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CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist (ign.com)
Scientists at CERN are bemused as to why the universe exists, according to a new study. From a report, shared by a reader:
Recent discoveries suggest that there's a perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter - meaning it's not clear why they didn't annihilate each other upon the birth of the universe. CERN's latest study sought to find out whether different magnetic properties accounted for matter's seeming victory after the Big Bang, but found another point of symmetry. Essentially, going by our findings so far, there simply shouldn't be a universe.
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Ron Eglash |
I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry. |
| C. S. Lewis |
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. |
| Vanilla Ice |
When 'Ice Ice Baby' was selling a million records a day, I bought several properties: a home next to Michael J. Fox in L.A., a palace in Miami and a mountain cabin in Utah. Then, a few years later, I took a break from touring, saw that my properties had cobwebs, so I sold them, and - to my surprise - I made a huge profit! |
| Winston Churchill |
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. |
| Gilbert K. Chesterton |
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. |
| Cindy Gallop |
If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results. |
| Jonathan Edwards |
There are two sorts of hypocrites: one that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion; and the other, are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevations; which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and talk much of free grace; but at the same time make a righteousness of their discoveries, and of their humiliation, and exalt themselves to heaven with them. |
| Henri Nouwen |
Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let's not be afraid to receive each day's surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity. |
| Viktor E. Frankl |
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. |
| Joseph Campbell |
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. |
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"i think the smallest things we do can cause entire dimensional shifts or tangent/parallel paths for us to take. like a deep conversation or a series of events can fundamentally change our universe and the path we (as spiritual beings) are on. like little positive moments (or negative too) can be the seeds for total change in our world, and like the butterfly effect it will affect eternally, the entire universe, from the tiniest random experiences.
"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."
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NASA's Atomic Fridge Will Make the ISS the Coldest Known Place in the Universe
Later this year, a small part of the International Space Station will become 10 billion times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space thanks to the Cold Atom Lab (CAL). Once it's on the space station, this atomic fridge will be the coldest known place in the universe and will allow physicists to 'see' into the quantum realm in a way that would never be possible on Earth.
In a normal room, "atoms are bouncing off one another in all directions at a few hundred meters per second," Rob Thompson, a...
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Experimental Device Generates Electricity From the Coldness of the Universe (phys.org)
An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity. In contrast to leveraging incoming energy as a normal solar cell would, the negative illumination effect allows electrical energy to be harvested as heat leaves a surface. Today's technology, though, does not capture energy over these negative temperature differences as efficiently. By pointing their device toward space, whose temperature approaches mere degrees from absolute ze...
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Physicists Detect Whiff of New Particle At the Large Hadron Collider
For decades, particle physicists have yearned for physics beyond their tried-and-true standard model. Now, they are finding signs of something unexpected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom smasher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The hints come not from the LHC's two large detectors, which have yielded no new particles since they bagged the last missing piece of the standard model, the Higgs boson, in 2012, but from a smaller detector, called LHCb, that precisely measures the decays of familiar particles. The latest signal involves deviations in the decays of particles called B mesons -- weak evidence on its own. But together with other hints, it could point to new particles lying on the high-energy horizon. "This has never happened before, to observe...
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I have been turning this over in my mind since I first heard of it. Here is how I think this works.
Imaginary numbers are very familiar to the physicist, who uses them constantly in everything. They probably aren't as familiar to non-physicists, who maybe learned them in high school, but then only as some abstract mathematical formality that was kind of neat but didn't really mean anything. So as a graduate student of physics, let me assure you that imaginary numbers aren't just abstract, but have a solid physical meaning, and are crucially important in describing the physical behavior of a number of systems, most importantly quantum mechanics.
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This post is a comment.
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Successful Correction of Genetic Problems In Mice Before Birth Raises Hopes of Similar Treatments For Humans
Gene editing to correct faulty DNA in human embryos has taken a step closer to becoming a reality, with scientists showing it is possible to correct genetic problems in mice before they are born. Researchers used a form of the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 to introduce a mutation into a gene that would otherwise cause lethal liver failure in mice. While the approach has previously been shown to work in mice after birth, the latest study showed it was also possible to make the all-important tweak before they were born. Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, a team of researchers in the US report how they conducted a series of experiments to explore the use of gene editing in mouse...
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A study on facebook conversations found they were more likely to go awry when one person shares something intended to be an opinion but another person believes it was intended or believed by the speaker to be a fact.
The appeal to expert opinion is often a fallacy. When people with higher academic degrees say their opinions, because they are perceived experts, the intention of opinion might be perceived as intention to share a fact. Facts are useful for persuasion, and when we hear them we might feel someone is attempting to persuade us.
Seems like something people with perceived expertise...
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How man licks does it take to get to the center of the universe?
This post is a comment.
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New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago
In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered...
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Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Brain-Cell Communication, Study Finds (npr.org)
A new study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to communicate to become slower and weaker. "The finding could help explain why a lack of sleep impairs a range of mental functions, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles," reports NPR. From the report:
The finding comes from an unusual study of patients being evaluated for surgery to correct severe epilepsy. As part of the evaluation, doctors place wires in the brain to find out where a pat...
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