Science

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Powderhorn , in Herpes cure with gene editing makes progress in laboratory studies
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Worth noting: this is 90% effective for HSV-1, but not tested on HSV-2. That's on their radar for research. It's nonetheless a breakthrough, and the Hutch has pulled off some interesting things in the past, so I'd imagine they'll get there.

Kolanaki , in “Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Can quantum particles be blocked or contained or otherwise impeded from entering a vessel?

Are they truly just appearing and disappearing or do they just move so fast (like, faster than C) that it only appears that way?

DarkGamer ,
@DarkGamer@kbin.social avatar

To a certain degree, as they mentioned in the article regarding the casimir effect. While one cannot keep out the quantum foam entirely, it can be restricted to specific wavelengths by altering the volume of the space.

Lampshade ,
@Lampshade@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

So with a sufficiently small volume of space, we would have an actual nothing again? Or the foam can go infinitely small?

Jeredin ,
@Jeredin@lemm.ee avatar

Consider this fact, some light waves like radio are large enough that a lot of matter is essentially invisible to their propagation; the radio waves just pass right by without any interactions. This becomes a similar problem when we try and measure such small quantum phenomena like zero-point energy. The quantum energy could be so small that they're invisible to our detectors, but are in fact still there - the two scales simple cannot interact in a measurable way. So, there'd like still be some quantum energy, just less and less until our detectors could not interact with the incredibly small quanta for measurement.

NoneOfUrBusiness ,

Nope, they actually appear and disappear. The idea is that even in vacuum there's a certain amount of background energy and that energy can randomly turn into matter-antimatter pairs in what is basically the inverse of matter-antimatter annihilation.

ALostInquirer , in “Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”

What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn't exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? 🤔

NoneOfUrBusiness ,

It's that they're using a more normal people term. They probably wanted to say vacuum.

millie , in “Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.

Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.

wesker ,
@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Just relax and enjoy your vanilla latte with quantum foam.

millie ,

Straight iced espresso for me. It does make me think of those particular customers who'd always demand an impossible level of no foam, though.

I did also end up reading about quantum foam anyway. 😂

loops ,

The foam is actually an accumulation of retired eldritch horror dandruff.

GammaGames , (edited )
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Luckily you can check out the author’s bio right from the article:

Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab, America’s leading particle physics laboratory, who has coauthored over 1,500 scientific papers. He was a member of the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and the Higgs boson in 2012.

nxdefiant ,

Oh snap, so this guy is on the faaaaaaaar side of the bell curve wearing the hood and agreeing with me. Well played.

millie ,

Okay well maybe I'll circle back to it, then. Maybe bad science writing has made me a little cynical.

GammaGames ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

A bit of cynicism is always healthy!

GreyEyedGhost ,

The guy just invents particles and you think we should trust him?

j/k

burgersc12 ,

The concepts are basically right arent they?

millie ,

I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.

In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.

Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.

It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.

burgersc12 ,

I don't think he was planning to explain these concepts, just hint at them to the layman reading thr article who probably barely know what Schodinger's cat is.

Sas ,

And the cat observes it but that doesn't mean that the cat is now in a discrete state that is either alive or dead. It is both and will stay both and you'll only see which version of the cat is in your world. At least according to the many worlds theory which makes sense to me

astrsk ,
@astrsk@kbin.social avatar

Shrodinger’s cat wasn’t some simplified lesson for the layman. It wasn’t even an explanation. It was a commentary about the quantum model itself and how the current state of the model is laughably incomplete and unable to adequately answer or predict anything of value (yet). It wasn’t until more recently that some Newtonian physics might be explainable as emergent properties of quantum mechanics, but we are still a long ways away from a unified or blurred model.

https://betterexplained.com/articles/gotcha-shrodingers-cat/

exocrinous ,

Actually, cats really are alive and dead at the same time according to the many worlds interpretation. Under classical quantum mechanics, we say that superpositions collapse when observed, and since the cat is an observer of the quantum event (since the cat would die if the atom decayed), then the cat's presence resolves the superposition. Thus, the cat is never in superposition.

However, according to the many worlds interpretation, observation does not collapse superposition. Rather, it simply expands the superposition to include the observer. So the cat, as an observer of the quantum event, really is both alive and dead. And at the moment that you open the box to see whether the cat died, you will also observe the quantum event and become part of the superposition as well. You will both see a dead cat, and see a living cat. But your consciousness only experiences one of these possibilities. Presumably, you have another consciousness in the other possibility observing the cat in the other state. Two separate timelines have been created, which will each progress on their own according to causality. We may also call these timelines worlds or universes, seeing as they're mostly self contained.

stembolts , in “Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”

Ah good, so I can tell my therapist I'm no longer a nihilist but a quantum foamer.

This is great.

nxdefiant ,

Conceptually, the nihilists are right! Nothing does matter.

MadMadBunny ,

Dammit.

Gaywallet Mod ,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

I hate and love this. Thanks 💜

Juno ,

Matters to me.

Rentlar , in Why do people hate people? - A question by 'curious kid' Daisy, age 9, Lake Oswego, Oregon

Dealing with anger is complicated. Blaming your anger on some group of people is easy.

tardigrada OP ,

Probably, but as the article's authors say, hate "does not mean rage, anger or general dislike". It appears to be a different concept.

PerogiBoi , in Why do people hate people? - A question by 'curious kid' Daisy, age 9, Lake Oswego, Oregon
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

In my unscientific opinion that will undoubtedly get shouted down by someone here, people hate people because they hate themselves or aspects about themselves.

The ego is fragile and cannot often handle direct known criticism, so people mirror their self hatred to others. Over time as this is practiced, the brain justifies reasons as to WHY they hate certain people. This helps the brain make sense of why they feel the way they do.

whoreticulture , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

Why is Google doing this research?!?

GammaGames OP ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Harvard has been partnering with their research labs for the last decade to gain access to hardware and algos they wouldn’t have themselves

hazelnoot , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail
@hazelnoot@beehaw.org avatar

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D.

The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain.

Ah so it's not a real model, just an AI approximation.

I_am_10_squirrels ,

It still seems like a real model to me. Just because they used a fancy computer to turn a sequence of 2d slices into a 3d representation doesn't mean it's not real.

blarth , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

Google can do this, but can’t maintain Google assistant features we’ve had for years?

GammaGames OP ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Fortunately the people working on brain research aren’t the same people programming assistant

kerr , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

That is amazing.

MonkderDritte , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D.

Why AI for that?

GammaGames OP ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

ML is pretty common when working with a ton of data, from another article:

To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”

Unfortunately techbros have poisoned the term AI 🥲

Source: Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

Onii-Chan , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail
@Onii-Chan@kbin.social avatar

This is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. The complexity of life just continues to astound me.

GammaGames OP ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Yes! That this thing could evolve into existence is practically a miracle

realitista , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail
metaStatic ,

if I cleaned it up I wouldn't know where anything is

echodot ,

It's all just cables now. Someone took the server out years ago and it just kept working out of habit.

Redjard ,
@Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Electricians will deny this is true but then just make up a new word for it (inductance)

muntedcrocodile , in Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

Where can I go download this cubic mm?

eleitl ,

https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/data.html

Make sure you have spare 1400 terabytes.

LanternEverywhere ,

Wild

metaStatic ,

you wouldn't download a brain

Kissaki ,
@Kissaki@beehaw.org avatar

Only a cubic millimetre of it

eleitl ,

Sadly, you can't download the hardware to run models that size.

muntedcrocodile ,

I imagined it would be big but that's mad. Is that full 3d model or just connection cos of its just connections it really shows how far our ai is from replacing us.

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