Bitcoin Association Announces Its Second Big Hire This Month – Live Bitcoin News

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The Bitcoin Association is bringing Alex Spiers onboard as its latest head of communications.

Spiers joins the company after serving as the editor-in-chief to the Legal 500s GC Magazine for more than three years. In addition, he has also served as the editor-in-chief for 2on4 Sports and has worked as a business journalist in New Zealand.

In a statement, Spiers expressed his joy over becoming the latest member of the Bitcoin Association:

Its certainly an exciting time to be joining the Bitcoin Association. The bitcoin SV ecosystem has reached an inflection point and the opportunities for businesses and enterprises alike only stand to grow. I look forward to working with Jimmy and the team as we work to significantly increase content and communications outreach, in multiple languages, to educate business, developer, consumer, investment and government audiences about BSVs potential.

The Bitcoin Association predominantly provides support for bitcoin SV (BSV), which emerged in late 2018 following a bitcoin cash (BCH) hard fork. The move proved very controversial, and the emergence of BSV is widely blamed for the massive bitcoin crash that occurred soon after.

Bitcoin had spent much of the summer of 2018 trading in the mid-$6,000 range, but later fell to about $3,500 following the completion of the fork. Some, like Craig Wright, claim that BSV is the true version of bitcoin that crypto creator Satoshi Nakamoto initially envisioned when he developed the bitcoin whitepaper in 2009.

Others, however, such as Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver, claim otherwise, and choose to instead pledge their loyalty to BSVs father BCH.

Nevertheless, the Bitcoin Association continues to grow despite the wary environment that has continued to form around BSVs continued presence. Jimmy Nguyen the founding president of the venture explained in a statement:

As bitcoin SV rapidly rises as the blockchain for business, the Bitcoin Association continues to expand our team of experienced professionals in order to support our ever-growing membership and ecosystem. One of the bitcoin SV ecosystems advantages is strength of message. Hiring Alex as our head of communications is another big addition to that strength as we build a truly global organization that will help bitcoins original design living now as bitcoin SV to finally fulfill its potential.

This is the second major hire made by the Bitcoin Association within two weeks. The first occurred in early March and involved bringing Ella Qiang to the BSV table as the Associations new manager in Asia.

Last year, the organization made headlines when it announced it was partnering with Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to develop a new study program that would allow pupils of the college to learn more about cryptocurrencies, specifically BSV.

The Bitcoin Association is headquartered in London.

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Bitcoin Association Announces Its Second Big Hire This Month - Live Bitcoin News

More than 100 Chinese real estate firms have filed for bankruptcy this year – The Real Deal

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Workers disinfect an apartment complex in Wuhan (Credit: Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated an already weakened residential real estate sector in China.

More than 100 real estate firms active in China filed for bankruptcy in the first two months of the year, according to Bloomberg. Smaller firms are taking the biggest hit, said China Index Holdings Ltd. Research Director Huang Yu.

A vast number of mid- to small-sized developers will face a choice no one wants to make either sell their property assets and start another business, or be bought out, Yu said, according to Bloomberg.

Yu expects that the wave of bankruptcies will result in a consolidation of real estate companies in the country because of mergers and acquisitions. Fusheng Group Co., based in the southeast of the country, has become one of the first mid-size companies to falter and sell a controlling stake to a larger company.

Rental management companies and short-term rental companies are among those under immense pressure from containment policies and reduced travel.

Standard & Poors is projecting that new home sales in China will drop for the first time in 12 years this year. Sales could be down between 15 percent and 20 percent depending how the next month or so shakes out.

The crisis in China is taking its toll stateside. U.S. construction firms are also feeling the effects of the crisis in China, which supplies about 30 percent of the countrys materials. Contractors are having trouble sourcing materials domestically and are slowed by shipping delays, meaning projects are slowing down.

As the virus has spread worldwide, the U.S hotel sector saw key fundamentals decline as well. [Bloomberg] Dennis Lych

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More than 100 Chinese real estate firms have filed for bankruptcy this year - The Real Deal

Busted Companies Blame Virus for Pushing Them Into Bankruptcy – Yahoo Finance

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(Bloomberg) --

The spreading coronavirus has already begun hurting the most vulnerable companies: those in bankruptcy or teetering on the edge.

Retailers like furniture seller Pier 1 Imports Inc. and direct-mailer Bluestem Brands Inc. have pointed to virus woes in justifying their requests for court protection, while cash-strapped energy companies -- already reeling from an oil market sell-off -- are seeing the pandemic disrupt long-standing restructuring plans.

Patient zero for the insolvency world may have been publicly traded Valeritas Holdings Inc., a bankrupt seller of diabetes devices that said in early February the shutdown of factories in China pressured its supply chain, worsening an existing cash crunch. The company plans to sell itself for just $23 million, citing uncertainty surrounding when workers in rural China will return to factories among its many problems.

Given the commercial reaction to the virus and the wheels of the economy slowing at this pace, the implications will be wide-reaching and long term, Duston McFaul, a partner in the bankruptcy practice at Sidley Austin LLP in Houston, said in an interview. Credit and lending markets are all taking a step back to gauge the implications and to know how to react.

Empty Shelves

The Chinese factories that produce so much of the worlds goods -- including Valeritas V-Go Insulin device -- are beginning to reopen, but empty store shelves will likely become a common sight in the coming months.

The virus will likely have some effect on inventory levels for the foreseeable future, Pier 1 Chief Executive Officer Robert Riesbeck said in court papers last month when the company filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors.

Industries reliant on crowds like restaurants, retail and hotels will likely see an impact from the virus and could be forced to dismiss employees or cut their hours, said Sidney Scheinberg, chair of the bankruptcy and creditors-rights arm of Godwin Bowman PC in Dallas. Restaurant chains are already under pressure from rising wages and third-party delivery service competition.

In some cases, the virus helped finish off companies that were headed for court anyway. Foresight Energy LP, the newly bankrupt coal miner, said in its court papers this week that its prospects were hurt when Covid-19 weakened the economy and demand for coal. Foresight had been in trouble for some time, though: it suspended its quarterly dividend in May and missed an interest payment in October.

School Closings

An attorney for Dean Foods Co., the top U.S. milk processor that went bust in November, told a bankruptcy judge in Houston Thursday the company is getting calls from schools across the country to take back milk deliveries in the wake of virus-related closings. Dean would lose millions of dollars each month if its school food service business dries up, Brian Resnick of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP said, because schools account for such a large portion of the companys milk sales.

The pandemic is hitting deal financing, too. Art Van Furniture LLC, which filed for bankruptcy last week, was closing in on an out-of-court cash infusion when the virus crushed equities markets, helping the deal fall apart, Chief Financial Officer David Ladd said in a court declaration. Elsewhere, a proposed $320 million sale of bankrupt Alta Mesa Resources Inc. assets is in doubt because the buyers say they cant line up the promised financing amid the virus-induced market turmoil.

That makes Houston-based EP Energy Corp. look like one of the lucky ones. The oil and gas producer disclosed its bankruptcy plan back in October, well before coronavirus was making headlines. Creditors fighting the drillers proposal argued earlier this month that the pandemic could tamp down demand for oil in the longer term, and that the companys plan to keep at least $1.5 billion of debt on its books wasnt feasible.

Judge Marvin Isgur ultimately approved the plan. Three days later, oil prices crashed.

I know that weve got problems out there and I dont know how to deal with them, Isgur said in a hearing Wednesday, where he confirmed hell sign a court order enforcing his earlier ruling. Im just going to be prepared to deal with them the best I can.

--With assistance from Tiffany Kary.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy Hill in New York at jhill273@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rick Green at rgreen18@bloomberg.net, Boris Korby

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Busted Companies Blame Virus for Pushing Them Into Bankruptcy - Yahoo Finance

Bankruptcy expert Ed Altman: ‘A lot of marginal companies are going to be forced out of business’ – Yahoo Finance

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Bankruptcy veteranDr. Edward Altmansees trouble brewing in corporate credit, with mass ratings downgrades and company bankruptcies on the horizon as the coronavirus outbreak shakes the global economy.

Altman, who is a professor emeritus at NYU Stern School of Business added that even before the virus, the fundamentals of companies and markets were already showing a lot of warning signs.

A growing number of analysts predict the markets mass selling of risk-sensitive assets will eventually hammer the corporate debt sector, where companies some with weak balance sheets have feasted on cheap credit.

I think the chances of a recession have spiked dramatically, obviously, since the coronavirus threat and now impact has happened, Altman told Yahoo Finance, pointing out that the average economist is now forecasting around a 60% chance of a recession within the next 12 months, up dramatically from before the outbreak.

That means a lot of companies kept afloat by cheap borrowing costs could be in real trouble. Altman contended that many of them should actually go bankrupt, because they are zombies and have been kept alive by historically low rates.

Recently, Moodys Investors Service forecasted that issuer default rates could rise by the end of this year, and the coronavirus outbreak could make it even worse. Speculative-grade debt, otherwise known as junk bonds, is likely to be hardest hit.

Altman who pioneered the financial-distress sniffing Z-Score, a formula he created more than 50 years ago for predicting bankruptcies suggested ratings agencies are often slow to recognize when companies need to get downgraded.

We ran a Z-Score test on BBB companies in the United States year-end 2019. And, in a downturn, a big downturn which happened in 08 and 2002 etcetera, maybe 10% the rating agencies say get downgraded, he said.

Thats a very important thing downgraded to high yield. If that happens, then you have problems in that market depending on the amount, he said adding that his model suggests the situation could be far worse than that 10% figure.

We ran our tests looking objectively at the health of BBB companies at the end of 2019 when everything was going great, and we came up with more than 30% looked vulnerable to a downgrade, in fact, looked like non-investment grade companies even then, Altman told Yahoo Finance.

And thats going to happen, maybe not 30%, because we dont do the rating change. But it does happen, and when that happens, a lot of marginal companies are going to be forced out of business, he added.

Julia La Roche is a Correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Follow her onTwitter.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

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Bankruptcy expert Ed Altman: 'A lot of marginal companies are going to be forced out of business' - Yahoo Finance

Bankruptcy allows Weatherford to realize first profit in more than six years – Chron

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Chapter 11 bankruptcy has allowed Houston oilfield service company Weatherford International to close 2019 with its first profit in more than six years.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy has allowed Houston oilfield service company Weatherford International to close 2019 with its first profit in more than six years.

Photo: Sergio Chapa / Houston Chronicle

Chapter 11 bankruptcy has allowed Houston oilfield service company Weatherford International to close 2019 with its first profit in more than six years.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy has allowed Houston oilfield service company Weatherford International to close 2019 with its first profit in more than six years.

Bankruptcy allows Weatherford to realize first profit in more than six years

Chapter 11 bankruptcy has allowed Houston oilfield service company Weatherford International to close 2019 with its first profit in more than six years.

Shedding roughly $6 billion of debt after successfully emerging from Chapter 11 reorganization in mid-December, Weatherford reported a $5.3 billion profit on more than $1.2 billion of revenue during the fourth quarter. The figures were mixed on the $2.1 billion loss on $1.4 billion of revenue during the fourth quarter of 2018.

Burdened by billion of dollars of debt, Weatherford had previously not made a profit since the third quarter of 2014.

Service Sector: Weatherford emerges from bankruptcy with $10 billion of support

Looking at the company's end-of-year results, shedding debt allowed Weatherford to close 2019 with a $3.6 billion profit on $5.2 billion of revenue. The figures were mixed compared to the $2.8 billion loss on $5.7 billion of revenue reported in 2018.

With roots in Texas going back to 1941, Weatherford had grown to become the nation's fourth-largest oil field services company but racked up $10 billion in debt along the way.

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Bankruptcy allows Weatherford to realize first profit in more than six years - Chron

Every musician I know is now facing bankruptcy the impact of coronavirus cancellations on classical… – Classic FM

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13 March 2020, 21:20 | Updated: 13 March 2020, 21:42

As the coronavirus pandemic impacts all parts of life, society, and the economy, musicians are left to feel the profound financial, artistic and emotional impacts.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought huge disruption to daily life, to many around the world. Concert halls are closed, gatherings cancelled, and large sectors of the economy are paralysed. Many members of the classical audience are self-isolating or just staying home.

All the major classical music events cancelled due to coronavirus so far >

Everyone we talked to agrees that the public's health and people's safety comes first at this time. However, freelance and touring musicians, who rely on performances for their livelihoods, are feeling a deep impact from the cancelled performances, scrapped tours and the resulting loss of income and opportunities.

Classic FM spoke to violinist Miriam Davis on Friday afternoon.

"A few minutes ago I had tonight's performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, for which I spent 4 months preparing, cancelled with just 4 hours notice.

"This follows yesterday, the cancellation of every other concert in my diary for the next 2 months.

"Ive turned down other work to practise. We often prepare for months with payment only expected at concert at the end.

"On top of the sadness and anxiety of the virus situation, every musician I know is now facing bankruptcy. We cannot pay our rent, we cannot buy food, and we see no relief from this situation.

"Im personally heartbroken not to be playing the piece tonight. It's a time of human anxiety and suffering, and live music is one of the few things which could bring small solace, I was grateful today for one last chance to offer some beauty, peace and joy in this world. Now, that too has gone."

British Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston told us of the shockwaves cancellations and disruption will send through the music industry.

"The current situation, with most cultural organisations worldwide shutting down for a period, is unprecedented and will cause most self-employed performers to face major financial issues, even bankruptcy.

"Most performers live life on a financial knife-edge because if we dont work, we dont get paid, and we arent catered for even under the current statutory sick pay regime.

"Clearly, everyones health is important, and so no-one is opposing the shutdowns, but nonetheless there is grave concern that not only are there severe financial implications for individuals, but also arts organisations themselves will struggle, having lost ticket revenues or income from touring, or, in the case of agents, commission from contracts carried out by their artists.

"We will feel shockwaves as a result for a long time to come."

We also heard from Australian flautist Ana de la Vega, who is currently on the road, touring in Europe. She said she was struggling to comprehend the impact of a rapid string of cancellations and the deep emotional impacts of sudden travel restrictions.

"I'm feeling the sadness, disappointment and stress of the past days. I've been on the road and trying to keep it going, not knowing what is happening, and one by one having our concerts cancelled.

"I'm touring to promote a CD with oboist Ramn Ortega Quero. We've been working on this for more than a year. This is what we do and live for, and we just wanted to play and share music.

"On tour, I'm separated from my family and I've just learnt that I can't return home to Scandinavia without putting myself, my husband and two-year-old daughter in quarantine.

"After these cancellations, I have no further performances until June and which to me feels like both means nothing financially and nothing for the soul. Emotionally thats really complex, and hard to explain."

Ana's new release of Haydn and Stamitz is a wonderful one, and was Classic FM's Drive Discovery a few weeks ago. Please do buy a copy in support of the project she spend years creating.

John Brunning's Drive Discovery this week has been an outstanding new recording of Haydn & Stamitz Concertos for Flute...

Guitarist and conductor Michael Poll writes:

"Unlike most workers who have one job or freelance for one platform, I depend on a broad portfolio of work for inspiration and solvency. This is uncertain in the best of times I don't know another artist not concerned that it could all dry up one morning due to injury, disaster, or act of God. Covid-19 is now eating away at the heart of the spring and possibly the summer season, so the biggest projects that I count on and the smaller ones that are more regular are in serious jeopardy.

"But I try not to be all doom and gloom, so I'm refocusing on the chance to develop new repertoire, polish my writing, and record a new project. But I get a lot of energy from playing out in the world, so I can't say it's not a challenge!"

Greek-American soprano Jamie Chamberlin took to Twitter to share a plea on behalf of artists struggling with canceled performances and uncertain incomes.

In an Instagram post, Chamberlin said: "Most of us have a clause called force majeure in our contracts which leaves us vulnerable to a total loss of income, even if we've already done work in learning our roles and music".

She suggested if ticket holders and patrons wanted to support artists and creative organisations at this time, they could donate their refunded ticket price back "Most artists do not have a significant safety net for this type of income loss", she said.

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Every musician I know is now facing bankruptcy the impact of coronavirus cancellations on classical... - Classic FM

Banks should be instructed not to invoke IBC for non-payment in testing times of Coronavirus: SICCI – Economic Times

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Chennai: The Southern Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SICCI) on Monday made a representation to the government to instruct banks not to invoke Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) for non-payment as one of the measures to provide businesses with relief owing to the impact of the novel Coronavirus.

"Possibility of delayed payments cannot be ruled out due to various factors including production losses, non-availability of manpower, reduction of sale and other extraneous factors. Banks should be instructed not to invoke IBC for non-payment and should suspend any action by a quarter for the economy to settle down," the organisation said in its letter to the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

SICCI provided a slew of other suggestions in its letter which focused on measures with regard to tax and other legislations and operation of businesses. In its letter, R Ganapathi, President of SICCI said the penetration of the virus was impacting industry.

"There is visible contraction in production, manufacture, import and exports, including consumption. This could be attributed to various concerns including - shortage of raw material, non-availability of manpower, uncertainty of consumption and general reluctance due to ambiguity of the future turn of the virus," the letter read.

SICCI went on to add that the Government should play a 'supportive role' and 'build confidence in the minds of industry while also boosting morale and ensuring that the economy is not crippled.' It lauded the initiatives that the Government has taken in response to curbing the outbreak but sent a list of suggestions that it believed would further help the industry.

"The Government of India has taken a number of initiatives to support the trade and industry as providing work from home facility for IT/ITes companies, relaxation from DOT standpoint and extension of GST audits for the period 2018-19 and deferment of e-invoicing and new returns till October 1, 2020. Owing to cases across India, the business community has been facing a lot of challenges in conducting business as well as from an employee safety perspective."

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Banks should be instructed not to invoke IBC for non-payment in testing times of Coronavirus: SICCI - Economic Times

How Can Spontaneous Spin Polarization be Observed in Different Nanomaterials? – AZoNano

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Image Credit: GiroScience/Shutterstock.com

There are several ways spin polarization is observed in nanomaterials, but until recent years it was always considered an impossibility. Spin polarization remains essential in understanding and applying spintronics, but scientists are regularly surprised by some of the seemingly random effects that occur during experimentation with different nanomaterials.

How and Why?

"Where does this spin polarization come from? The electrons are interacting with one another, and molybdenum disulfide also exhibits a very weak spin orbit coupling. These two factors presumably have a massive influence on the system.

Roch, J. via Phys.org 2019

A 1966 theorem assumed the absence of spin-orbit interaction, discovering spontaneous spin polarization an interesting puzzle for many in the scientific community.

Before explaining how it can be observed in different nanomaterials, it is important to understand the benefits of spontaneous spin polarization and why many are excited about it.

There are two significant benefits.

In 2016, scientists presented an experimental study of narrow line Dysprosium MOTs. The study revealed that by combining radiation pressure and gravitational force, spontaneous polarization of the electronic spin of the particle occurs.

The spin was measured using a Stern-Gerlach separation of spin levels. This revealed that the gas becomes almost entirely spin-polarized for large laser frequency de-tunings. In this instance, the laser de-tunings reach the optimal operation of the MOT with samples of typically 3 x 108 atoms. The spin polarization reduced the complexity of the radiative cooling description allowing for a simple model that enabled scientists to take measurements.

It would be hard to talk about spontaneous spin polarization without mentioning graphene, one of the most used and sought after nanomaterials. The zig-zag-like atomic structure at the edges of graphene produces a flat energy band. Because electrons have infinite mass at the flat band, they all localize at the edges with the highest density. Here, spontaneous polarization can be observed because of the mutual Coulomb interaction. This occurs despite a material consisting of only carbon atoms with sp2 bonds.

Physicists from the University of Basel discovered one of the most interesting examples of spontaneous spin polarization in their studies of two-dimensional nanomaterials. Despite the theorem mentioned above, from the 1960s speculation that spontaneous spin polarization cannot occur in two-dimensional materials, the Basel physicists were able to demonstrate spin alignment of free electrons in a 2D nanomaterial.

Doctoral students Jonas Roch and Nadine Leisgang made the discovery using graphene. Filling the M0S2 layer with free electrons, they then exposed it to a weak magnetic field. This caused all free electrons to spin in the same direction. They also discovered the spin could be switched in the other direction by merely reversing the magnetic field.

This and other observations of spontaneous spin-polarization demonstrates exciting possibilities for our future understanding and application of nanomaterials.

Spontaneous spin polarization in two dimensional material Physics.org. - 2019. Available at:https://phys.org/news/2019-03-spontaneous-polarization-two-dimensional-material.html

Spontaneous spin polarization demonstrated in a two-dimensional material Nanowerk - 2019. Available at:https://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news2/newsid=52334.php

Spontaneous spin polarization and spin pumping effect on edges of graphene antidot lattices Physica Status Solidi - 2012. Available at:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pssb.201200042

Spontaneous Spin Polarization and Electronic States in Platinum Nano-Particle New trends in superconductivity 2002. Available at:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300824288_Spontaneous_Spin_Polarization_and_Electronic_States_in_Platinum_Nano-Particle

Spin polarization and quantum spins in Au nanoparticles International Journal of Molecular Sciences - 2013. Available at:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3794745/

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author expressed in their private capacity and do not necessarily represent the views of AZoM.com Limited T/A AZoNetwork the owner and operator of this website. This disclaimer forms part of the Terms and conditions of use of this website.

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How Can Spontaneous Spin Polarization be Observed in Different Nanomaterials? - AZoNano

Scientists Measured An Exact Moment In Quantum Time – And It Was Fuzzy – Forbes

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The nature of time is one of the most intriguing questions in modern physics and philosophy. One of the reasons why is that the world we observe (often referred to as classical) differs from what really exists on very small scales - the weird, surprising world of quantum physics. Recently, a team of researchers from Sweden, Spain, and Germany designed a clever experiment to watch how quantum systems become classical systems - and in the process, found that time is not as precise as we thought it was.

At its most fundamental level, time is fuzzy.

Lets pretend that your car is acting like an electron. When you look down at your speedometer, instead of having one needle pointing to 40 miles per hour, you would have a highlighted bar letting you know your car was going somewhere between 20 and 60 miles per hour. When you look up, you wouldnt even know what lane you were in.

That would all change when a police officer points her radar gun at you and measures you to be going precisely 40 miles an hour in the right-hand lane.

This is how reality works on very very small scales. Particles like electrons are not in any one position with any one energy. Instead, they are simultaneously in many positions with many energies at once - something called a superposition. This is the case until something - or someone - observes that tiny electron. At that moment, the electron picks a state to be in, illustrating that the observer is a fundamental part of this universe.

The authors of the paper, appearing in Physical Review Letters, wanted to see an electron in the act of making up its mind. They took small snapshots of a strontium ion in an electric field. The electrons within these ions at first were still in their quantum state - and their reality was a smudging of probabilities of various orbital states.

Electrons in orbit around an atom aren't in any one state until they are measured.

The scientists then made their observation by poking the atom with a laser, forcing the electrons to decide what orbit they would occupy.

The scientists found it took the electrons some time to make up their minds.

By taking photographs to see what happens in that one-millionth of a second, scientists saw that the decision, a process referred to as wave function collapse, took some time to happen. Its like when the police officer points her radar gun at you - your car is first going somewhere between 20 and 60 miles an hour, then between 35 and 50, then either 40, 42, or 45, then finally deciding it is going 40 miles an hour.

The intriguing results show that quantum collapse is not instantaneous. It also shows us how time operates on the quantum level - and shows us that time itself may be a blurry, abstract concept. It also shows us that our concept of now may not really exist, and that our reality is a very weird place indeed.

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Scientists Measured An Exact Moment In Quantum Time - And It Was Fuzzy - Forbes

Quantum Death Human Cells Carry Quantum Information That Exists as a Soul (Weekend Feature) – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel

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Posted on Mar 14, 2020 in Cosmology, Physics, Science

The physical universe that we live in is only our perception and once our physical bodies die, there is an infinite beyond. Some believe that consciousness travels to parallel universes after death. The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger which this world is rooted in. In this way, our lives in this plane of existence are encompassed, surrounded, by the afterworld already The body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way, I am immortal, suggest researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich

The Max Planck physicists are in agreement with British Physicist Sir Roger Penrose who argues that if a person temporarily dies, this quantum information is released from the microtubules and into the universe. However, if they are resuscitated the quantum information is channeled back into the microtubules and that is what sparks a near death experience. If theyre not revived, and the patient dies, its possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.

Steve Paulson writing for Nautil.us describes the 88-year-old Penroses theory as an audaciousand quite possibly crackpottheory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (One of the very few people Ive met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius, physicist Lee Smolin has said), wed be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand.

While scientists are still in heated debates about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizonas Hameroff and Penrose conclude that it is information stored at a quantum level. Penrose agrees he and his team have found evidence that protein-based microtubulesa structural component of human cellscarry quantum information information stored at a sub-atomic level.

It was Hameroffs idea, writes Paulson, that quantum coherence happens in microtubules, protein structures inside the brains neurons. And what are microtubules, you ask? They are tubular structures inside eukaryotic cells (part of the cytoskeleton) that play a role in determining the cells shape, as well as its movements, which includes cell divisionseparation of chromosomes during mitosis. Hameroff suggests that microtubules are the quantum device that Penrose had been looking for in his theory. In neurons, microtubules help control the strength of synaptic connections, and their tube-like shape might protect them from the surrounding noise of the larger neuron. The microtubules symmetry and lattice structure are of particular interest to Penrose. He believes this reeks of something quantum mechanical.

Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here, Penrose told Paulson during an interview. Theres intelligent lifeor consciousnesssomewhere else in the cosmos, Penrose added. But it may be extremely rare. But if consciousness is the point of this whole shebang, wouldnt you expect to find some evidence of it beyond Earth Paulson asked? Well, Im not so sure our own universe is that favorably disposed toward consciousness, Penrose replied.

In Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death, Robert Lanza asks does the soul exist? The new scientific theory he propounds says were immortal and exist outside of time. Biocentrism postulates that space and time are not the hard objects we think. Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. His new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feelingthe Who am I?- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesnt go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Nautil.us, Robert Lanza and Sunday Guardian Live

Image credit: via Pixabay

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Quantum Death Human Cells Carry Quantum Information That Exists as a Soul (Weekend Feature) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

The Mother of Invention (March 9, 2005) – Anderson Valley

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I dont know if were more religious today, says Ken Bingman, who has taught biology in Kansas City public schools for 42 years, but I see more and more students who want a link to God.

While religion certainly looks to be on the upswing in the United States, theres a lot more to the resurgence of creationism than a rising tide of religious fervor. Received wisdom counsels little more than continued resistance against the Bible thumpers at the gates. Daniel Dennett, author of Darwins Dangerous Idea, is too busy excoriating creationists and scientific fellow-travelers to notice that the dominant biological theory of the day is inadvertently encouraging the creationist revival. The chief threat to Darwinian evolution is none other than neo-Darwinian evolution. As conceived by Austrian theorist August Weismann in the 1890s, neo-Darwinism shares fundamental features with creationism, not the least of which is reliance on blind faith rather than empirical fact. The creationist tide may never be stemmed until biology abandons Weismannian reductionism and returns to a more traditional Darwinian outlook.

Given the cultural atmosphere of his upbringing, Darwin could hardly have helped but absorb the lesson that an all-knowing, masculine deity commands the cosmos. At a time when science was still joined at the hip with religion, the modern prophets were Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, whose mastery of mathematics gave them a communion of sorts with the Almighty, allowing them to receive the eternal equations supervising the operations of the universe. Newtons laws of motion were no less than Gods thoughts.

As above, so below. After establishing the heavens, the cosmic Mechanic fashioned each species of life according to a design of His choosing. According to theologian William Paley whose treatise, Natural Theology, had young Darwin temporarily hypnotized an organism is no different in principle than a watch. Just as a watch cannot come into being without the painstaking efforts of a craftsman, organisms are mechanisms constructed and wound up by God and left to play out their allotted time on Earth.

But Darwin was a true naturalist. Guided by his intuitive sense of nature, he gradually outgrew Paleys notion of divine authority over obedient matter. The naturalistic materialism of his mature years represented a total repudiation of theological mechanism, substituting divine creation with the creativity inherent in nature. His new understanding was prefigured in part by the deist teachings of his grandfather, Erasmus, who alleged that after devising the cosmic machine, the deity left the mundane affairs of terrestrial existence to their own devices.

Erasmus had a streak of the pagan in him. Though outwardly a scientific rationalist, he found religion in nature if not the Bible. Exploring a cave, he didnt just find a bunch of rocks but glimpsed the Goddess of Minerals naked, as she lay in her inmost bower. The earth wasnt just a passive depository for Gods will but Mother Earth, whose womb gave life and whose wrath in the form of floods, eruptions, and quakes could just as easily snuff it out. In contrast to the paternal principle of the heavens, the earth followed its own, darker, maternal principle.

Materialism is not so much a sophisticated modern philosophy as an ancient mythos that locates within the earth itself the source of life and its myriad forms. Etymologically, mother and matter are the same word, having evolved from the same Indo-European root. The materialist metaphysics signified by Mother Nature is not the reductionistic form were accustomed to today, in which particles are mere playthings of eternal laws of physics, but an expansive materialism in which matter is endowed with its own creative and destructive powers.

In response to the 1859 debut of Darwins theory of natural selection, Adam Sedgwick, an old-school geologist, accused the author of trying to render humanity independent of a Creator by breaking the chains that link all secondary causes to Gods ultimate cause. Though Darwins declaration of independence was a prerequisite to the scientific study of life, he was understandably anxious about turning his back on the Father. Caught in the pull of two opposing worldviews, he conceded that his theological opinions were hopelessly muddled. The same could be said of his views on physics and life.

The starting-point for the theory of descent with modification is not the equations of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton but the fecundity of living nature and the resulting struggle for existence in the face of finite resources. Though Darwin invoked the authority of natural law so as to eliminate the role of divine intervention in the creation of species, at the core of evolution is novelty, and by definition novelty is not pre-determined, either by God or physics. While pledging allegiance to Newton as final arbiter of everything under the sun, he set out on a course that would ultimately undermine physical determinism in biology.

Throw up a handful of feathers, he says in The Origin of Species, and all fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is the problem where each shall fall compared to that of the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on [Native American] ruins! The mathematical abstractions of physics had little to offer when it came to either ecology or the internal dynamics of organisms. Dissenting from T. H. Huxleys notion of animal automatism, Darwin stressed the importance of individual will in shaping behavior and maintained that a complex system of cells, tissues, and organs cant function properly without a coordinating power that brings the parts into harmony with each other. Such talk has no place in a purely mechanistic program.

While today evolution is generally thought to result from the purely mechanical interplay of natural selection and genetic mutation, Darwin explicitly rejected this view, assigning only a marginal role to the spontaneous variations (mutations) arising from the germ-plasm (genome). The variations subject to natural selection did not emerge from the germ-plasm buried deep within the organisms cells but from its day-to-day struggle to survive in the face of competition and limited resources. Darwinian evolution is a model of clarity, elegance, and common sense: the adaptations made by organisms are transmitted to their progeny, and these adaptations become more ingrained and more pronounced with each passing generation until a new species emerges from the old.

Ordinarily written off as Lamarckian, this view is incidental to Lamarcks theory, according to which evolution, from the beginning, was divinely guided toward the emergence of Homo sapiens. As for the capacity of plants and animals to inherit traits taken up by their ancestors during their life-struggles, Darwin concurred. I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them; and that such modifications are inherited. He cited examples of animals that clearly inherited traits from their ancestors, such as young shepherd dogs that know, without training, to avoid running at sheep. He explained that domesticated chickens have no fear of cats or dogs because their ancestors became accustomed to common pets and lost their fear of them. Ostriches cant fly because they inherited weak wing muscles and strong legs from their ancestors who learned to kick their enemies instead of taking flight. A similar effect in ducks may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parents.

Darwin was skeptical of the notion that examples such as these and there are literally countless more could all result from genetic mutation. Why attribute a given trait to a mysterious and random process taking place in the depths of the body when theres a perfectly obvious explanation involving the life-circumstances of ancestors? Everyone knows that hard work thickens the epidermis on the hands; and when we hear that with infants, long before birth, the epidermis is thicker on the palms and the soles of the feet than on any other part of the body we are naturally inclined to attribute this to the inherited effects of long-continued use or pressure.

The meaning of evolution is that species are not created so much as self-created in the act of living and adapting. Regarding the origin of sea mammals, Darwin writes, A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean. Due to the variability of bone structure in youth, newly-acquired behaviors can gradually result in structural modifications, such as flat-fish that pushed their eye sockets a little further up their skulls with each passing generation. The tendency to distortion would no doubt be increased through the principle of inheritance.

The key is that offspring inherit adaptations at the same age or younger than the age at which their parents originally made the adaptation. The alternative that such changes result only from random genetic mutations fails to explain the changes but merely surrenders the issue to chance. Rather than account for the fact that camels, which often have to kneel on sandy terrain, begin developing padded tissue on their knees while still in the womb, we simply say that it happened by chance, and this explanation repeats for every species on Earth in regard to any trait that might otherwise be attributed to the living adaptations of organisms in their struggle to survive.

Finding this prospect intolerable, Darwin insisted on the centrality of the inheritance of adaptations, emphasizing that the young play a central role in this process. For if each part [of the body] is liable to individual variations at all ages, and the variations tend to be inherited at a corresponding or earlier age, propositions which cannot be disputed, then the instincts and structure of the young could be slowly modified as surely as those of the adult; and both cases must stand or fall together with the whole theory of natural selection. The primary source of variations to be selected or rejected is the will of the organism to survive and reproduce.

But what if Darwin was wrong? He certainly stumbled with his fanciful theory of pangenesis, whereby each cell sloughs off tiny gemmules that reflect changes occurring in the body and transmit those changes to the reproductive organs. Pangenesis was intended to provide a mechanism enabling adaptations to be passed along to the next generation. According to Neal Gillespie, Darwins theory assured him that a capricious deity could be excluded from the process of heredity as well as from speciation. Unfortunately, another capricious deity, DNA, eventually took its place.

August Weismann was absolutely correct when he concluded that organisms cannot affect the determinants (genes) in their reproductive cells. If genes are the sole vehicle of hereditary information, as Weismann assumed, then acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and Darwinian evolution, with its typically English sentimentalism, must yield to a more precise, mechanistic form.

But Weismann was very clear that his theory was not based on evidence and could never be tested. Cutting off the tails of mice and finding that their offspring still had tails proved nothing, as Weismann himself readily admitted. Though he claimed his argument was ironclad, he offered nothing to support it beyond the fact that he simply couldnt imagine how hereditary information could be transferred by any means other than the passage of genes from parents to offspring. We accept it, not because we are able to demonstrate the process in detail but simply because we must, because it is the only possible explanation that we can conceive. As neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins likes to point out, the inability of creationists to imagine how the species of life could have emerged without Gods help does not make creationism a scientific theory. What he fails to realize is that his argument applies with equal force to his own favored view.

Darwinian evolution can be expressed as a form of local creationism. Rather than products of a universal creator, species are shaped by their pragmatic adjustments to local environments. Thus, by emphasizing that evolution boils down to the purely mechanical interaction of genes and environment, neo-Darwinism reverses Darwin's innovation and restores the creation of species to universal causes. Whether theological or mathematical, mechanistic determinism is universal creationism.

As Darwin observed on the Pacific islands, its no accident that frogs, which cant survive seawater, are found only on the islands where they evolved, whereas birds, which can fly from one island to the next, are found everywhere. When confronted with this fact, a creationist might say, It pleased the Creator to place those frogs on some islands and not others. Of course, this fails to explain the situation but merely restates the facts. Similarly, the neo-Darwinian reliance on genetic mutation as the source of heritable variations merely restates the fact that a transformation has taken place and that it has become biologically ingrained within the species.

Neo-Darwinsim shares many features with creationism. First, it is faith-based and untestable. It simply must be true. Second, it is universalist: the source of species is not local conditions and creative adaptations but transcendent principles that merely manifest locally. Third, like the exhortation that God did it, neo-Darwinism makes use of a generic, all-purpose explanation instead of tailoring its account to particular situations faced by particular organisms. Fourth, it is anthropomorphic. In place of a human-like God, a human-like language or code inscribed in DNA is responsible for shaping organisms. Fifth, it is mechanistic: we are machines assembled according to a blueprint or design. Whether this design is a soul crafted by God or a genome forged beneath the blind forces of mutation and natural selection, the body is a mechanism constructed from specifications of one sort or another. Finally, as with creationism, the power of speciation is appropriated from the species themselves and refashioned as an external, mechanical process.

The shift from Darwinism to neo-Darwinism is pure atavism, a reversion to the transcendent determinism previously found only in creationist dogma. The law-giver may have been airbrushed out, but the law remains. Trouble is, with its cosmic Mechanic, creationism is clearly the strong form of mechanism, while neo-Darwinism though obviously much closer to the truth must remain the weak form. In the struggle between intelligent design and blind design, is it any wonder that creationism has proved so resilient?

Since the 1972 publication of Jacques Monods Chance and Necessity, the mechanistic theory of life has been known as reductionism. But what, precisely, is life being reduced to? Though often mistaken for the monistic doctrine of materialism, reductionism is a dualistic theory that reduces life not to matter but to physics. We have, on the one hand, the passive material constituents of the organism; on the other, the laws of physics that provide order and necessity to the otherwise chance motions of atoms and molecules.

According to Stephen Rothman, a professor at UC San Francisco and an experimental biologist for 40 years, reductionistic bias has severely impaired the ability of researchers to accurately assess the operations of cells and bodies. Rothman offers the vesicle theory of protein transport as an example of the reductionistic approach at work. The vesicle theory is stupendously unwieldy and implausible, requiring 15 to 30 mechanisms to move proteins a few microns. None of the experiments cited in support of the theory can prove that these mechanisms actually exist but only what they would look like if they did. Proponents have never put their theory to the test, never saying, If the theory is true, then such and such should happen. Yet they remain implacably confident in themselves. Why? Because their supposition is the only way to account for the movement of protein on the view that cellular activities are completely lost without the guidance of physical and chemical principles.

Since preparation of cell samples for viewing in electron microscopes inevitably distorts the final image, some proteins appear where theyre supposed to be, while others are phantoms. The resulting confusion allowsreductionist researchers to interpret all experimental results in their favor. Thus, if a protein appears where the vesicle theory predicts, its assumed to be in the correct place, and if not, its simply written off as a contaminant. As to predicted proteins that dont show up at all, these are assumed to have been lost in the sample preparation process.

Much like the automobile a soothingly familiar mechanism in our daily lives a vesicle is supposed to open up to allow proteins to enter it, then shut tight during transport and re-open upon reaching its destination. In the 60s, when Rothman demonstrated that proteins can freely enter and exit a vesicle even when its shut, most of his colleagues assumed his finding was flawed due to errors in sample preparation. In the 80s, when the brand new x-ray microscope proved him right, Rothman figured the vesicle proponents would admit their mistake. Hes still waiting. It seems that no amount of evidence, no matter how compelling, can falsify the vesicle theory.

A self-proclaimed biological skeptic, Rothman is not the first to call into question the final authority of physics over biology. Ernst Mayr noted that the property of individuality, which is utterly foreign to atomic physics and chemistry, places biology beyond the grasp of physical analysis. Though the late Mayr helped bring neo-Darwinian theory to fruition in the 30s and 40s with the modern synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics, he was dismissive of efforts at physical reductionism. Attempts to reduce biological systems to the level of simple physico-chemical processes have failed because during the reduction the systems lost their specifically biological properties.

According to Niels Bohr the first of the quantum generation to investigate the potential for a physics of life a rigorous analysis of a cell would require knowing the initial values and positions of its constituent particles. Since measuring these particles disturbs them by breaking or dislocating bonds between them, its impossible to measure precisely the parts of a cell without altering it. Bohr compared this conundrum to his prior discovery that the momentum of an electron cannot be established once its position has been determined, and vice versa. Bohr called this complementarity, a principle he generalized to encompass all sufficiently complex systems, including cells and organisms. The more precisely we describe the parts, the cloudier the system as a whole becomes. Just as the quantum realm requires its own set of principles apart from classical physics, life, he concluded, is a primary phenomenon not subject to prior forms of analysis.

In 1944, the same year DNA was identified as the carrier of genes, Erwin Schrodinger published a short book called What Is Life? Taking a somewhat rosier view than his Danish colleague, Schrodinger proclaimed that the inability of current physics to account for life is no reason to doubt the eventual success of the project. The only catch is that a successful resolution will depend on other laws of physics hitherto unknown. We have no idea what these laws might be or how to find them. All we know for sure, said Schrodinger, is that the ordering of living matter is entirely different from the physical processes described by statistical mechanics. Despite imploring the reader not to accuse him of calling genes cogs of the organic machine, Schrodinger is commonly cited to this day as a physicist who lent support to reductionistic biology.

To date, the most sustained, in-depth examination of biology by a physicist was carried out by Walter Elsasser, another pioneer in quantum mechanics who later turned to geophysics and proposed against great opposition what eventually became the definitive theory of the earths electromagnetic field. Intrigued by the challenge of explaining organisms from a physical standpoint, Elsasser approached the issue in terms of precise point to point predictability of every step in a reaction chain that is both necessary and sufficient for a particular biological outcome. Yet this method, he discovered, has no applicability to organisms.

Quantum mechanics, the foundation of modern physics and the most thoroughly tested and successful theory of all time, is a statistical science, explaining the behavior of particles en masse rather than one quark at a time. What makes quantum mechanics a viable undertaking is that every particle of a given class is identical to every other particle of that class. As long as every proton is identical to every other proton, and every electron is identical to every other electron, etc., the averages obtained for a given class apply equally to every member within it.

By contrast, life is characterized by individuality, or radical heterogeneity, in Elsassers phrase. Macromolecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organisms are never identical to other members of their class (not even in the case of identical twins). We are individualized right down to the chemistry of our blood and saliva. As a result, when it comes to living matter, averages dont apply equally to all members of a given class. Individuality short-circuits the statistical methods of quantum physics, rendering inoperative the differential equations that determine ordinary physical processes. Physics is simply not equipped to bridge the gap between the homogeneous safety of atoms and the heterogeneous stew of organisms.

As we learn from Ludwig von Boltzmann and the science of thermodynamics, physics can predict the motions of a cloud of gas taken as a whole but not the particles comprising it. So too, the interior of a cell consists primarily of free particles not subject to deterministic equations. The orderly processes that take place within cells are set against a backdrop of atomic and molecular randomness. With a trillion atoms per cell, many of them multi-bonding carbon, the number of possible molecular states compatible with the shapes and functions of a cell is far too great to yield to the yoke of mathematical physics. Though the patterned regularities of cells can be described in great detail, the ultimate origins of these processes are buried in unfathomable complexity. Elsasser declared biology a non-reductionistic science, fundamentally and qualitatively different from physical science.

Even if life really is reducible to physical principles, biological reductionism can be neither verified nor falsified and is thus not a theory in the scientific sense. Perhaps life emerged when God exhaled onto a lump of clay, but this too can never be proven or disproven.

Rather than accept that physicalist biology has no scientific meaning, reductionists settled on a jerry-rigged substitute theory based around genes. That life is a product of physics is taken on faith while the multi-level ordering of the organism is attributed to DNA, which is charged with the dual task of storing morphological information and coordinating (via RNA and protein) development from egg to adult. In place of true physical reductionism, we have a stop-gap genetic reductionism. Yet even the watered down physics of life is untenable.

By utilizing the mathematics of combinatorics, UC Berkeley biologist Harry Rubin has demonstrated that the precise combination of genes required for the mold Aspergillus to produce penicillin is transcalculational, or beyond the computational capacity of any conceivable computer in a finite amount of time. With 1000 genes influencing penicillin production and each gene having, at the very least, alternate wild and mutant states the minimum number of possible gene combinations is 2 to the 1000th power, or 10 to the 300th power. The magnitude of this number can be appreciated when we consider there are only 10 to the 80th particles in the universe. Yet the production of penicillin is a model of simplicity compared to the generation of the eye in the fruit fly Drosophila, which involves 10,000 genes. With two copies of each gene and multiple types of mutation for each, the number of possible combinations grows beyond our imaginative capacity. If organic structures really are built mechanically from genetic instructions, then genes must possess a magical power of computation.

The Boltzmann theorem, which limits deterministic equations to statistical aggregates of molecular events, poses an insurmountable problem for genetic reductionism. Whether in a gas cloud or a living cell, a free molecules behavior is always unique and nonrecurrent. Between the genes in the nucleus and the tissues and organs they allegedly determine lies an ocean of chaos called the cytoplasm. Deterministic processes, such as enzyme-driven reactions, are like rafts tossed about on giant waves in the vast cytoplasmic outback, every causal chain bound by a terminal point beyond which nothing can be predicted. Even if genes could miraculously express their inner blueprint, this information would quickly be swamped by the molecular pandemonium. In contrast to computers, which are designed so as to maintain an acceptable signal to noise ratio, organisms have no means of insulating against noise, particularly inside cells.

Oddly enough, instead of compounding the underlying error of physical reductionism, the error of genetic reductionism seems to cancel it out. Under the spell of DNA and its four nucleotide letters, we cant see that the ground has dropped out from beneath our feet, leaving neither reduction of organism to genome nor reduction of cell to physics. The endless stream of wordlets formed from the combinations of a, c, g, and t c is a kind of incantation that keeps the mind frozen in reverential awe at the keepers of the keys and their magic code. The Human Genome Project, intended to explain the mystery of life, merely completed the catechism.

This is not to deny the numerous effects that genes have on organisms. But the fact that genes distinguish one individual from another means only that they influence development not that they necessarily program and determine it every step of the way. That the gene-protein complex is necessary for the formation of organs and tissues doesnt mean its sufficient. As embryologist Paul Weiss observed, its a long way from determining eye color to actually building a pair of eyes. If genes determine multicellular structures, then why, asked Weiss, does embryogenesis begin indeterminately, differing from case to case, as if each embryo must improvise as it goes along? And why does organic form emerge top-down? Only when the body as a whole begins taking shape do the outlines of its organs emerge, and only then do cells begin conforming to characteristic types exactly the opposite of what we would expect from a process driven from within the dark recesses of our cells. As to DNA replication and other mechanical operations within organisms, Weiss contended that rather than controlling the living system, organic mechanisms are tools utilized by the system in its quest to maintain large-scale order in the face of small-scale disorder.

This is what Darwin was getting at with his coordinating power. The organism operates holistically, much like a magnetic field. It also adapts holistically. As Rothman points out, adaptive qualities belong to organisms, not genes. Its the organism as a whole that struggles to survive in the jungle or savanna, not genes tucked away in their cozy nuclear compartments. The question is not whether creatures pass on their living adaptations but how.

Toward the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin takes Leibniz to task for alleging that Newton introduced occult qualities and miracles into philosophy with his theory of gravity. As with Faradays undulatory theory of light, which Darwin cites as a fine example of scientific detective-work, Newtons theory of gravity suggests that matter possesses unexpected properties that do not conform to our standard notion of matter, i.e., contact mechanics. Weve known since Einstein that electromagnetism and gravity both allow matter to act at a distance without material mediation. Elsasser suggests that an unforeseen property of matter enables organisms to receive hereditary information from their ancestors at a distance over time. He calls this holistic memory, as opposed to the artificial, information-storage memory in computers.

The physics to which biology reduces itself is not the modern discipline of Einstein and quantum mechanics but the discredited variety that saw contact mechanics as the fundamental reality. Biologists today resemble theorists of the 19th century who still believed in a luminiferous ther that mediated the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. As physicist James Croll averred in 1867, No principle will ever be generally received that stands in opposition to the old adage, A thing cannot act where it is not, any more than it would were it to stand in opposition to that other adage, A thing can not act before it is or when it is not. Having recognized that matter does indeed act where it is not, Elsasser began to wonder if it could also act when it is not.

Apart from allowing the transmission of acquired characteristics, holistic memory disposes of the need for a blueprint. Instead of following a pre-planned design, the embryo merely mimicks the developmental steps of its predecessors. If all they must do is combine as they always have in a given situation, genes have no need for magical powers of computation. But this does not mean the behavior of organisms is reducible to a new kind of physical determinism based on holistic memory in place of contact mechanics. Between the randomness of molecular events and the necessity of physical law lies a probabilistic gray area in which an organism may choose to follow its memory or if environmental conditions have changed sufficiently to select a new course of action. By contrast, if every creature is deterministically bound to its species memory, all the genetic mutations in the world cannot give rise to evolution. Elsassers organismic selection is the logical counterpart to Darwins natural selection.

Which option should cause us greater skepticism that a human being is a robot constructed through blind forces of nature and operated by remote-control from the nuclei of its cells or that once again matter turns out to be more versatile than wed previously imagined? Which is more plausible that the memory of how to grow from an egg to an inconceivably complex living system is somehow encoded in our genes or that nature has its own form of memory?

Darwins theory of evolution is true to life precisely because it shifts the focus from the timeless abstractions of physics to the irreducible powers of creativity and destruction that play out day by day in the natural world. As he wrote in the famous final passage of Origin, There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers such as growth, reproduction, variability, the will to live, and natural selection. Though he (tentatively) believed in a Creator who set it all in motion according to fixed, universal laws, in order to comprehend the ever-changing face of life, Darwin turned to Mother Nature. Instead of attaching biology to physics and thereby subsuming it to the Fathers mathematical idealism, he brought biology to life by animating it with a materialistic theory all its own.

As he observed in a letter to his friend, geologist Charles Lyell, it is absolutely necessary to go the whole vast length, or stick to the creation of each separate species. Its about time the Darwinian revolution was completed. Contrary to Weismann, not only can we conceive of alternatives to reductionism, but we have no choice, as the ghost of mechanism past will continue to haunt us until we reject mechanistic biology in all its forms.

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The Mother of Invention (March 9, 2005) - Anderson Valley

Researchers Develop a Machine Capable of Solving Complex Problems in Theoretical Physics – SciTechDaily

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Over the last few decades, machine learning has revolutionized many sectors of society, with machines learning to drive cars, identify tumors and play chess often surpassing their human counterparts.

Now, a team of scientists based at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), the University of Munich and the CNRS at the University of Bordeaux have shown that machines can also beat theoretical physicists at their own game, solving complex problems just as accurately as scientists, but considerably faster.

In the study, published in Physical Review B, a machine learned to identify unusual magnetic phases in a model of pyrochlore a naturally-occurring mineral with a tetrahedral lattice structure. Remarkably, when using the machine, solving the problem took only a few weeks, whereas previously the OIST scientists needed six years.

The pyrochlore crystal structure contains magnetic atoms, which are arranged to form a lattice of tetrahedral shapes, joined at each corner. Credit: Theory of Quantum Matter Unit, OIST

This feels like a really significant step, said Professor Nic Shannon, who leads the Theory of Quantum Matter (TQM) Unit at OIST. Computers are now able to carry out science in a very meaningful way and tackle problems that have long frustrated scientists.

The Source of Frustration

In all magnets, every atom is associated with a tiny magnetic moment also known as spin. In conventional magnets, like the ones that stick to fridges, all the spins are ordered so that they point in the same direction, resulting in a strong magnetic field. This order is like the way atoms order in a solid material.

But just as matter can exist in different phases solid, liquid and gas so too can magnetic substances. The TQM unit is interested in more unusual magnetic phases called spin liquids, which could have uses in quantum computation. In spin liquids, there are competing, or frustrated interactions between the spins, so instead of ordering, the spins continuously fluctuate in direction similar to the disorder seen in liquid phases of matter.

Previously, the TQM unit set out to establish which different types of spin liquid could exist in frustrated pyrochlore magnets. They constructed a phase diagram, which showed how different phases could occur when the spins interacted in different ways as the temperature changed, with their findings published in Physical Review X in 2017.

The phase diagram produced by the Theory of Quantum Mater unit at OIST, showing all the different magnetic phases that exist in the simplest model on a pyrochlore lattice. Phase III, VI and V are spin liquids. Credit: Image reproduced with permission of the American Physical Society from Phys. Rev. X, 2017, 7, 041057

But piecing together the phase diagram and identifying the rules governing the interactions between spins in each phase was an arduous process.

These magnets are quite literally frustrating, joked Prof. Shannon. Even the simplest model on a pyrochlore lattice took our team years to solve.

Enter the machines

With increasing advances in machine learning, the TQM unit were curious as to whether machines could solve such a complex problem.

To be honest, I was fairly sure that the machine would fail, said Prof. Shannon. This is the first time Ive been shocked by a result Ive been surprised, Ive been happy, but never shocked.

The OIST scientists teamed up with machine learning experts from the University of Munich, led by Professor Lode Pollet, who had developed a tensorial kernel a way of representing spin configurations in a computer. The scientists used the tensorial kernel to equip a support vector machine, which is able to categorize complex data into different groups.

The advantage of this type of machine is that unlike other support vector machines, it doesnt require any prior training and it isnt a black box the results can be interpreted. The data are not only classified into groups; you can also interrogate the machine to see how it made its final decision and learn about the distinct properties of each group, said Dr Ludovic Jaubert, a CNRS researcher at the University of Bordeaux.

The phase diagram reproduced by the machine. For comparison, the phase boundaries previously determined by the scientists without the machine have been drawn over the top. Credit: Image reproduced with permission of the American Physical Society from Phys. Rev. B, 2019, 100, 174408

The Munich scientists fed the machine a quarter of a million spin configurations generated by the OIST supercomputer simulations of the pyrochlore model. Without any information about which phases were present, the machine successfully managed to reproduce an identical version of the phase diagram.

Importantly, when the scientists deciphered the decision function which the machine had constructed to classify different types of spin liquid, they found that the computer had also independently figured out the exact mathematical equations that exemplified each phase with the whole process taking a matter of weeks.

Most of this time was human time, so further speed ups are still possible, said Prof. Pollet. Based on what we now know, the machine could solve the problem in a day.

We are thrilled by the success of the machine, which could have huge implications for theoretical physics, added Prof. Shannon. The next step will be to give the machine an even more difficult problem, that humans havent managed to solve yet, and see whether the machine can do better.

References:

Identification of emergent constraints and hidden order in frustrated magnets using tensorial kernel methods of machine learning by Jonas Greitemann, Ke Liu ( ), Ludovic D. C. Jaubert, Han Yan (), Nic Shannon and Lode Pollet, 5 November 2019, Physical Review B.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.100.174408

Competing Spin Liquids and Hidden Spin-Nematic Order in Spin Ice with Frustrated Transverse Exchange by Mathieu Taillefumier, Owen Benton, Han Yan, L.D.C. Jaubert and Nic Shannon, 6 December 2017, Physical Review B.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.7.041057

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Researchers Develop a Machine Capable of Solving Complex Problems in Theoretical Physics - SciTechDaily

Does The Quantum Realm Really Exist? – World Atlas

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In physics, the quantum realm represents the realm where the scale of quantum mechanics becomes crucial if we study it as an isolated system. It seems complicated, right? And it is, quantum physics can be extremely complicated. It is also hard to explain in more simple terms, but we can try to answer this question in a way that is as simple as possible.

The term quantum realm gained enormous popularity among people that are generally not interested in physics once it appeared in movies from the popular Marvelcomic bookfranchise. Everyone started talking about the quantum realm and wondering if it was real. And the answer is not simple.

The answer to the question of whether the quantum realm exists can be both yes and no. It depends on what we consider the quantum realm to be. A realm that exists separate from our reality, that we would call the quantum realm does not exist. At least not according to everythingphysicshas learned about the universe so far.

However, our reality is based on quantum mechanics, which is a unique set of rules that are applied on a microscopic level. When physicists say quantum realm, they are talking about the situations where these rules are more apparent.

Quantum physics is often considered the branch of physics that deals with the understanding of our universe at themicroscopic level. However, this is also a misunderstanding of sorts. Quantum physics can be most accurately described as the foundation of all physics. It is a theory of knowledge itself; it allows physicists to ask questions that reach far beyond what they were able to ask before.

It allows us to see the true form of our reality and leads to some exciting advances in science. It can also give us insight into things we did not think were possible before, like quantum entanglement or particles being in two places at the same time.

Studying quantum physics allows us to understand how particles behave. We can learn about the way quantum particles communicate with each other over vast distances. Things like this happen at a microscopic level and fall into the quantum realm. However, even if they mostly occur on that microscopic, nanometer scale, they can also operate on a broader level.

The examples of quantum physics on a regular-sized scale are the double-slit experiment and electron tunneling. One other very well known example is theSchrdinger's cat thought experiment, which is a paradox that operates under the rules of the quantum realm.

So while yes, the quantum realm does exist, it probably is not what you imagined it to be. It is not some magical space that exists separate from our reality and where magical things can happen. It exists here, in our world, and it is a complex subject whose new mysteries are continually being discovered by physicists.

It deals with events that happen on an extremelysmall scalebut can help us better understand the secrets of our entire universe. It is a fascinating subject that may be hard to understand, but is incredibly significant and may hold the key for a large number of future discoveries.

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Does The Quantum Realm Really Exist? - World Atlas

Parallel University: The Big Ten Tournament – The Only Colors

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In the world of quantum physics, there is a theory that all possible outcomes of any measurement or event actually takes place in at least one universe. Every time a coin is flipped, in one universe it comes up heads, and it another newly created universe, it comes up tails. As a result, if this interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, an infinite number of universes exist where all possible outcomes actually take place.

In our particular universe, life kinda sucks right now. A deadly pandemic virus is sweeping the globe, and as a result, one of our most beloved sports traditions, the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament, has been cancelled. For me, this feel like Christmas got cancelled, and we were forced to take all of our presents into the front yard and set them on fire.

But, what if there is a universe out there where there is no COVID-19 virus? What if there is a universe where we are on the eve of Selection Sunday? Wouldnt it be fun just to take a peak into that universe to see how things are going? Well, maybe we can.

Throughout this season, I have given a running tally of the number of expected wins and the odds to win the Big Ten regular season title. I accomplished this, in part, by taking Kenpom adjusted efficiencies, converting them into point spread for each game, converting those spreads into win probabilities, and then using those probabilities to run a 120,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the remaining Big Ten season. I used a similar methodology just the other day to project the results of the now cancelled Big Ten Tournament.

If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then each of those simulations represents what actually happened in some parallel universe out there. So, why not use the same method to see what one possible, but mathematically consistent, Big Ten Tournament would have looked like? Well, as it turns out, I did just that, and I am happy to share the results with you now.

No. 9-Michigan defeats No. 8-Rutgers: 76-61

No. 12-Minnesota defeats No. 5-Iowa: 74-64

No. 7-Ohio State defeats No. 10-Purdue: 70-61

No. 11-Indiana defeats No. 6-Penn State: 76-64

Michigan was favored over Rutgers, so that result is not a surprise, but Iowa and Penn State stumbled out of the blocks. This all but certainly guarantees Indiana a parallel universe bid to the Big Dance, but will it hurt Penn State and Iowas seed? Also, Ohio State survived a late charge from Purdue and now faces MSU for the second time in under a week.

No. 9-Michigan defeats No. 1-Wisconsin: 70-64

No. 4-Illinois defeats No. 12-Minnesota: 77-57

No. 2-Michigan State defeats No. 7-Ohio State: 70-66

No. 3-Maryland defeats No. 11-Indiana: 77-59

Vegas had Michigan and Wisconsin as a pickem, and the Badgers were due for a tough game. At the end of the day, their luck ran out. The same can be said for Minnesota and Indiana, who ran out of gas and get boat-raced. Ohio State showed more fight against MSU in the rematch, but in the end, Cash and Tillman were just too much. MSU survives and advances to the semis to face Maryland, who cruised against the Hoosiers.

No. 9-Michigan defeats No. 4- Illinois: 77-59

No. 2-Michigan State defeats No. 3-Maryland: 73-64

While Michigan was the lower seed, they were a two-point favorite over the Illini and managed to crush Illinois due to hot shooting from the outside. Meanwhile, MSU led the Terrapins wire-to-wire, and were buoyed by a 15-point outing from Gabe Brown.

This sets up a rematch of the 2019 & 2014 Final, both of which were won by the Spartans. Can MSU make it three in a row? (I have a very good feeling about it.) Either way, we will have to wait until just before the brackets are announced on Sunday evening in the parallel universe to find out.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the parallel universe, other conference tournament were going on as well. The parallel universe selection committee was watching these games very closely. I will now give a quick summary of how those came out:

(Note: I did not actually simulate the results of this final batch of tournaments. For seeding purposes, I will lean heavily on the aggregated results from the bracket matrix project. Even I have limits...)

In the parallel universe, Selection Sunday is still on schedule. Stay tuned on Sunday night to see where MSU winds up, and how mad at the committee we should or should not be.

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Parallel University: The Big Ten Tournament - The Only Colors

Birmingham scientist recognised with international physics prize – University of Birmingham

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A University of Birmingham physicist has been awarded a prestigious prize for his contributions to gravitational wave research.

Dr Davide Gerosa, an early career researcher in the Universitys School of Physics and Astronomy, was recognised by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation in their 2020 awards.

He receives the Societys flagship Young Scientist Prize, awarded only to researchers with fewer than 8 years experience working in their field. Nominees for the prize are expected to have displayed significant achievement and exceptional promise for future achievements in relativity and gravitation.

Dr Gerosa was commended for his outstanding contributions to gravitational-wave astrophysics, including new tests of general relativity.

A member of the University of Birminghams Gravitational Waves Institute, Dr Gerosa studies the impact of Einsteins general relativity on the astrophysical world. His particular research interests include astrophysical inference with gravitational-wave sources, black-hole binary spin dynamics, black-hole recoils, accretion disks and tests of general relativity.

This is a truly exciting time for gravitational-wave astronomy, a golden age of discoveries, says Dr Gerosa. Its a huge privilege to be working in this field. I would like to thank all my supervisors and mentors for their invaluable support in these past years - this is their prize as well."

The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the worlds top 100 institutions. Its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers, teachers and more than 6,500 international students from over 150 countries.

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Birmingham scientist recognised with international physics prize - University of Birmingham

‘Minor planet’ bonanza: 139 new objects discovered beyond Neptune – Space.com

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The list of Pluto's neighbors just got considerably longer, potentially boosting scientists' odds of finding the putative Planet Nine.

Astronomers have discovered 139 more "minor planets" small bodies circling the sun that are neither official planets nor comets in the dark, frigid depths beyond Neptune's orbit, a new study reports. The new additions represent nearly 5% of the current trans-Neptunian object (TNO) tally, which stands at about 3,000, the researchers said.

The scientists pored over data gathered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) during its first four years of operation, from 2013 to 2017. The DES studies the heavens using the 520-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, which is mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Related: Trans-Neptunian objects in the outer solar system (infographic)

As the project's name implies, the main goal of the DES involves shedding light on dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be behind the universe's accelerating expansion. But the high-resolution DES imagery has a number of other applications, including the discovery of small objects in our own solar system, as the new study shows.

The researchers started out with 7 billion DES-detected dots, which they whittled down to 22 million "transients" after ruling out objects such as galaxies that appeared in roughly the same spot on multiple nights. Those 22 million were further culled to 400 TNO candidates, whose movements the team was able to track over at least six different nights.

After months of vetting by analysis and observation, the team verified 316 of the small bodies as bona fide TNOs. These cataloged objects lie between 30 and 90 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, and 139 of them are new to science, the researchers said. (1 AU is the Earth-sun distance, which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)

The techniques the researchers developed could aid future TNO searches, including those potentially conducted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to come online in the early 2020s, study team members said.

"Many of the programs we've developed can be easily applied to any other large datasets, such as what the Rubin Observatory will produce," lead author Pedro Bernardinelli, a physics and astronomy graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

The team members are also now running their analyses on the DES' entire six-year data set, an effort that could yield an additional 500 or so newfound TNOs. (The DES' initial run wrapped up in 2019.) Such new additions could end up being bread crumbs that lead to Planet Nine, the hypothesized world that some scientists think lurks undiscovered in the far outer solar system, hundreds of AU from the sun.

Planet Nine's existence, after all, is inferred from weird clustering in the orbits of certain TNOs.

"There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren't there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet," study co-author Gary Bernstein, an astronomy and astrophysics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said in the same statement.

"Making the catalog is the fun discovery part," Bernstein added. "Then, when you create this resource, you can compare what you did find to what somebody's theory said you should find."

The new study was published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. You can read a preprint of it for free at arXiv.org.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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'Minor planet' bonanza: 139 new objects discovered beyond Neptune - Space.com

The universe may have been filled with supermassive black holes at the dawn of time – Livescience.com

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Nine hundred million years after the Big Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine known as a blazar that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later.

Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are galaxies with cores that look extra-bright to radio telescopes, which is considered evidence that they contain supermassive black holes. Blazars are a unique type of RL AGN that spit out two narrow jets of "relativistic" (near-light-speed) matter in opposite directions. Those jets emit narrow beams of light at many different wavelengths and have to be pointed right at Earth for us to detect them across such vast distances. This new blazar discovery moves the date of the oldest confirmed supermassive black hole to within the first billion years of the universe's history and suggests there were other, similar black holes in that era that we haven't detected.

"Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets," Silvia Belladitta, a doctoral student at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan and co-author of a new paper on the blazar, said in a statement.

Related: Twisted physics: 7 mind-blowing findings

The discovery by Belladitta and her co-authors confirms that blazars existed during an epoch of our universe's history known as "reionization" a period after a long, post-Big Bang dark age when the first stars and galaxies began to form.

And discovering one blazar strongly suggests there were many others, the authors wrote. If only one blazar existed in this early phase of the universe, it would be an extraordinarily lucky break for it to have pointed its narrow, visible beam at Earth. It's much more likely that there were many such blazars pointing in all sorts of directions, and that one of them happened to throw its light our way.

These blazars, the authors wrote, were the seeds of the supermassive black holes that dominate the cores of large galaxies across our universe today including Sagittarius A*, the relatively quiet supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way.

"Observing a blazar is extremely important. For every discovered source of this type, we know that there must be 100 similar, but most are oriented differently, and are therefore too weak to be seen directly," Belladitta said.

That information helps astrophysicists reconstruct the story of how and when these monster black holes formed.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Here’s how a massive new telescope will revolutionize our view of the sun – Space.com

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It's an image of the sun like nothing anyone has ever seen: glowing, golden kernels divided by dark latticework, like a stained-glass window forged by astrophysics.

But that image, the "first light" data taken by a massive new solar telescope, is only a preview of how the observatory will change the way we see the star that shapes every day of our lives. That "caramel corn" image was stunning to many people, even solar scientists.

The new image was "crystal clear, sharp," said Valentin Martnez Pillet, director of the National Solar Observatory. That institution operates the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and which captured the new data. Martnez Pillet said that, in decades of viewing solar images, he's never seen anything like the new one. "That's as good as it gets," he told Space.com.

Related: Our sun will never look the same again thanks to two solar probes and one giant telescope

"It was always the case where you would look at the solar image and you knew, yeah, we need to do better," Martnez Pillet said. Not anymore.

But although he was awed just like everyone else, he saw the image a little differently than others may have. Many people fixated on the large, pale "kernels," each about the size of Texas. But for Martnez Pillet, the most compelling features in the first-light image were the crackles of granulated brightness nestled between the kernels.

Scientists have never been able to see those granules clearly before, yet they believe the bright dots are key to understanding solar phenomena and how we experience those events way out here in Earth's neighborhood. "As scientists, our eyes went to the brightest tiny, little features," Martnez Pillet said. "The reason for that is we know these are the roots of the solar magnetic field."

The sun's magnetic field dictates precisely how the plasma, or soup of charged particles that make up our star, roils in the sun and blasts out across the solar system. The blasts take different forms, from the slow, steady flow called the solar wind to the massive outbursts called coronal mass ejections. But around Earth, the plasma can cause a host of phenomena called space weather, which can harm astronauts, damage communications and navigation satellites, and cause other disruptions. Scientists want to make better predictions of these events, and to do so, they need to understand how the sun and its magnetic field really work.

Of course, the crackly "first light" image is only one step toward reaching that goal. And the instrument that produced the image is just one of three instruments the solar telescope will use once the facility, located on the Hawaiian island of Maui, is fully operational.

The other two instruments, which should be installed by this summer, will tell scientists much more about the dynamics of the magnetic field than any image could, thanks to two other key techniques. "Everything we do in astronomy is either imaging, spectroscopy or polarimetry," Martnez Pillet said. "We solar astronomers need to do all of them."

Spectroscopy is a standard astronomical technique that analyzes the specific wavelengths of light that a source emits a technique that can reveal the locations of different elements. Spectroscopy can also tell scientists where plasma is moving higher or lower in the sun by using Doppler shifts, the phenomenon that tweaks all light depending on whether its source is moving toward or away from the instrument.

Polarimetry is a less common astronomical technique, because for polarimetry to be successful, scientists need to be able to capture a lot of photons, or light, which is tricky for more distant stars. But the sun is, of course, much closer than any other star, and the Inouye Solar Telescope's polarimeter will be the largest such instrument ever built, making polarimetry a powerful approach for studying the sun's magnetic field, Martnez Pillet said.

In general, Earth's magnetic field is reasonably steady over time and space. North is north is north. The sun's magnetic field, by contrast, is dynamic. "The sun has billions of compasses and magnets moving around, and we need to know the directions of these compasses," Martnez Pillet said. That's what the tiny, bright spots in the new image represent: individual, dynamic magnetic fields.

And although most sunlight doesn't have any sense of direction, the light from these spots does because the magnetic field gives that light direction. Polarimetry measures that direction, and those measurements can give scientists a better understanding of activity in the magnetic field.

With that knowledge, scientists hope to begin tracing space weather phenomena back to their very beginnings on the sun. "We are magnetically connected to the sun," Martnez Pillet said. "There are so many physical processes that we don't know what their origins really are on the sun."

Scientists hope the new solar telescope will give them enough detailed data to begin evaluating the potential origins of different phenomena. "We have theories," Martnez Pillet said. "We need to start saying, 'OK, these are the good theories; these are the ones that are not working.'"

The Inouye Solar Telescope won't be alone in that effort. In particular, it has two crucial partners that are taking instruments directly to the sun: NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter, which NASA and the European Space Agency jointly operate. The Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to the surface of the sun than any spacecraft has before, and the Solar Orbiter, which launched last month, will give scientists their first look at the sun's poles.

The Inouye Solar Telescope has company here on Earth as well, Martnez Pillet said. In particular, he pointed to the National Solar Observatory's network of six smaller solar telescopes stationed around the world. Those telescopes, working two at a time as Earth's spin carries each in view of our star, offer a constant look at the whole Earth-facing side of the sun.

With these four projects, scientists hope to understand space weather well enough to predict it reliably. "We're going to need a decade; it's going to be a long process," Martnez Pillet said. "It's exciting times to be a solar astronomer."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Here's how a massive new telescope will revolutionize our view of the sun - Space.com

This astrophysicist could become the first non-binary person to lead a major political party in Canada – PinkNews

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Amita Kuttner could be the first non-binary person to lead a major political party in Canada. (Amita Kuttner)

A non-binary astrophysicist named Amita Kuttner has announced theyre running to be the next leader of Canadas Green Party.

Kuttner, whos from North Vancouver, is the latest candidate to jump into the race to replace the partys longtime leader, Elizabeth May.

Speaking to Burnaby Now, the 29-year-old, who has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, said that they are running to be Green Party leader because a large number of people encouraged them to do so.

I fully believe you cannot achieve full equity before you break down the (gender) binary, because along with it goes so many ideas of what gender means, and I think if we just get to a point where people are just people, that is useful, they said.

Kuttner outlined three pillars that their campaign will be based on.

I think the first step is to create safe and inclusive spaces, and politics is tough for that. All the parties have got problems in terms of that, they said, adding the solution goes beyond diversifying the partys candidate list.

You cant just add people and have quotas and then get where you need to go. The work that Ive done on diversity, Ive learned that it really is about the space you create.

The second pillar would be genuinely evidence-based policy, which Kuttner may have an upper edge in with a background as an astrophysicist.

The third (pillar) is making sure that were ready for the future, everything that that brings, in terms of crises and breakthroughs, whether it be technology or a catastrophe, they said, adding they would be applying their scientific lens to developing policies.

We need to make sure that all our policy is driven by really clear values and principles, they said.

Kuttner, who ran as the Green Party for Burnaby North-Seymour in 2019, is one of few non-white candidates in the race to replace May.

It was interesting being in a party that was very white, Kuttner said when they announced their leadership bid, emphasising that the party must do more than increase diversity among its candidates.

Much like with my gender, I get annoyed with labels because I feel like it alienates people. If you say youre a socialist or if you say youre capitalist, people attach assumptions with those words. So I do have an issue with that, they added.

Kuttner also says they want to bring a more evidence-based approach to policy into the Green Party.

We need to make sure we dont have any room for criticism when it comes to credibility on evidence, Kuttner said.

Our official platform has always been science-based. But if we read the policy book, theres stuff that needs ironing out.

If they win the Green Party leadership, Amita Kuttner said they are prepared to move anywhere in Canada in order to get a seat in parliament.

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This astrophysicist could become the first non-binary person to lead a major political party in Canada - PinkNews

Data Science, AI, and Space Are All Connected for New AAS Fellow Kirk Borne – CSRwire.com

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Kirk Borne a top speaker anddigital influencerin the areas of Big Data, Data Science, and AIworks in data science and AI at Booz Allen, where he serves as an Executive Advisor, the firms first and only Principal Data Scientist, and in 2019 was named the firms first and only Data Science Fellow. His work is rooted in another aspect of his professional identity: astrophysicist.

Before Borne joined the firm in 2015, he supported NASA projects including the Hubble Space Telescope and NSF projects including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (recently renamed the Vera Rubin Observatory), applying his expertise in large scientific databases and information systems, scientific data mining and management, and informatics to our understanding of space. He also taught the next generation as a professor of astrophysics and computational science at George Mason University.

The American Astronomical Society (AAS)recognizedBorne for his achievements in astrophysics with a new accolade, AAS Fellow. AAS Fellows are recognized for original research and publication, innovative contributions to astronomical techniques or instrumentation, significant contributions to education and public outreach, and noteworthy service to astronomy and society. In addition to this new honor, in 2016, Borne was electedFellow of the International Astrostatistics Associationfor his contributions to the advancement of astroinformatics throughout the world.

A passion for data and discovery

Bornes work in machine learning and data mining started with astronomy and space science data, then branched out into researching and applying those techniques and algorithms to many other data types and domains: earth science and climate data, digital marketing, healthcare, finance, smart energy, transportation, and more.

I have always loved scientific discovery, and this world [of data analytics and data science] allows me to do discovery bigger and better all the time, Borne wrote inHumans of Analytics, an online publication celebrating analytics professionals. I enjoy the challenge of modeling a system in a way that explains the data and that enables prediction and deeper understanding from the data.

Exploration and education in intersecting worlds

Today at Booz Allen, Bornes worlds of astronomy and data science are overlapping more and more. Increasingly, Booz Allen has been working at the intersection of space, data science, and AI, with projects including:

Data science and visualization to optimize trajectories that return spacecraft safely to earth

Adigital modelfor NASAs planetary exploration systems that captures every element from requirements to the physical structure and shows how changes to one affects the other

Algorithms, AI and machine learning models to increase domain awareness in space

Learn more aboutdata scienceandAIat Booz Allen. And, follow Kirk Borne on Twitter@kirkdborne.

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Data Science, AI, and Space Are All Connected for New AAS Fellow Kirk Borne - CSRwire.com