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Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day

Our brains are wired for new sensations.

By Steve Paulson

Brain “plasticity” is one of the great discoveries in modern science, but neuroscientist David Eagleman thinks the word is misleading. Unlike plastic, which molds and then retains a particular shape, the brain’s physical structure is continually in flux. But Eagleman can’t avoid the word. “The whole literature uses that term plasticity, so I use it sparingly,” he says. Eagleman also discounts computer analogies to the brain. He’s coined the term “livewired” (the title of his new book) to point out that the brain’s hardware and software are practically inseparable.

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“Ending the Abortion Debate” is Live on Kindle and Print!

philosophycorner:

You may purchase the book here. The book is about 150 pages written to persuade readers to stop debating and talking passed one another, and instead, take action together. I think I indentify common ground that makes this possible. I synthesize the pro-life and pro-choice positions not by taking the better parts of each and fusing them into a new one, but by dissolving both perspectives and inviting everyone to adopt a fresh perspective that, while accounting for the insights of both, goes further in paying much needed attention to the issues surrounding the decision to have an abortion. It’s a short, insightful, and hopefully persuasive read. Thank you in advance to all who purchase a copy!

A Break in the Quest for the Quantum Speed Limit

“When you see that, you know you’re touching on something very, very deep and fundamental.”

By NATALIE WOLCHOVER

A ubiquitous quantum phenomenon has been detected in a large class of superconducting materials, fueling a growing belief among physicists that an unknown organizing principle governs the collective behavior of particles and determines how they spread energy and information. Understanding this organizing principle could be a key into “quantum strangeness at its deepest level,” says Subir Sachdev, a theorist at Harvard who was not involved with the new experiments.

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(Source: The Atlantic)

philosophycorner:

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Please check out the site! Lots of cool things. Think of giving someone a gift as well.

We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down

By  Jon Cartwright

In the Antarctic, things happen at a glacial pace. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues would watch a giant balloon carrying a collection of antennas float high above the ice, scanning over a million square kilometres of the frozen landscape for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space.

When the experiment returned to the ground after its first flight, it had nothing to show for itself, bar the odd flash of background noise. It was the same story after the second flight more than a year later.

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Scientists Just Unveiled The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement

By Fiona MacDonald

In an incredible first, scientists have captured the world’s first actual photo of quantum entanglement - a phenomenon so strange Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

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(Source: google.com)

A new moon for Neptune

Hippocamp, a previously undetected moon of Neptune, has a peculiar location and a tiny size relative to the planet’s other inner moons, which suggests a violent history for the region within 100,000 kilometres of the planet.

By Anne J. Verbiscer

In 1989, the NASA spacecraft Voyager 2 detected six moons of Neptune that are interior to the orbit of the planet’s largest moon, Triton¹. In a paper in Nature, Showalter et al.² report the discovery of a seventh inner moon, Hippocamp. Originally designated as S/2004 N 1 and Neptune XIV, this moon was found in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2004–05 and 2009, and then confirmed in further images captured in 2016. Hippocamp is only 34 kilometres wide, which makes it diminutive compared with its larger siblings, and it orbits Neptune just inside the orbit of Proteus — the planet’s second largest moon.

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philosophycorner:

You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time

By Elise Crull

In the summer of 1935, the physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger engaged in a rich, multifaceted and sometimes fretful correspondence about the implications of the new theory of quantum mechanics. The focus of their worry was what Schrödinger later dubbed entanglement: the inability to describe two quantum systems or particles independently, after they have interacted.

Until his death, Einstein remained convinced that entanglement showed how quantum mechanics was incomplete. Schrödinger thought that entanglement was the defining feature of the new physics, but this didn’t mean that he accepted it lightly. ‘I know of course how the hocus pocus works mathematically,’ he wrote to Einstein on 13 July 1935. ‘But I do not like such a theory.’ Schrödinger’s famous cat, suspended between life and death, first appeared in these letters, a byproduct of the struggle to articulate what bothered the pair.

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Experiments Show The Effects of a Fourth Spatial Dimension

Wow.

By David Nield

We’re used to dealing with three physical dimensions and one extra dimension of time as we move through the Universe, but two teams of scientists have shown that a fourth spatial dimension could reach beyond the limits of up and down, left and right, and forwards and backwards.

As you might expect given this is bending the laws of physics, the experiments involved are partly theoretical and very complex, and touch on our old friend quantum mechanics.

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philosophycorner:

This Is Why Understanding Space Is So Hard

By Dan Falk

If all the matter in the universe suddenly disappeared, would space still exist? Isaac Newton thought so. Space, he imagined, was something like Star Trek’s holodeck, a 3-dimensional virtual-reality grid onto which simulated people and places and things are projected. As Newton put it in the early pages of his Principia: “Absolute space, of its own nature, without reference to anything external, always remains homogeneous and immovable.” ¹

This seems persuasive in everyday life. I’m walking east, you’re walking west, and the post office stays put: The frame of reference remains static. But Newton’s contemporary, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, balked at this idea of absolute space. Take away the various objects that make up the universe, he argued, and “space” no longer holds any meaning. Indeed, Leibniz’s case starts to look a lot stronger once you head out into space, where you can only note your distance from the sun and the various planets, objects that are all moving relative to one another. The only reasonable conclusion, Leibniz argued, is that space is “relational”: space simply isthe set of ever-changing distances between you and those various objects (and their distances from one another), not an “absolute reality.” ²

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Skunk Bear

Your cells are constantly being shed and replaced—so is your body ever completely refreshed? Does anything remain of the body that existed on Jan. 1, 2017? 2007? The day you were born?

sciencesourceimages:

These 17 Women Changed The Face Of Physics

Click through to read the rest.

(Source: space.io9.com)

The Universe Began With a Big Melt, Not a Big Bang

The cosmological constant and the creation of the universe.

By Thanu Padmanabhan

There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if they are not?

The first problem has to do with the existence of something called “dark energy,” which is today accelerating the expansion of the universe and will determine its final fate. Theorists tell us that the effects of dark energy can be explained by introducing a term into Einstein’s equations of gravity called the cosmological constant. But, for this explanation to work, the cosmological constant must have a very specific—and tiny—value. In natural units, the cosmological constant is given by 1 divided by a number made of 1 followed by 123 zeros! Explaining this value is considered one of the greatest challenges faced by theoretical physics today.

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Lawrence Krauss on “Seeing” the Early Universe

By Stephen Johnson

At a 2016 convention hosted by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss spoke about scientists’ attempts to look back to when the universe was just fractions of a second old. A few highlights from Krauss’ talk are listed below, and his full presentation can be seen at the bottom of this article.

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(Source: bigthink.com)

MEET THE GENIUS BUSH FAMILY; TEENS HAVE MASTER’S DEGREES, MOM IS ATTORNEY AND ARCHITECT

postingwhileblack:

It has to be America’s most amazing family. Meet the Bushes from South Florida overachievers who stand at the ready to serve their country. Gisla and Bobby Bush have 9 children, who are some of the brightest young minds in the US.

Three of the oldest had graduated from college while they were still teenagers.

Gabrielle Bush graduated from college with a Bachelor’s Degree in health administration at 18. At 19 she received her Master’s Degree in public administration.

Grace Bush graduated from high school and college in the same week at 16. At 18 she earned her Master’s Degree in public administration.

Gisla Bush was only 18 when she graduated from college with a Bachelor’s Degree in urban design.

Other children are home-schooled as the rest of the family. All of them play musical instruments.

Their mom was asked about the secret source:

I bet you haven’t heard about this family that raise prodigy kids. The media always keep silent about successful Black people. 

That’s why representation matters.