Weird Science

[Krow]

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.

Here’s something semi related, but not exactly.

A fungus was found to be feeding on plastic at a landfill a few years ago. Could/would be huge if it could be harnessed.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749117300295

 

[rms]

I think jellyfish are big plastic eaters too, right? https://www.newscientist.com/articl...solution-to-the-problem-of-plastic-pollution/

 

[CiG]

One half of the issue could potentially be solved that way.

 

[Einherjar86]

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.

I haven't--need to read about this. Thanks!

As for the comments on organic/plastic syntheses, we're seeing more and more of it these days. It'll be years before we can see what the real consequences are of plastic contamination though. It wasn't until the 1950s that plastic started being produced in such massive quantities as to alter the actual mineral and geologic contents of the planet. Since 1950, plastic manufacturing has gone from something like under 2 million tons to over 300 million. We're already seeing the negative aspects of plastic pollution, especially in the oceans; but we're still very much in the experimental phase when it comes to observing what impact plastic consumption has on multicellular organisms.

 

[CiG]

I was reading a new article just yesterday that apparently Americans on average eat 50 thousand pieces of microplastic every year and inhale like 50 thousand more. A lot of it comes from bottled water iirc. Pretty frightening to think what impact this has on humans if we find out that plastic contamination has a noteworthy impact on the environment.

 

[Dak]

Seen some stuff recently, can't be bothered to find the article(s), that cancer has been misunderstood, and that we are basically pre/partially cancerous all the time, and that health is partially our body's ability to keep it suppressed.

 

[Sirjack]

It's all down to your Genes

 

[CiG]

A Carl Sagan Inspired Solar Sail Is Set to Launch Next Week.

 

[Einherjar86]

Where physics and systems theory come in contact...

In different formulations of the laws of physics, like Newtonian mechanics or quantum mechanics, there is background structure — structure which has to be specified and is fixed. It’s not subject to evolution, it’s not influenced by anything that happens. It’s structure outside the system being modeled. It’s the framework on which we hang observables — the observer, a clock and so forth. The statement that there’s nothing outside the universe — there’s no observer outside the universe — implies that we need a formulation of physics without background structure. All the theories of physics we have, in one way or another, apply only to subsystems of the universe. They don’t apply to the universe as a whole, because they require this background structure.

If we want to make a cosmological theory, to understand nature on the cosmological scale, we have to avoid what the philosopher Roberto Unger and I called “the cosmological fallacy,” the mistaken belief that we can take theories that apply to subsystems and scale them up to the universe as a whole. We need a formulation of dynamics that doesn’t refer to an observer or measuring instrument or anything outside the system. That means we need a different kind of theory.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/were...389976173&mc_cid=8558f2bb3c&mc_eid=d876fb4325

The problem of observation is one my central interests in literature, and it's one of the reasons I'm drawn to literature and science. Literature dramatizes the paradox of unobservability (i.e. the challenge of observing ourselves observing). Ideas like the expansion and size of the universe fascinate me because they directly engage this paradox in a material and mathematical way.

 

[Dak]

Observation is problematic. Weird how it never applies to things they observe they don't like.

 

[Einherjar86]

...who?

 

[CiG]

NASA’s $1 Billion Jupiter Probe Just Sent Back Stunning New Photos Of Jupiter.

Traveling above Jupiter at more than 130,000 miles per hour, NASA’s $1 billion Juno probe took its ninth set of stunning flyby images on October 24. But the sun slipped between the giant planet and Earth for more than a week, blocking the spacecraft from beaming home its precious bounty of data.







There's a lot more in the link. Amazing shots.

 

[Einherjar86]

View attachment 20551

Holy shit, seriously? That looks like an artist's rendition. Awesome.

EDIT: sorry, not to be a downer, but I think the first pic is an artist's rendition. It looks like it's from Cosmos. The rest of the photos are still amazing though.

 

[CiG]

Yeah it's a rendition from the TV series Cosmos (as per the watermark). I probably shouldn't have included it lmao.

 

[Bloopy]

Worth a watch:

 

[Dak]

Not exactly "weird", but cool:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1335-8

we demonstrate that an unsupervised method can recommend materials for functional applications several years before their discovery. This suggests that latent knowledge regarding future discoveries is to a large extent embedded in past publications. Our findings highlight the possibility of extracting knowledge and relationships from the massive body of scientific literature in a collective manner, and point towards a generalized approach to the mining of scientific literature.

 

[Dak]

https://time.com/4854718/quantum-entanglement-teleport-space/

A team of researchers in China sent a photon from the ground to an orbiting satellite more than 300 miles above through a process known as quantum entanglement, according to MIT Technology Review. It’s the farthest distance tested so far in teleportation experiments, the researchers said. Their work was published online on the open access site arXiv.

 

[The Ozzman]

Chief O'Brien unavailable for comment

 

[CiG]

Elon Musk’s Neuralink plans to hook human brains directly to computers.

Elon Musk’s secretive neurotechnology startup Neuralink has made its first major public announcement, revealing flexible “threads” designed to link a human brain directly to a computer.

The technology is aimed at helping paraplegics control computers through implantable devices in their brain, and could one day vastly improve the way humans think and communicate.

Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Mr Musk said the chip will help “preserve and enhance your own brain” and “ultimately achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence”.

 

[Dak]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quan...bjective-reality-passes-first-tests-20190722/

About a decade ago, while Riedel was working as a graduate student with Zurek, the two showed theoretically that information from some simple, idealized quantum systems is “copied prolifically into the environment,” Riedel said, “so that it’s necessary to access only a small amount of the environment to infer the value of the variables.” They calculated that a grain of dust one micrometer across, after being illuminated by the sun for just one microsecond, will have its location imprinted about 100 million times in the scattered photons.

It’s because of this redundancy that objective, classical-like properties exist at all. Ten observers can each measure the position of a dust grain and find that it’s in the same location, because each can access a distinct replica of the information. In this view, we can assign an objective “position” to the speck not because it “has” such a position (whatever that means) but because its position state can imprint many identical replicas in the environment, so that different observers can reach a consensus.

Quantum Darwinism looks fairly persuasive on paper. But until recently that was as far as it got. In the past year, three teams of researchers have independently put the theory to the experimental test by looking for its key feature: how a quantum system imprints replicas of itself on its environment.

A strike against pretty much everyone using "quantum" as an adjective/noun to explain something weird, paradoxical, or pseudoscientific. Maybe it's simply darwinism all the way down.