Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery that human olfactory perception can detect changes in odors within just a single breath, challenging the previously held view that our sense of smell is slow.

By utilizing a sniff-triggered device precise to 18 milliseconds, they demonstrated that people can discern between two different odors in sequences as short as 60 milliseconds—faster than a blink.

Understanding Olfaction: Speed and Sensitivity.

Approximately 41 000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field briefly reversed during what is known as the Laschamp event. During this time, Earth’s magnetic field weakened significantly—dropping to a minimum of 5% of its current strength—which allowed more cosmic rays to reach Earth’s atmosphere.

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Centre for Geosciences used data from ESA’s Swarm mission, along with other sources, to create a sounded visualisation of the Laschamp event. They mapped the movement of Earth’s magnetic field lines during the event and created a stereo sound version which is what you can hear in the video.

Continue reading “Sound of Earth’s magnetic flip 41 000 years ago” »

Mitigating the need for hypothetical dark matter.

Kyoto, Japan — Scanning your brain to decode the contents of your mind has been a subject of intense research interest for some time. As studies have progressed, scientists have gradually been able to interpret what test subjects see, remember, imagine, and even dream.

There have been significant limitations, however, beginning with a necessity to extensively catalog each subject’s unique brain patterns, which are then matched with a small number of pre-programmed images. These procedures require that subjects undergo lengthy and expensive fMRI testing.

A quantum experiment revealed two observers can experience different, coexisting realities.

Our understanding of reality is often shaped by biases—our senses, cultures, and knowledge influence how we see the world. But even science, often regarded as a path to objective truth, may not always offer a single, consistent version of reality. A recent experiment testing a 1961 thought experiment by Nobel Prize winner Eugen Wigner highlights this issue, showing that two versions of reality can coexist in the quantum world.

Wigner’s Friend: The Thought Experiment Wigner’s thought experiment, known as “Wigner’s Friend,” explores a scenario in quantum mechanics where two observers can experience contradictory realities. The setup involves a quantum system, such as a photon with two possible polarizations (horizontal or vertical), that exists in a state of superposition, meaning both states exist at the same time until measured.

Rising emissions and climate change boost demand for renewable energy.

Researchers have developed a method to produce hydrogen gas from water using only solar power and agricultural waste like manure or husks.

Scientists achieved a record-breaking 10 quadrillion-watt energy burst using 192 giant lasers.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved a groundbreaking result in nuclear fusion by generating an energy burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts. This was accomplished by using 192 giant lasers to target a tiny hydrogen pellet, releasing 1.3 megajoules of energy in a fraction of a second. The experiment, carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), marks a significant step forward in fusion research and brings scientists closer to achieving “ignition,” where a fusion reaction generates more energy than it consumes.

In this latest experiment, conducted at the NIF, researchers focused intense beams of light from the world’s largest lasers onto a pea-sized pellet of hydrogen. The lasers delivered an immense amount of energy to the pellet, causing it to emit 1.3 megajoules of energy in just 100 trillionths of a second. This amount of energy is equivalent to about 10% of the sunlight that hits Earth at any moment and is significantly higher than the previous record of 170 kilojoules.

Continue reading “Fusion experiment sets record, generating 10 quadrillion watts of power” »

A Stanford Medicine-led study found that residual liver cancer cells interact with neighboring macrophages to prompt the disease to reappear.

Now in Quantum: by Yifan Hong, David T. Stephen, and Aaron J. Friedman https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-10-10-1499

Yifan Hong, David T. Stephen, and Aaron J. Friedman, Quantum 8, 1499 (2024). We constrain a broad class of teleportation protocols using insights from locality. In the “standard” teleportation protocols we consider, all outcome-dependent unitaries are Pauli operators conditioned on linear functions of the measurement outcomes. We find that all such protocols involve preparing a “resource state” exhibiting symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order with Abelian protecting symmetry $\mathcal{G}_{k}= (\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2)^k$. The $k$ logical states are teleported between the edges of the chain by measuring the corresponding $2k$ string order parameters in the bulk and applying outcome-dependent Paulis. Hence, this single class of nontrivial SPT states is both necessary and sufficient for the standard teleportation of $k$ qubits. We illustrate this result with several examples, including the cluster state, variants thereof, and a nonstabilizer hypergraph state.