Did Wigner's Friend kill Schrödinger's Cat? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did Wigner's Friend kill Schrödinger's Cat?

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Most of us have heard of the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. As it turns out, there's a variant, and it involves an irresponsible friend, a possibly dead cat, and an even weirder configuration of quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger's Cat is possibly the world's most famous animal. It figured prominently in the rather sarcastic thought experiment that Erwin Schrödinger devised in 1935, and has been making headlines and tucked into references ever since. Schrödinger used the cat to explain what was strange, and possibly ridiculous, about quantum mechanics.

The experiment is infamous. Lock a cat up in a box with a lump of radioactive material. The radioactive material is of a quantity and kind that, in the next hour, a single atom of it could decay. However, it's equally probably that the atom won't decay. It's a fifty-fifty shot, and that means a lot for the cat, because if the atom decays it will trigger the opening of a vial of poison gas. Different probable quantum states which are unmeasured have to be treated as both existing at the same time. Schrödinger stretched out the quantum state to include the entire system inside the box. So after an hour the atom has both decayed and not, the poison gas has both been released and not, and the cat is both alive and dead. It's only when you open the box that the wave function collapses and the cat lives or dies.

Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner who studied elementary particles and their behavior, laughed in the face of Schrödinger's conservatism. Why, he reasoned, would you apply that reasoning only to the cat? The idea could be stretched further. The entire Schrödinger's cat set-up could be repeated, except Wigner would leave the lab, and put his friend in charge of running the experiment. Wigner knows that his friend will be saddened if the cat dies. He knows his friend will be happy if the cat lives. These are certainties. Therefore, for Wigner, there is an extension of the superposition of states. Until he returns to the lab, one could argue that there is simultaneously a Dead Cat And Sad Friend state and a Live Cat And Happy Friend state. Once he checks on it, one of these possible states becomes reality.

But maybe we could go even further. I submit this idea to you. What if that friend was feeling ambivalent about the cat? What if, when he opened the box and saw the cat dead, he could either think, "I really liked that cat," or "It's kind of a relief that I won't have to take care of that stupid cat anymore." Alternately, if he opened the box and saw the living cat he could think, "Yay," or "Damn it." Could these be a superposition of states, and if so, can quantum mechanics determine how you felt about your cat?

[Via Cornell University Library.]

Image:Jennifer Barnard

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did Wigner's Friend kill Schrödinger's Cat?

Did you know vampire squid are actually vegetarians? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did you know vampire squid are actually vegetarians?

Terrifying though it certainly appears, the scarlet-bodied, cloudy-eyed Vampyroteuthis infernalis (aka "vampire squid from hell") isn't the least bit scary from a dietary standpoint.

Via Deep Sea News' R.R. Helm:

The decisive clue to the vampire's kinder nature came in the form of long, stringy tentacles. For decades scientists puzzled over the mystery of these strange appendages. Are they for mating? Defense? No one knew, until scientists observed the squid doing something altogether surprising. It turns out, vampire squid use these tentacles like fishing lines, but they're not catching living prey, they're catching 'snow'. Vampire squid scoop up sinking ocean gunk, known as marine snow, with their thin yellow tentacles, and then suck it off these appendages (like licking your fingers). This gunk includes bits of algae, dead animals, poo and bacteria from the ocean above.

Vampire squid: just misunderstood finger-food tentacle-gunk enthusiasts. More info at Deep Sea News.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Did you know vampire squid are actually vegetarians?

Welcome to Yesterday is like The Chronicle, but with time travel onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Welcome to Yesterday is like The Chronicle, but with time travel

Everyone is calling Welcome To Yesterday the next Chronicle. Which is a pretty steep comparison. This time-traveling adventure centered around a pack of teens may look like Chronicle, but will it be as dark as that brilliant superhero film?

Here's your very first look at the film, penned by Jason Pagan and Andrew Stark and directed by Dean Israelite, which was previously titled Almanac. The premise appears to be simple: The kids build a time machine and their backwards journey causes a terrible ripple effect that they now have to fix. But you know how time travel works — the more you mess with it, the worse it usually gets.

Welcome to Yesterday will open in theaters on February 28, 2014.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Welcome to Yesterday is like The Chronicle, but with time travel

Here's what China's Yutu rover is doing on the Moon onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's what China's Yutu rover is doing on the Moon

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This weekend, the China National Space Administration (国家航天局, or CNSA) landed its Chang'e-3 lander on the Moon, deploying the Yutu rover on a 3-month mission to explore the dark lava plains of Bay of Rainbows, northeast of Mare Imbrium. It will also leave a powerful telescope behind, to watch the stars.

Here's the region where Yutu has landed, in a screenshot from LunarMap HD (click to embiggen). Bay of Rainbows is called by its Latin name Sinus Iridum in most lunar maps.

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Yutu, similar to rovers like Curiosity on Mars, is the first robotic observer to be deployed on the Moon in roughly 3 decades — and it's a first for China, which has now taken the next step on its path into the Space Age. CNSA will be sharing all the data it gathers with scientists in other nations. This is truly a time to put aside national interests, and celebrate the international achievements of scientists and explorers working together to make new discoveries in space.

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Here you can see the rover being lowered to the lunar regolith via the "transfer" mechanism, AKA the super awesome Chang'e lander's elevator.

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Then Yutu rolled down the ramp, and finally rolled onto the lunar surface, with all six wheels taking the vehicle forward and into humanity's first rover adventure on our satellite since the mid-twentieth century.

There's a very futuristic reason to explore the Bay of Rainbows, aside from the fact that it's a famous feature of dark patches on the Moon visible from Earth. It's a region of ancient lava flows, from a time when the Moon was full of active volcanoes. Many of these lava flows have left long, deep tunnels beneath the surface of the Moon — just as lava leaves tunnels behind on Earth, too. These lava tunnels are predicted to be regions where humans might start building Moon colonies, because being underground is a good way shield lunar inhabitants from the radiation bombarding the Moon's surface from space.

Ouyang Ziyuan, one of the chief scientists on the Chang'e-3 mission, said in an interview:

The Chang'e 3 mission will achieve three "firsts". Number one: space observation from the moon. This is the dream of many astronomers because atmosphere, wind, snow and pollution don't obstruct visibility as they do on earth. The result is also better because of the longer periods of uninterrupted observation from the moon due to it orbiting the earth. One day of observation on the moon is equivalent to 14 days on earth. Number two: we have an ultraviolet camera on the lander to monitor the earth. This camera is different from the one used by America's Apollo 16. Ours can see the formation of the earth's plasmasphere and its density change. It's better than a satellite, which can only record data section by section as it orbits around the earth. On the moon it can observe half of earth at a time without moving. This is something people have always wanted to do. Number three: we will be the first to learn the structure and layers of the moon 100 meters below its surface with radars installed at the bottom of the rover. As the rover drives on the lunar surface, it will be as it can cut and see what's 100 meters below. These three highlights are what no other countries have done so far.

Yutu will spend three months (about 3 lunar days) exploring a 3-km region, and it has the ability to see 100 meters underground with ground-penetrating radar. This will help scientists understand the structure of the lunar regolith and possibly find lava tunnels that might be good settlement areas. It also has a spectrometer to analyze the chemical composition of the regolith and rocks. Yutu will also be sending high-definition images, including panoramas, back to Earth.

The Chang'e lander has its own, one-year, mission. It has powerful, HD science cameras that can send at a rate of one image per second. Though the lander can't move, it will deploy a powerful telescope which will remain on the Moon, and can see much farther than Earth-based telescopes because there is no atmospheric distortion.

Yutu means Jade Rabbit in Chinese. We can't say how excited we are to see Jade Rabbit hopping across the lunar landscape, taking humanity one step closer to building homes on another world.

Thanks to Jesse B. for the screenshots and research!

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Here's what China's Yutu rover is doing on the Moon

​A male birth control pill that causes a temporary vasectomy onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​A male birth control pill that causes a temporary vasectomy

It's the 21st century and men still don't have a birth control pill to call their own. But now, scientists from Britain and Australia have figured out a way to prevent sperm from escaping during the moment of ejaculation — and without affecting sexual function.

To date, most attempts at creating a male birth control pill have focused on the development of sperm or hormonal techniques to produce dysfunctional sperm. Problem is, those approaches tend to create various health problems for men, including reduced libido or permanent alterations to the way the body produces sperm. Worst of all, some methods even cause males to transmit detrimental changes to future offspring.

Related: A male contraceptive that you apply like a lotion and one that doesn't use hormones.

But the new technique, which is described in a recent edition of PNAS, targets the autonomic nervous system. It doesn't affect the long-term viability of sperm, nor the health of males. In fact, men would keep on producing sperm as per usual, it just wouldn't join the ejaculate. It's like a vasectomy in a pill, but one that's easily reversible.

Working with mice, the researchers disabled two specific components in the nervous system (specifically, the P2X1-purinoceptor and α1A-adrenoceptor) that prevent sperm from leaving the vas deferens (a kind of holding area in the testes just prior to ejaculation). Basically, they produced mice that couldn't squeeze the sperm out of their vas deferens.

After the treatment, these mice were 100% infertile and no deleterious effects to their sexual behavior or function could be detected. The sperm looked completely normal and the mice were able to produce healthy offspring. Well, to be completely accurate, the mice did experience a slight drop in blood pressure — a side-effect that has the researchers slightly worried about potential human applications. That said, it's being seen as an important find.

"[This provides] conclusive proof of concept that pharmacological antagonism of the P2X1-purinoceptor and α1A-adrenoceptor provides a safe and effective therapeutic target for a nonhormonal, readily reversible male contraceptive," write the authors in the study.

The next step will be to find a pair of drugs that work in humans. One may already exist in the form of a drug that treats benign prostate enlargement, but the other will have to be made from scratch — a process the researchers say could take another ten years.

Read the entire study at PNAS: "Male contraception via simultaneous knockout of α1A-adrenoceptors and P2X1-purinoceptors in mice".

Image: Josh Resnick/Shutterstock.com.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com ​A male birth control pill that causes a temporary vasectomy

With Fiddlehead, Cherie Priest ends the Clockwork Century with a bang onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com With Fiddlehead, Cherie Priest ends the Clockwork Century with a bang

In 2009, Cherie Priest's Boneshaker introduced readers to her Clockwork Century alternate history series, set in a United States where the Union was never reunited in 1865. It was a fun, durable world, full of zombies, weird drugs, giant machines, and zeppelin pilots. Now it comes to a satisfying end with Fiddlehead.

Some spoilers ahead.

Fiddlehead follows a former slave, Gideon Bardsley, inventor and patron of former President Abraham Lincoln and his pet project, a calculating machine nicknamed 'Fiddlehead', which has spat out something that worries just about everyone. Fiddlehead predicts that if the United States can't bring the war to a close, the growing zombie plague is going to run out of control and everyone - Union and Confederate - will lose. Lurking in the shadows is also another a plot that'll hasten the end of the United States by destroying the Fiddlehead and its creator.

The various elements that make up Fiddlehead have been building over the course of the series: we saw the zombies first appear as an immediate threat in Boneshaker, and on the loose in Dreadnought. Other books have featured the impact of Sap, a drug derived from the gas, and their ghastly consequences. Fiddlehead has some big arcs to finish out, all the while maintaining a standalone story. It mostly works, and Priest brings the story to a satisfying conclusion that sees some familiar characters return from the earlier works in the series.

Fiddlehead runs through the war-torn American south, following Bardsley as he struggles to alert the American public to the dangers that threaten both North and South, while Maria Boyd is on the track of a plot that threatens to undermine even that overwhelming threat. The book thunders to a close with an action-packed conclusion that features gunfights, airship chases, strike teams and some good old espionage. It's a hard book to put down.

It's difficult to close out a lengthy series to everyone's satisfaction, and while Priest manages, Fiddlehead does suffer from a divided focus. It's preoccupied with closing out the major storylines, all while trying to tell its own story. At times, it's hobbled by several chapters of a single gun fight that seem to simply tread water while the rest of the book catches up. Then we speed past what the book promises to do: show how it all ends. The American Civil War comes to an end with a short conclusion, and I missed seeing a compelling story of just how one ends a war. It's a good entry in the series, but it's a conclusion that never quite lives up to the Boneshaker.

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What's most interesting about Fiddlehead is its contemporary relevance, and this helps keep the book afloat. In a year that has seen horrific chemical weapons attacks in Syria, as well as new doomsday scenarios from global climate change, Priest's latest is a surprisingly timely novel that has some good lessons to take to heart.

Here, a divided North America faces major problems that surpass each side's individual interests; and all the while there are those who aim to generate a profit from a never-ending war. While I don't think that climate change and specifically Syria figured into the influences here, its intriguing to see their shadows in this kind of fictional environment. The entire Clockwork Century series has looked to technology out of time, showing us a world that really doesn't operate that much differently from today.

I'm also sad to see this series go. Priest has had a good thing going with her series, a durable, fleshed out world populated by a huge range of interesting characters, locations and technologies, and an overarching storyline that really worked. Boneshaker was a wonderfully entertaining novel, and while none of the books in the series quite captured the same enthusiasm as that first book, I looked forward to each one as they came out.

There's certainly room for additional adventures - Priest hasn't ruled out additional works set in the real world - and I hope that she'll eventually return to play in this fantastic, open world. In the meantime, Fiddlehead is a fitting conclusion to an entertaining series, one that lives up to its predecessors and providing us a solid ending.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com With Fiddlehead, Cherie Priest ends the Clockwork Century with a bang