the process.
The project is being undertaken by geneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. They're raising money on Experiment.com, but they've already started looking at a genomic region that they know governs polydactylism. The analysis revealed that Lil Bub may be related to the so-called "Hemingway cats," descended from the famous writer's original cat, Snowball, perhaps the best-known polydactyl cat in history.
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