Monthly Archives: March 2020

The University of Chicago, working with scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, has developed a new fiber-optic quantum loop to expand quantum communication experiments. The 52-mile-long loop, consisting of two 26-mile cables that link Argonne to the Illinois Tollway near suburban Bolingbrook, is one of the longest ground-based channels for quantum communication in the country.

This loop network gives researchers a platform for replicable testing of using quantum entanglement to send unhackable information over long distances, according to UChicago News. Researchers with both Argonne and UChicago plan to utilize this loop to examine and harness the properties of quantum entanglement. This phenomenon links two (or more) particles so that they are in a shared state such that whatever happens to one immediately affects the other, no matter how far apart they have traveled.

David Awschalom, principal investigator and professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago, believes that the establishment of the loop will help both the city of Chicago and the nation to build a similar network to securely transmit information and data over long distances.

The loop will enable us to identify and address challenges in operating a quantum network and can be scaled to test and demonstrate communication across even greater distances to help lay the foundation for a quantum internet, he said.

According to Argonne National Laboratory, researchers performed a series of experiments aimed to transmit signals using photon emission from ensembles of ions in the loop. These ions can serve as a form of memory for the loop. By creating this functional quantum memory, researchers can optimize quantum communication to form a quantum internet, a highly secure network of quantum computers and other quantum devices.

The research performed by the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory will lead to optimization of data collection and the internet, according to Paul Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory.

Along with the UChicago quantum loop, Argonne National Laboratory is working with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to plan and develop a similar two-way quantum link network. When the two projects are connected, it will form one of the longest networks that can be used to send secure information using quantum physics, according to Argonne National Laboratory.

Both Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are members of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a community hub of researchers aimed at advancing academic and industrial efforts to understand quantum information. Funding for the quantum loop was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Partnership between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory Leads to New Methods of Quantum Communication - The Chicago Maroon

In the heart of a galaxy cluster 200 million light-years away, astronomers have failed to detect hypothetical particles called axions.

This places new constraints on how we believe these particles work - but it also has pretty major implications for string theory, and the development of a Theory of Everything that describes how the physical Universe works.

"Until recently I had no idea just how much X-ray astronomers bring to the table when it comes to string theory, but we could play a major role," said astrophysicist Christopher Reynolds of the University of Cambridge in the UK.

When it comes to understanding how the Universe works, we've developed some pretty good frameworks. One is general relativity, describing how physics works on a macro level. Another is quantum mechanics, which describes how things behave on the atomic and subatomic level.

The big problem is that the two frameworks famously don't get along. General relativity cannot be scaled down to the quantum level, and quantum mechanics cannot be scaled up. There have been many attempts to get them to play nice, developing what is called a Theory of Everything.

One of the most promising candidates for resolving the differences between general relativity and quantum mechanics is something called string theory, which involves replacing the point-like particles in particle physics with tiny, vibrating one-dimensional strings.

Furthermore, many models of string theory predict the existence of axions - theultra-low-mass particles first hypothesised in the 1970s to resolve a question of why strong atomic forces follow something called charge-parity symmetry, when most models say they don't need to. As it turned out, string theory also predicts large numbers of particles that behave like axions, called axion-like particles.

One of the properties of axion-like particles is that they can convert into a photon when they pass through a magnetic field; and, conversely, photons can convert into axion-like particles when they pass through a magnetic field. The probability of this depends on a range of factors, including the strength of the magnetic field, the distance travelled, and the mass of the particle.

This is where Reynolds and his team come in. They had been using the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the active nucleus of a galaxy called NGC 1275 that sits around 237 million light-years away, at the heart of a cluster of galaxies called the Perseus cluster.

Their eight days' worth of observations ended up telling them almost nothing about the black hole. But then they realised the data could be used to look for axion-like particles.

"The X-ray light from NGC1275 needs to pass through the hot gas of the Perseus cluster, and this gas is magnetised," Reynolds explained.

"The magnetic field is relatively weak (more than 10,000 times weaker than the magnetic field at Earth's surface), but the X-ray photons need to travel an enormous distance through this magnetic field. This means there is ample opportunity for the conversion of these photons into axion-like particles (provided that the axion-like particles are sufficiently low mass)."

Because the probability of conversion depends on the wavelength of the X-ray photons, the observations should reveal a distortion as some wavelengths are being converted more effectively than others. It took the team about a year of painstaking work, but in the end, no such distortion was found.

This means the team could rule out the existence of axions in the mass range their observations were sensitive to - down to about a millionth of a billionth of the mass of an electron.

"Our research doesn't rule out the existence of these particles, but it definitely doesn't help their case," said astronomer Helen Russell of the University of Nottingham in the UK.

"These constraints dig into the range of properties suggested by string theory, and may help string theorists weed their theories."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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This Galaxy Cluster May Have Just Dealt a Major Blow to String Theory - ScienceAlert

The crossover effort between Dungeons & Dragons and Critical Role is here,

Matthew Mercer and his show Critical Role has a profound impact on Dungeons & Dragons. Millions of new players have tried D&D after watching Mercer and his crew of nerdy voice actors play through an epic story. The Critical Role crew have played live shows across the world and Mercer has been Dungeon Master for notable people from Vin Diesel to Stephen Colbert. They have also expanded beyond livestreaming content into shows for Amazon Prime. This month, Matt Mercer gets to cross another item off his bucket list; author of an official D&D book from Wizards of the Coast called Explorers Guide to Wildemount.

I was caught off guard because Wizards contacted us, said Mercer, I had been brought in to contribute on a couple books which was a really, really cool experience, but I never expected it at this level. I had done one book with Green Ronin, the TalDorei guide which was an awesome learning experience, a time consuming experience where I learned a lot through that process with them. If it wasnt with Wizards in an opportunity like this I probably would have held off because of how crazy life has been.

The book details the continent of Wildemount on the world of Exandria where the campaigns of Critical Role are set. Wildemount is the setting of the current episodes on the show. The book includes details on the setting, spells, character options and plenty of information fans of the show are looking to devour.

Ever since I finished [the TalDorei guide] my world building and note taking had taken more of a formal approach, said Mercer, so, thankfully when this came around, I had more thorough notes and ideas that didnt completely need an overhaul. Of course, I only developed enough to touch on the campaign that I was running. The process from that point became How do I take the things that I already have established or partially fleshed out into an entirely suitable form? and What ideas do I have beyond those and how do I flesh them out in an equally exciting way?

Even D&D fans who are not deep into the show will find some interesting ideas contained within. The Heroic Chronicle charts offer players a way to pull together a character with backstories that link their characters together and to the setting without wandering through a few awkward sessions of getting to know characters. Mercers world also offers some unusual magic schools that draw their power from scientific sources such as gravity, time and probability.

A lot of that stems from a love of quantum physics and astrophysics growing up, said Mercer, Ive always had a love of those weird esoteric elements of theoretical science. I came up with the Kyrn Dynasty before we started the second campaign as a way to renovate the class and present these ideas in an innovative way in a classic D&D setting. As part of that religious scenario, I thought about what kind of magic in the world hadnt really been touched on and what magic intrigued me. I wanted to look at how gravity and probably affects you from a theoretically standpoint. How could I adapt that under an umbrella of magic that was unique to this world?

Mercer took a hand in every element of the book from story elements to mechanical write ups. He was joined by veteran D&D authors James J. Haeck, James Introcaso and Chris Lockey with development handled by Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor and Kate Welch.

I began doing some home brewed class mechanic stuff on DMs Guild years ago and found that I really enjoyed it, said Mercer. Getting better at it as time goes on has been a real thrill for me. Being able to write narrative world building elements is a safer space because nobody can argue with it. With player facing mechanics theres a much more intense level of scrutiny, so its a bigger challenge to create. I really enjoy monster design because I make a lot of monsters for Critical Role because we have such a large party of powerful players. Its become a secondary hobby of mine to create weird, interesting, dynamic battles for my players.

Explorers Guide to Wildemount is available on Amazon or from Friendly Local Game Stores around the world.

Originally posted here:

An Interview With Matthew Mercer About The Explorers Guide To Wildemount - Forbes

The pace of improvement in quantum computing mirrors the fast advances made in AI and machine learning. It is normal to ask whether quantum technologies could boost learning algorithms: this field of inquiry is called quantum-improved machine learning.

Quantum computers are gadgets that work dependent on principles from quantum physics. The computers that we at present use are constructed utilizing transistors and the information is stored as double 0 and 1. Quantum computers are manufactured utilizing subatomic particles called quantum bits, qubits for short, which can be in numerous states simultaneously. The principal advantage of quantum computers is that they can perform exceptionally complex tasks at supersonic velocities. In this way, they take care of issues that are not presently feasible.

The most significant advantage of quantum computers is the speed at which it can take care of complex issues. While theyre lightning speedy at what they do, they dont give abilities to take care of issues from undecidable or NP-Hard problem classes. There is a problem set that quantum computing will have the option to explain, anyway, its not applicable for all computing problems.

Ordinarily, the issue set that quantum computers are acceptable at solving includes number or data crunching with an immense amount of inputs, for example, complex optimisation problems and communication systems analysis problemscalculations that would normally take supercomputers days, years, even billions of years to brute force.

The application that is routinely mentioned as an instance that quantum computers will have the option to immediately solve is solid RSA encryption. A recent report by the Microsoft Quantum Team recommends this could well be the situation, figuring that itd be feasible with around a 2330 qubit quantum computer.

Streamlining applications leading the pack makes sense well since theyre at present to a great extent illuminated utilizing brute force and raw computing power. If quantum computers can rapidly observe all the potential solutions, an ideal solution can become obvious all the more rapidly. Streamlining stands apart on the grounds that its significantly more natural and simpler to get a hold on.

The community of people who can fuse optimization and robust optimization is a whole lot bigger. The machine learning community, the coinciding between the innovation and the requirements are technical; theyre just pertinent to analysts. Whats more, theres a much smaller network of statisticians on the planet than there are of developers.

Specifically, the unpredictability of fusing quantum computing into the machine learning workflow presents an impediment. For machine learning professionals and analysts, its very easy to make sense of how to program the system. Fitting that into a machine learning workflow is all the more challenging since machine learning programs are getting very complex. However, teams in the past have published a lot of research on the most proficient method to consolidate it in a training workflow that makes sense.

Undoubtedly, ML experts at present need another person to deal with the quantum computing part: Machine learning experts are searching for another person to do the legwork of building the systems up to the expansions and demonstrating that it can fit.

In any case, the intersection of these two fields goes much further than that, and its not simply AI applications that can benefit. There is a meeting area where quantum computers perform machine learning algorithms and customary machine learning strategies are utilized to survey the quantum computers. This region of research is creating at such bursting speeds that it has produced a whole new field called Quantum Machine Learning.

This interdisciplinary field is incredibly new, however. Recent work has created quantum algorithms that could go about as the building blocks of machine learning programs, yet the hardware and programming difficulties are as yet significant and the development of fully functional quantum computers is still far off.

The future of AI sped along by quantum computing looks splendid, with real-time human-imitable practices right around an inescapable result. Quantum computing will be capable of taking care of complex AI issues and acquiring multiple solutions for complex issues all the while. This will bring about artificial intelligence all the more effectively performing complex tasks in human-like ways. Likewise, robots that can settle on optimised decisions in real-time in practical circumstances will be conceivable once we can utilize quantum computers dependent on Artificial Intelligence.

How away will this future be? Indeed, considering just a bunch of the worlds top organizations and colleges as of now are growing (genuinely immense) quantum computers that right now do not have the processing power required, having a multitude of robots mirroring humans running about is presumably a reasonable way off, which may comfort a few people, and disappoint others. Building only one, however? Perhaps not so far away.

Quantum computing and machine learning are incredibly well matched. The features the innovation has and the requirements of the field are extremely close. For machine learning, its important for what you have to do. Its difficult to reproduce that with a traditional computer and you get it locally from the quantum computer. So those features cant be unintentional. Its simply that it will require some time for the people to locate the correct techniques for integrating it and afterwards for the innovation to embed into that space productively.

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The Well-matched Combo of Quantum Computing and Machine Learning - Analytics Insight

Hunter Pence shared the movies, films and workout videos he's currently streaming at home.

Hunter Pence shared the movies, films and workout videos he's currently streaming at home.

Photo: John Hefti / Associated Press

Hunter Pence shared the movies, films and workout videos he's currently streaming at home.

Hunter Pence shared the movies, films and workout videos he's currently streaming at home.

Here's what Giants' Hunter Pence is streaming while sheltering in place

You may not be able to hit like a San Francisco Giants player, but you can stream like one.

Like the rest of us, two-time World Series champion Hunter Pence is sheltering in place and attempting to unwind by watching television and movies. He shared with us a list of his favorite shows and movies that he's watching to fight cabin fever (scroll through the slideshow above).

Due to coronavirus shutting down movie theaters, many studios have begun releasing their current slate of theatrical films digitally. Pixar's "Onward" is the latest to be available on demand and Pence watched recently.

"I love this movie!" he told SFGATE via email. "It has all of my favorite things in one movie: family, magic, and imagination."

RELATED:SF documentaries to stream to fight cabin fever

On an educational front, Pence recommends the YouTube channel of Dr. Joe Dispenza, a lecturer whose topics range from neuroscience to self-help. "I love listening to Dr. Dispenza deep dive into quantum physics and explain how to evolve your consciousness," Pence said.

"Trolls" was another recent stream: "This is a movie with great music that makes you feel good. I particularly love the message about happiness."

For staying in physical shape, Pence recommends CorePower Yoga On Demand. "I've been streaming their yoga classes every day as part of my workout routine," he says. "Some of the classes are pretty tough and really crush me." In terms of mental health, he's a big fan of Calm App, which offers meditation and relaxation exercises.

And of course, he's a big fan of LetsGetLexi on YouTube his wife Alexis Pence's channel which recently featured a video of a walk around their neighborhood.

Dan Gentile is a digital editor at SFGATE.com Email: Dan.Gentile@sfgate.com | Twitter: @Dannosphere

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Here's what Giants' Hunter Pence is streaming while sheltering in place - Chron.com

The placebo effect is a wonderful thing, and still highly mysterious. A person who believes they have been given effective treatment for pain or disease, even though they havent, might get better. Placebos can work even if you know they are placebos, and for reasons no one understands the placebo effect appears to be getting stronger over time. It is silly to casually dismiss findings that a medicine performs only a little bit better than placebo: placebo is already extremely strong.

It is surprising, then, that the placebo effect is first mentioned only halfway through this compendium of stories about people given terminal diagnoses for stage 4 cancer and other diseases who, for medically unexplained reasons, suddenly experience a miraculous recovery, or in the lingo a spontaneous remission. One woman goes to a faith-healing centre in Brazil and gets better; another quits her job and starts doing yoga and gets better; another accepts herself just as she is and faces up to death and gets better; a man adopts the keto diet and gets better, and so forth.

The author, a psychiatrist with a theology degree, is determined to keep an open mind about all this but not so open, the reader hopes, that everything falls out. He notes, for example, that people who attend the Brazilian healing community experience a sudden change in diet (lots of fruit juices and vegetarian meals), spend hours a day meditating, and experience the loving kindness of strangers, all of which are definitely good for you. The keto diet, in particular, might be excellent for the immune system and we know, thanks to the growing field of cancer immunotherapy, that a supercharged immune system can defeat tumours all by itself. Even forgiving those who have wronged you, some research suggests, is good for the immune system.

There are no stories here about people who became ill, changed their diet, avoided stress and still died anyway

This is all interesting and warmly related, and Rediger mainly avoids woo, as you would hope a medically trained person would though there is one dispiriting section in which he excitedly suggests that quantum physics might explain how the mind can affect the body. How, exactly? Oh, just because quantum physics apparently is showing us that some of the laws of the universe that we thought of as fixed or immutable are, in fact, not. Actually, quantum physics, too, is grounded in immutable laws. The author is in a hurry, too, to dismiss the possibility that a couple of his case studies happened to be especially high responders to chemotherapy drugs that they did, in fact, take, while also embracing their unique individuality.

Its worth noting that an ancient, moralistic view of health and disease is still encoded into the terms we use: remission originally meant forgiveness of sins, or pardon for a crime, and the potential negative implication of a book such as this, which cheers on those who experienced remission for having done all the right things, is that if you get sick, and stay sick, you have no one to blame but yourself. The sect known confusingly as Christian Science, indeed, follows the teaching of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, that sickness is merely an illusion and can be corrected by prayer. Despite his laudable attempt to reassure the reader that being sick is not your fault, Redigers own conclusion is not a million miles from the same idea. What spontaneous healing has taught us, he writes, is that waking up to a deeper awareness of our value and strength is capable of changing our physiology. If we assume that the mind is powerful and capable of altering disease progression, it follows that a significant mental change may be capable of precipitating a significant physical change even a remission.

There is a lot of work being done with that little may. From a scientific standpoint, there is a severe issue of selection bias in the narratives the book offers. Rediger does not, after all, tell any stories about people who became ill and then changed their diet, avoided stress, embraced love, and faced up to their inevitable extinction and still died anyway. You would think there would be no shortage of such discouraging tales. Without a sense of whether they, as you might suspect, vastly outweigh the cases of amazing recovery, it is hard to draw firm conclusions. The introduction even claims that the author has discovered the foundation for a new model of medicine, but it would be irresponsible to suggest anyone decline hospital treatment in favour of positive thinking. In the meantime, the author himself at one point boasts that it is almost impossible for him to become ill. Given the timing of his books publication, one can only hope he is right.

Cured is published by Penguin (RRP 16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over 15.

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Cured by Jeffrey Rediger review stories of spontaneous healing - The Guardian

If 200 years ago we had a pandemic in China it would reach Europe only years later. Today, when the first cases happen in China, the second wave could be documented in Argentina or New York. The same goes for financial risks.

Many global risks indeed occur at such speeds, and if we want to assess them and search for solutions we must change our attitude by using viable and adaptable methods from physics, chemistry and biology.

The first three industrial revolutions were simple to explain. In the first, we discovered how to burn fuel to mechanise production; in the second, we used electricity to make our lives better; and in the third, we learned how to use computers.

Even as the world is passing through the fourth industrial revolution where the digital, biological and physical worlds meet in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is a relatively poor understanding of how new computing technologies will adapt to our natural intelligence.

The world today is changing so fast, I predict that we will not be able to distinguish todays fourth revolution from the fifth or the sixth and so on

Earlier this year, at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, one of the worlds leading platforms for sustainable development, I shared my vision about the future impact of AI. As a former mathematician, physicist and computer scientist who worked on the early models for it, my argument is that there is no tangible reason to be afraid of AI. The beauty of human civilisation is that change, advancement and concern go hand in hand. We need to manage this reality and deliver solutions. I believe AI and humans will co-exist, not compete, and AI will serve us, not the other way round. Moreover, just as every previous revolution ended up creating far more jobs than it displaced, the same will happen with the fourth industrial revolution. And these new jobs will benefit both men and women.

The world today is changing so fast, I predict that we will not be able to distinguish todays fourth revolution from the fifth or the sixth and so on.

Each previous transformation was met with concern about how it would affect our lives and whether it would take away jobs from the Luddites who fought against mechanisation to the fear that computers would put us all out of work.

The traditional construct of global politics is undergoing an adaptation. All of this implies that we urgently need to upskill our existing workforce. The growing deficit of radically new ideas and the need for non-standard solutions induces the need for a broader range of skills and talents than in the past.In the classical political prism, what mattered were organised forms of connectivity: tribes, nations, religions, ideologies, parties and political institutions. In that context, the quantum political world moved in faster, unpredictable and seemingly random ways. Now, we are in a new era of quantum politics, quantum behaviour and quantum impact, which also makes it difficult to see the whole picture, because it is all new and global too.

While for us humans the entire picture may still appear blurry, AI is here to help us. With billions of dollars being invested, we are reaping the fruits of AI in medicine, space exploration and other sciences. This is the future and it will alter our understanding and change our lifestyle. The gradual integration of AI from science to the every day has already started to serve as a driving force of technological and civilisational progress. Schools, institutions, universities need to adapt themselves to these new realities, first to stay competitive, and then to be effectively involved in building our common future.

In my soon-to-be-released book Quantum Behaviour of Global Risks, I try to explain how global risks become quantum. We need to understand that the way human life is evolving in a digital world, it must factor in risks such as pandemics, terrorism and financial crises.

One upshot of this is that women will have more opportunities than they have had in the past. The unique experience of many women as nurturers and social carers has been at the heart of many cultures and has been vital for sustaining societies. If we can harness such experiences to build sustainable relations in business, and leverage them better through technology, then we will succeed in the future. The question is, are leaders wise enough to give women more opportunities to tackle the world's challenges?

The way we are working now will have to change in the future. If you look back to Isaac Newtons time, there were perhaps 1,000 people in the world who were studying advanced mechanics. In Einsteins day, he was one of maybe 10,000 scientists researching quantum physics.

How many people today do we have engaged in scientific research and development around the world, from scientists in laboratories at major universities to kids working in their basements? How many Newtons, how many Einsteins are potentially out there? And how many do we risk losing if we exclude 50 per cent of the population?

In Armenia, we have long acknowledged the importance of treating men and women equally. The First Armenian Republic of 1918-20 was one of the first states to give women the right to vote and to be elected to Parliament. The first female ambassador of modern times was also a woman Dr Diana Abgar, who served as the Republics ambassador to Japan.

Of course, our country today faces many challenges, but we are embracing technology to drive us forward Armenia is one of the start-ups of the 21st Century. Our Advanced Tomorrow initiative will help us to leverage science and technology and deliver a better future for all men and women together.

Armen Sarkissian is the President of the Republic of Armenia

Updated: March 22, 2020 10:26 AM

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AI and humans will co-exist, not compete, and AI will serve us, not the other way round - The National

Ocean Currents. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Study shows ripples across a newly fertilized egg are similar to other systems, from ocean and atmospheric circulations to quantum fluids.

When an egg cell of almost any sexually reproducing species is fertilized, it sets off a series of waves that ripple across the eggs surface. These waves are produced by billions of activated proteins that surge through the eggs membrane like streams of tiny burrowing sentinels, signaling the egg to start dividing, folding, and dividing again, to form the first cellular seeds of an organism.

Now MIT scientists have taken a detailed look at the pattern of these waves, produced on the surface of starfish eggs. These eggs are large and therefore easy to observe, and scientists consider starfish eggs to be representative of the eggs of many other animal species.

In each egg, the team introduced a protein to mimic the onset of fertilization, and recorded the pattern of waves that rippled across their surfaces in response. They observed that each wave emerged in a spiral pattern, and that multiple spirals whirled across an eggs surface at a time. Some spirals spontaneously appeared and swirled away in opposite directions, while others collided head-on and immediately disappeared.

The behavior of these swirling waves, the researchers realized, is similar to the waves generated in other, seemingly unrelated systems, such as the vortices in quantum fluids, the circulations in the atmosphere and oceans, and the electrical signals that propagate through the heart and brain.

Not much was known about the dynamics of these surface waves in eggs, and after we started analyzing and modeling these waves, we found these same patterns show up in all these other systems, says physicist Nikta Fakhri, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Assistant Professor at MIT. Its a manifestation of this very universal wave pattern.

It opens a completely new perspective, adds Jrn Dunkel, associate professor of mathematics at MIT. You can borrow a lot of techniques people have developed to study similar patterns in other systems, to learn something about biology.

Fakhri and Dunkel have published their results today in the journal Nature Physics. Their co-authors are Tzer Han Tan, Jinghui Liu, Pearson Miller, and Melis Tekant of MIT.

Previous studies have shown that the fertilization of an egg immediately activates Rho-GTP, a protein within the egg which normally floats around in the cells cytoplasm in an inactive state. Once activated, billions of the protein rise up out of the cytoplasms morass to attach to the eggs membrane, snaking along the wall in waves.

Imagine if you have a very dirty aquarium, and once a fish swims close to the glass, you can see it, Dunkel explains. In a similar way, the proteins are somewhere inside the cell, and when they become activated, they attach to the membrane, and you start to see them move.

Fakhri says the waves of proteins moving across the eggs membrane serve, in part, to organize cell division around the cells core.

The egg is a huge cell, and these proteins have to work together to find its center, so that the cell knows where to divide and fold, many times over, to form an organism, Fakhri says. Without these proteins making waves, there would be no cell division.

In their study, the team focused on the active form of Rho-GTP and the pattern of waves produced on an eggs surface when they altered the proteins concentration.

For their experiments, they obtained about 10 eggs from the ovaries of starfish through a minimally invasive surgical procedure. They introduced a hormone to stimulate maturation, and also injected fluorescent markers to attach to any active forms of Rho-GTP that rose up in response. They then observed each egg through a confocal microscope and watched as billions of the proteins activated and rippled across the eggs surface in response to varying concentrations of the artificial hormonal protein.

In this way, we created a kaleidoscope of different patterns and looked at their resulting dynamics, Fakhri says.

The researchers first assembled black-and-white videos of each egg, showing the bright waves that traveled over its surface. The brighter a region in a wave, the higher the concentration of Rho-GTP in that particular region. For each video, they compared the brightness, or concentration of protein from pixel to pixel, and used these comparisons to generate an animation of the same wave patterns.

From their videos, the team observed that waves seemed to oscillate outward as tiny, hurricane-like spirals. The researchers traced the origin of each wave to the core of each spiral, which they refer to as a topological defect. Out of curiosity, they tracked the movement of these defects themselves. They did some statistical analysis to determine how fast certain defects moved across an eggs surface, and how often, and in what configurations the spirals popped up, collided, and disappeared.

In a surprising twist, they found that their statistical results, and the behavior of waves in an eggs surface, were the same as the behavior of waves in other larger and seemingly unrelated systems.

When you look at the statistics of these defects, its essentially the same as vortices in a fluid, or waves in the brain, or systems on a larger scale, Dunkel says. Its the same universal phenomenon, just scaled down to the level of a cell.

The researchers are particularly interested in the waves similarity to ideas in quantum computing. Just as the pattern of waves in an egg convey specific signals, in this case of cell division, quantum computing is a field that aims to manipulate atoms in a fluid, in precise patterns, in order to translate information and perform calculations.

Perhaps now we can borrow ideas from quantum fluids, to build minicomputers from biological cells, Fakhri says. We expect some differences, but we will try to explore [biological signaling waves] further as a tool for computation.

This research was supported, in part, by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

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Pattern of Waves Found in Growing Organisms Similar to Ocean Circulations and Quantum Fluids - SciTechDaily