This Week In Science

They call it ironic in the article...

I see no better way to say it... lol


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SUSPENDED ANIMATION HUMAN TRIALS ABOUT TO BEGIN

With traumatic injuries, timing in treatment can be the difference between life and death. What if surgeons could hit the pause button, giving them precious additional time to treat the wounds? Suspended animation has been featured in a wide array of fictional films, but could it actually work on humans? The FDA has approved a small study that will allow surgeons at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh to try to suspend human life later this month.

In Hollywood, suspended animation involves freezing solid (or nearly so), thawing at some point in the future when new medical advances have taken place to treat their conditions. This emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR) technique isn’t quite so extreme, but it will reduce body temperature to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) by inserting a cannula into the aorta and flushing cold saline into the system. This will slow the blood flow, which will prevent the body from bleeding out (which can be fatal within minutes). The low temperatures will also slow other biological processes as well.

This state of hypothermia can only be sustained by the human body for about two hours. While this isn’t as dramatic of EPR as some may have expected, that could easily provide enough time for surgeons to perform emergency lifesaving surgery. Trauma patients who suffer cardiac arrest have a 7% chance of survival, giving this technique some very real and amazing implications.

Peter Rhee first tried this technique on 40 pigs in 2000, with the results published in 2006. After inflicting a lethal wound to simulate real-world trauma scenarios, the pigs were cooled down so the surgeons could operate then resuscitate them. While all of the control pigs died, the surgeons were able to save 90% of the pigs. None of the surviving pigs were reported to have sustained cognitive or physical impairment.

Due to the extremely time-sensitive and dire nature of the injuries of the test subjects, the FDA has declared that the surgeons will not require informed consent. As a precaution, the team took out advertisements to inform the public of the upcoming study, and even set up a website that would allow people to opt out, if desired. As of yet, nobody has opted out.

The team will first use this technique on 10 trauma patients whose injuries would be otherwise fatal. That group will be compared against 10 other patients who are not able to undergo EPR, due to the surgical team not being available. After the first increments of 10 EPR and 10 control patients, the technique will be analyzed and refined. They will continue in this fashion until enough data points have been collected which will allow them to analyze the efficacy of suspending life in this manner, though a predetermined set number has not been made.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/suspended-animation-human-trials-about-begin#D2FLJmLIFxeZBeBA.99

Scientists Achieve Quantum Teleportation

One of the hurdles to teleportation has been overcome, with the reliable movement of quantum information between two objects separated by a short distance. The achievement is still a very, very long way from the movements familiar from science fiction, but strengthens our confidence in the theory of quantum entanglement, one of the most controversial aspects of modern physics. It may, moreover, assist the much closer goal of quantum computing.

Certain subatomic particles always exist in paired states. For example, two electrons may have opposite spins. This is fine initially, but creates a famous paradox if one particle is interfered with in such a way that its spin is changed. According to entanglement theory the other particle will instantly respond to the changes wrought on its pair so that the two remain opposite.

However, the distance between the two this means that the information of what has happened to the one particle must be transmitted infinitely fast – faster than the speed of light. Einstein famously mocked the idea as “spooky action at a distance”, and suggested our understanding of quantum mechanics must be in error. However, with quantum theory's subsequent success physicists have grown more comfortable with the idea that entanglement exists, although many argue it cannot be used to transmit information.

In 1964 physicist John Stewart Bell came up with an idea for an experiment to test whether entanglement is real. At the time the test was impractical, but with publication in Science a team from the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands have got close to conducting Bell's test.

The Delft team trapped electrons in very low temperature diamonds, which team leader Ronald Hanson describes as “miniprisons”. This allowed them to measure the spin for each electron very reliably. Alterations to this spin were reflected in the spin of an entangled electron trapped in a similar diamond prison on the next bench.

The small distance between the two diamonds makes it hard to demonstrate that the transfer of information is occurring instantly, rather than at light speed. Consequently, the next step will be to entangle caged electrons and expand their separation across town or around the world. Entanglement between islands more than 100km apart has already been demonstrated, but only statistically, rather than with 100% success.

Besides finally settling one of 20th Century physics greatest debates, reliable quantum teleportation could make possible the ultimate in secure communication channels, which would also be infinitely fast as well. Although this is starting to sound awfully close to Ursula Le Guin's ansible, most physicists dispute the possibility of such a device.

As usual, the result does not come out of nowhere. Other teams have also been able to teleport quantum information, but only in a minority of cases. Last year Hanson's team announced they had achieved quantum teleportation using diamond entrapment, but without the 100% reliability of the most recent work.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/physics/scientists-achieve-quantum-teleportation#9QwDqfdtfgtLV8Qy.99

A Computer Has Passed The Turing Test For The First Time.

This is big. A computer has successfully managed to fool a bunch of researchers into thinking that it was a 13-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman. In doing so, it has become the first computer in the world to have successfully passed the Turing Test.

The test is named after computer pioneer Alan Turing. To pass it, a computer needs to dupe 30 percent of human judges in five minute text-based chats, a feat that until now had never been accomplished.
What It's Like to Judge the Turing Test

"What are your favourite Sci Fi movies?" "I like Star Wars and The Matrix,"… Read more

"Eugene" was created by a team based in Russia, and passed the test organized by the University of Reading just barely, by duping 33 percent of the judges. It should also be noted that successfully pretending to be a 13-year-old boy for whom English is a second language ain't exactly Hal 9000.

It's still an obviously exciting breakthrough, though, one that has critics already raising red flags about its implications. "Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cyber crime," said Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the University of Reading and deputy vice-chancellor for research at Coventry University told the Independent.

Are there serious concerns about what this means for online security in the future? Sure. But today they'll have to take a back seat to the understanding that we've entered a new era of computing. One that's alive with possibilities, or at least convincingly enough so.

http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history-to-have-passed-th-1587780232

want one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7J-tlrkVEE

That witch dos not kill you makes you stronger,

hhahaha

Jestor wrote: They call it ironic in the article...

I see no better way to say it... lol


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Outstanding Time Lapse of Steller Explosion From Hubble

In January 2002, astronomers discovered a massive explosion coming from V838 Monocerotis. They initially thought they were witnessing a supernova, but after the initial flash of light began to dim (as expected), it began to brighten again in infrared wavelengths at the beginning of March. After that brightening faded, another one happened in April. While astronomers were certain they weren’t witnessing a supernova, they weren’t quite sure what it actually was.

Now the Hubble team have released an absolutely extraordinary time-lapse video of the event. Check it out here, and make sure you go full screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fvMSs9cps

othing like this has ever been observed before, making it hard to rule out many of the possible explanations. There are five hypotheses put forward in the literature about what is causing the event, and they really don’t have much in common.

Some scientists believe V838 Monocerotis was a supernova, just a fairly unique one. This idea doesn’t have much support, since the stars in that area are too young and too massive to have caused this type of event. Another unlikely explanation is that a dying star’s core exploded into a helium flash, like what happened in Sakurai’s Object. Again, this star is too young for a thermal pulse to be the most likely scenario.

Another model proposes the helium flash, but as a thermonuclear event in which a massive star would have been able to survive. While this does fit within the necessary age of the star, the star’s mass might not support this idea.

In planetary capture events, stars begin to consume planets in their system. For a very large planet, getting pulled apart would increase friction between the solar atmosphere and the planet. There could be enough energy generated to spark deuterium fusion, which releases large amounts of energy, such as was seen in the explosion. These types of events are predicted to be about five times more common for stars like V838 Monocerotis than for stars like our Sun.

Another possible explanation is an event known as a mergeburst, in which two main sequence stars collide. This hypothesis is supported by computer modeling, and the youth of the star systems in that region could provide the unstable orbits required for stars to merge in that fashion.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/space/outstanding-time-lapse-stellar-explosion-hubble#a12XRqQ2XlurZXkF.99


Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/space/outstanding-time-lapse-stellar-explosion-hubble#a12XRqQ2XlurZXkF.99

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3492919.stm

Diamond star thrills astronomers
Concept image (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
A diamond that is almost forever
Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats , astronomers have discovered.

The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.

Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Twinkle twinkle

"You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.

The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.

For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.

The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.

"By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.

"We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe.

Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system.

"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe.