Like many others, Penrose struggled with the weirdness of quantum theory. “As Schrödinger clearly pointed out with his poor cat, which was dead and alive at the same time, he made this point deliberately to show why his own equation…
Science
Steve Paulson: Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute – Nautilus
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Philosophy, Science Tagged with: Cognitive Science, Consciousness, Penrose
An Armada of Icebergs Has Just Invaded The North Atlantic – robertscribbler
This week an unprecedented 481 icebergs swarmed into the shipping lanes of a storm-tossed North Atlantic. Strong hurricane force winds had ripped these bergs from their sea ice moored haven of Baffin Bay and thrust them into the ocean waters…
NuSTAR Probes Puzzling Galaxy Merger – NASA
In several hundred million years, the black holes of the large and small galaxies will merge into one enormous beast. From: NuSTAR Probes Puzzling Galaxy Merger | NASA
Brain ‘rewires’ itself to enhance other senses in blind people – Harvard Medical School
“Our results demonstrate that the structural and functional neuroplastic brain changes occurring as a result of early ocular blindness may be more widespread than initially thought,” said lead author Corinna Bauer, HMS instructor of ophthalmology and a scientist at Schepens…
Extended spider cognition – SpringerLink
To tease apart the central from the extended cognition, we apply the mutual manipulability criterion, testing the existence of reciprocal causal links between the putative elements of the system. We conclude that the web threads and configurations are integral parts…
Scientists Finally Observed Time Crystals, But What the Hell Are They? – Gizmodo
One group at the University of Maryland lined up ten trapped ytterbium ions (ytterbium is just a chemical element) and shined them with periodic laser pulses to mostly, but not completely, flip the ions’ spins. The particles’ spin values snapped…
NASA proposes building artificial magnetic field to restore Mars’ atmosphere – ExtremeTech
Green notes that advances coming out of plasma physics could allow for the future development of inflatable structures that can generate a magnetic dipole of 1 or 2 tesla. That could [be] enough to shield Mars against the solar wind,…
Looking into the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way – The Guardian
[I]f Einstein’s equations break down anywhere, they are most likely to do so at the edge of a black hole, where the fabric of space-time is being stretched more severely than any other place in the cosmos. As Laing says:…
Stuff in Space – h/t @pbump
Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL. The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions. From: Stuff in Space
Vicious microbial warfare helps bacteria evolve cooperation – New Scientist
When Ratcliff and his team mixed two strains of Vibrio cholerae bacteria with different T6SS toxins on petri dishes, one strain or the other always killed off its opponent at any given place. The two strains gradually separated into patches…