Weird Science

[CiG]

I was watching an over 2 hour presentation on sustainable vegetation and one of the presentations was by this molecular biologist from South Africa Jill Farrant, and she seemed interesting so I looked around for more by her, found two TED talks and this interview on television on the same subject. Resurrection plants; plants that can survive extreme dehydration for months or years. She performs 'targeted genetic modification of crop plants to make them tolerate desiccation by activating genes that are already there but not natively expressed in response to drought.'





As the world's population grows and the effects of climate change come into sharper relief, we'll have to feed more people using less arable land. Molecular biologist Jill Farrant studies a rare phenomenon that may help: "resurrection plants" — super-resilient plants that seemingly come back from the dead. Could they hold promise for growing food in our coming hotter, drier world?

 

[Dak]

notanargument.gif

Stunning riposte.

 

[Einherjar86]

Stunning riposte.

I mean, why bother?

 

[Einherjar86]

I was watching an over 2 hour presentation on sustainable vegetation and one of the presentations was by this molecular biologist from South Africa Jill Farrant, and she seemed interesting so I looked around for more by her, found two TED talks and this interview on television on the same subject. Resurrection plants; plants that can survive extreme dehydration for months or years. She performs 'targeted genetic modification of crop plants to make them tolerate desiccation by activating genes that are already there but not natively expressed in response to drought.'





As the world's population grows and the effects of climate change come into sharper relief, we'll have to feed more people using less arable land. Molecular biologist Jill Farrant studies a rare phenomenon that may help: "resurrection plants" — super-resilient plants that seemingly come back from the dead. Could they hold promise for growing food in our coming hotter, drier world?

These studies/experiments are fascinating. And she's working on a crucial issue. A lot of people associate climate change with rising sea levels, but don't often consider the impact it will very likely have on inland agriculture.

On a related note, I co-taught a course on climate change in the fall, and two of the instructors involved were marine biologists. One of them worked as part of group to stimulate coral growth by manipulating underwater acoustics. According to their research, sound has a lot to do with how an ecosystem functions; and when organisms leave (due to coral acidification, for instance), the place goes acoustically dead. So they're trying to imitate the sounds of thriving ecosystems in order to attract the organisms who help coral resist acidification. The last time I asked, results were inconclusive. Still, it's a wild idea.

 

[Dak]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...ts-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition.

The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.

That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.

 

[Einherjar86]

Quanta published a very similar piece in December, although it was about an extension of Wigner's thought experiment, rather than a physical experiment using entangled particles.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/frau...where-our-views-of-reality-go-wrong-20181203/

Despite this lack of empirical evidence, physicists think that quantum mechanics can be used to describe systems at all scales — meaning it’s universal. To test this assertion, Frauchiger and Renner came up with their thought experiment, which is an extension of something the physicist Eugene Wigner first dreamed up in the 1960s. The new experiment shows that, in a quantum world, two people can end up disagreeing about a seemingly irrefutable result, such as the outcome of a coin toss, suggesting something is amiss with the assumptions we make about quantum reality.

Quantum physicists just be constructing reality and shit.

 

[Dak]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n06/michele-pridmore-brown/unfeeling-malice

Not quite "weird science", but interesting. Didn't know "Asperger" and "Autism" terminology was Nazi in origin and that they killed a lot of them. I wouldn't be surprised if I was just slightly on the spectrum.

 

[CiG]

This is frankly pretty amazing.

The new lightweight design by Open Bionics uses a 3D printer to create the hand in four separate parts, custom-built to fit the patient using scans of their body. Sensors attached to the skin detect the user’s muscle movements, which can be used to control the hand and open and close the fingers.

 

[Einherjar86]

Soooooooo much wtf, I love it.

https://palladiummag.com/2019/04/01...K0R2MvuF8ae3jPoqkQDLnKMHMOslH3G0x77D9p5Q-PsSU

In late 2017, it was reported that an underwater site called “Octlantis” had been discovered by researchers off the coast of Australia. Normally considered to be exceptionally solitary, fifteen octopuses were observed living together around a rocky outcropping on the otherwise flat ocean floor. Fashioning homes—dens—for themselves out of shells, the octopuses were observed mating, fighting, and communicating with each other. Most importantly, this was not the first time that this had happened. Another similar site called “Octopolis” had been previously discovered in the vicinity in 2009.

One of the researchers, Stephanie Chancellor, described the octopuses in “Octlantis” as “true environmental engineers.” The octopuses were observed conducting both mate defense and “evictions” of octopuses from dens, defending their property rights from infringement by other octopuses. The other “Octopolis” site had been continuously inhabited for at least seven years. Given the short lifespans of octopuses, lasting only a few years on the high end, it is clear that “Octopolis” has been inhabited by several generations of octopuses. We are presented with the possibility of not only one multi-generational octopus settlement chosen for defense from predators and engineered for octopus living, but two. And those are just the ones we’ve discovered. The oceans cover over 70% of Earth’s surface.

Despite all of these incredible abilities, the octopus’ most terrifying feature remains its intelligence. The octopus has the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any invertebrate, a ratio that is also higher than that of many vertebrates. Two thirds of its neurons, however, are located in its many autonomous arms, which can react to stimuli and even identify and grab food after being severed from the rest of the octopus, whether still dead or alive. In other words, the intelligence of an octopus is not centralized. It is decentralized, like a blockchain. Like blockchains, this makes them harder to kill. It has been reported that octopuses are capable of observational learning, short- and long-term memory, tool usage, and much more. One might wonder: if octopuses have already mastered blockchain technology, what else are they hiding?

We can see octopuses frequently putting this intelligence to good use, and not only in their burgeoning aquatic settlements. Some octopuses are known to use coconut shells for shelter, even dismantling and transporting the shell only to reassemble it later. In laboratory settings, octopuses are able to solve complex puzzles and open different types of latches in order to obtain food. They don’t stop there, though. Captive octopuses have been known to escape their tanks, slither across the floor, climb into another tank, feast on the helpless fish and crabs within, and then return to their original tank. Some do it only at night, knowingly keeping their human overseers in the dark. Octopuses do not seem to have qualms about deceiving humans. They are known to steal bait from lobster traps and climb aboard fishing boats to get closer to fishermen’s catches.

One octopus in New Zealand even managed to escape an aquarium and make it back to the sea. When night fell and nobody was watching, “Inky”—his human name, as we do not know how octopuses refer to themselves in private—climbed out of his tank, across the ground, and into a drainpipe leading directly to the ocean.

omg this is amazing.

 

[Bloopy]

Next level April Fools article with large parts of it being true including what you quoted.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/black-hole.html

Eight radio observatories around the world have combined forces to create, in effect, an Earth-size dish capable of detecting the event horizons of two nearby black holes. The first black hole is 26,000 light-years away, at the center of our galaxy, and weighs as much as four million suns. The second is a behemoth at the center of one of the largest nearby galaxies; it is estimated to weigh more than six billion suns.

The theory of general relativity predicts weird phenomena around a black hole, one of which is the extreme bending of light rays that stray close. Matter pulled close by the gravity of the black hole settles into a disc-like formation that “feeds” the black hole, as gas and dust slowly trickle toward the event horizon and into oblivion. The matter that falls into this feeding disc is sped up and heated to such high temperatures that it emits light. In turn, this light skirts around the event horizon.

It is this pattern of bent light that the astronomers running the Event Horizon Telescope have been trying to detect — a slightly lopsided glowing ring that would limn the point of no return. It would constitute the silhouette of the black hole.

One reason to be excited by the possibility of this discovery is that such images would test Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Will his predictions about how matter and energy behave hold true so close to a black hole? Or might we see a flaw in the theory?

 

[CiG]

@Einherjar86 did you see that the black hole images have been revealed? Articles are popping up everywhere, and I just saw this video:



Pretty exciting.

 

[Einherjar86]

"If you could go there [...] you could actually look forward and see the back of your head."

 

[CiG]

 

[CiG]

 

[CiG]

Exciting!

 

[Bloopy]

 

[Einherjar86]

Exciting!

Very exciting. Makes me think of Europa Report, except... on Titan.

 

[CiG]

Still need to see that. My modern sci-fi game is slacking.

 

[CiG]

Have you heard about this new "endlessly recyclable" plastic researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have designed? They're calling it PDK (polydiketoenamine) and it's still in the testing stage in terms of what it can be used for, how it can be manipulated etc but it sounds pretty interesting. Apparently it takes a mere 12 hours to dissolve it in acid.