Daily Archives: July 5, 2020

This computer-generated visualization shows the wavelike pattern of a quantum handshake between a hydrogen atom emitting energy and another atom receiving the energy. (J. Cramer and C. Mead via arXiv)

The University of Washington physicist whoonce ran a crowdfunded experiment on backward causationis now weighing in with a potential solution to one of the longest-running puzzles in quantum mechanics.

John Cramer, a UW physics professor emeritus, teamed up with Caltech electrical engineer and physicist Carver Mead to put forward an explanation for how the indefinite one-and-zero, alive-and-dead state of a quantum system gets translated into a definite observation a phenomenon known as wave function collapse.

Up to now, the mechanism behind wave function collapse has been considered a mystery that is disconnected from established wave mechanics. The result has been that a large number of attempts to explain it have looked elsewhere, Cramer told GeekWire in an email.

In our work, we have discovered that wave function collapse, at least in a simple case, is implicit in the existing formalism, he said, as long as one allows the use of advanced as well as retarded electromagnetic potentials.

In other words, the explanation requires accepting the possibility that time can flow backward as well as forward. And for some physicists, that might be too big of a quantum leap.

Most people just dont like the idea of having the kind of time symmetry that sort of implies that time isnt strictly speaking a one-way street, Cramer acknowledged during a phone interview.

Nevertheless, the idea is getting traction. A math-heavy research paper laying out the concept has been submitted to the open-access journal Symmetry, and Cramer said theres a good chance itll be accepted for publication now that he and Mead have addressed questions raised in peer review.

Were about to send a revised version of the paper back to the journal, he said.

The concept includes elements from what Cramer calls the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which he laid out in a 2016 book called The Quantum Handshake. That interpretation, which Mead fleshed out in subsequent work, puts a new spin on the interaction between quantum systems.

Most physicists visualize the emission of electromagnetic energy from an atom in the form of particles namely, photons. But in Cramers interpretation, the energy transfer between atoms is a two-way transaction involving waves rather than particles. One set of waves spreads out from the source to interact with another set of time-reversed confirmation waves from the destination. Interactions between the forward-time waves and the backward-time waves quickly determine where the energy ends up, Cramer said.

The idea in the Transactional Interpretation is that youre using it as a sort of time-symmetric situation, in which its OK to have things going backward in time as well as forward in time, in the limited case where youre doing this handshake, he said.

If time reversal actually exists, would that open the door to the kind of time travel seen in movies such as Back to the Future? Unfortunately for Doc Brown, Mother Nature is very clever about not letting you in on the action, Cramer said. The time symmetry effect makes the equations work, but it wont show up in observations of the energy transfer.

That was also the case five years ago for Cramers retrocausality experiments. The interference patterns that he was hoping would provide the crucial evidence for backward causation ended up canceling each other out.

Nature is sending messages faster than light and backwards in time, but shes not letting you in on the action, Cramer said. Its blocked by this process.

In their research paper, the two physicists consider only the case of energy transfer between two hydrogen atoms, but Cramer said the concept could be extended to multiple atoms in a system.

Is there any way to prove or disprove the seemingly way-out interpretation put forward by Cramer and Mead? Thats tricky:By definition, an interpretation for quantum mechanics is judged by how well it matches up with the mathematics that underlie well-known quantum phenomena.

What you should do is see whether your interpretation can explain as many experiments as possible, Cramer said. My Transactional Interpretation explains more than 26 different quantum optics experiments in great detail how the handshakes work in order to make whats observed in the experiments come out.

He hasnt yet found an experiment that rules out the interpretation, but acknowledges that there are probably a lot more experiments left to check.

Cramer is particularly interested inan experiment known as TEQ, which stands for TEsting the large-scale limit of Quantum mechanics. The experiment has won a 4.4 million ($5 million) grant from the European Commission, and wasfeatured last week in The New York Times Magazine.

TEQs researchers aim to determine the value of a term that they think should be added to the Schrdinger Equation, which describes the wave function of a quantum system. The extra term would describe objectively how the wave function collapses, independently of any observers.

Cramer said TEQ may not turn out the way itsbackers expect.

What we demonstrated here is the mechanism by which the wave function does collapse, he said. And that means, in fact, that those experimenters will be wasting their time and their euros doing that measurement, because theyre almost certain to find that theres no such term.

To see how the quantum handshake works for two hydrogen atoms, check out the three animations in this OneDrive folder.

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Professor tackles one more mystery about quantum mechanics and times flow - GeekWire

The universe, as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics, is a noisy, crackling space where particles blink constantly in and out of existence, creating a background of quantum noise whose effects are normally far too subtle to detect in everyday objects.

Now for the first time, a team led by researchers at MIT LIGO Laboratory has measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on objects at the human scale. In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers report observing that quantum fluctuations, tiny as they may be, can nonetheless kick an object as large as the 40-kilogram mirrors of the U.S. National Science Foundations Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), causing them to move by a tiny degree, which the team was able to measure.

It turns out the quantum noise in LIGOs detectors is enough to move the large mirrors by 10-20 meters a displacement that was predicted by quantum mechanics for an object of this size, but that had never before been measured.

A hydrogen atom is 10-10 meters, so this displacement of the mirrors is to a hydrogen atom what a hydrogen atom is to us and we measured that, says Lee McCuller, a research scientist at MITs Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The researchers used a special instrument that they designed, called a quantum squeezer, to manipulate the detectors quantum noise and reduce its kicks to the mirrors, in a way that could ultimately improve LIGOs sensitivity in detecting gravitational waves, explains Haocun Yu, a physics graduate student at MIT.

Whats special about this experiment is weve seen quantum effects on something as large as a human, says Nergis Mavalvala, the Marble Professor and associate head of the physics department at MIT. We too, every nanosecond of our existence, are being kicked around, buffeted by these quantum fluctuations. Its just that the jitter of our existence, our thermal energy, is too large for these quantum vacuum fluctuations to affect our motion measurably. With LIGOs mirrors, weve done all this work to isolate them from thermally driven motion and other forces, so that they are now still enough to be kicked around by quantum fluctuations and this spooky popcorn of the universe.

Yu, Mavalvala, and McCuller are co-authors of the new paper, along with graduate student Maggie Tse and Principal Research Scientist Lisa Barsotti at MIT, along with other members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

A quantum kick

LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves arriving at the Earth from cataclysmic sources millions to billions of light years away. It comprises twin detectors, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector is an L-shaped interferometer made up of two 4-kilometer-long tunnels, at the end of which hangs a 40-kilogram mirror.

To detect a gravitational wave, a laser located at the input of the LIGO interferometer sends a beam of light down each tunnel of the detector, where it reflects off the mirror at the far end, to arrive back at its starting point. In the absence of a gravitational wave, the lasers should return at the same exact time. If a gravitational wave passes through, it would briefly disturb the position of the mirrors, and therefore the arrival times of the lasers.

Much has been done to shield the interferometers from external noise, so that the detectors have a better chance of picking out the exceedingly subtle disturbances created by an incoming gravitational wave.

Mavalvala and her colleagues wondered whether LIGO might also be sensitive enough that the instrument might even feel subtler effects, such as quantum fluctuations within the interferometer itself, and specifically, quantum noise generated among the photons in LIGOs laser.

This quantum fluctuation in the laser light can cause a radiation pressure that can actually kick an object, McCuller adds. The object in our case is a 40-kilogram mirror, which is a billion times heavier than the nanoscale objects that other groups have measured this quantum effect in.

Noise squeezer

To see whether they could measure the motion of LIGOs massive mirrors in response to tiny quantum fluctuations, the team used an instrument they recently built as an add-on to the interferometers, which they call a quantum squeezer. With the squeezer, scientists can tune the properties of the quantum noise within LIGOs interferometer.

The team first measured the total noise within LIGOs interferometers, including the background quantum noise, as well as classical noise, or disturbances generated from normal, everyday vibrations. They then turned the squeezer on and set it to a specific state that altered the properties of quantum noise specifically. They were able to then subtract the classical noise during data analysis, to isolate the purely quantum noise in the interferometer. As the detector constantly monitors the displacement of the mirrors to any incoming noise, the researchers were able to observe that the quantum noise alone was enough to displace the mirrors, by 10-20 meter.

Mavalvala notes that the measurement lines up exactly with what quantum mechanics predicts. But still its remarkable to see it be confirmed in something so big, she says.

Going a step further, the team wondered whether they could manipulate the quantum squeezer to reduce the quantum noise within the interferometer. The squeezer is designed such that when it set to a particular state, it squeezes certain properties of the quantum noise, in this case, phase and amplitude. Phase fluctuations can be thought of as arising from the quantum uncertainty in the light's travel time, while amplitude fluctuations impart quantum kicks to the mirror surface.

We think of the quantum noise as distributed along different axes, and we try to reduce the noise in some specific aspect, Yu says.

When the squeezer is set to a certain state, it can for example squeeze, or narrow the uncertainty in phase, while simultaneously distending, or increasing the uncertainty in amplitude. Squeezing the quantum noise at different angles would produce different ratios of phase and amplitude noise within LIGOs detectors.

The group wondered whether changing the angle of this squeezing would create quantum correlations between LIGOs lasers and its mirrors, in a way that they could also measure. Testing their idea, the team set the squeezer to 12 different angles and found that, indeed, they could measure correlations between the various distributions of quantum noise in the laser and the motion of the mirrors.

Through these quantum correlations, the team was able to squeeze the quantum noise, and the resulting mirror displacement, down to 70 percent its normal level. This measurement, incidentally, is below whats called the standard quantum limit, which, in quantum mechanics, states that a given number of photons, or, in LIGOs case, a certain level of laser power, is expected to generate a certain minimum of quantum fluctuations that would generate a specific kick to any object in their path.

By using squeezed light to reduce the quantum noise in the LIGO measurement, the team has made a measurement more precise than the standard quantum limit, reducing that noise in a way that will ultimately help LIGO to detect fainter, more distant sources of gravitational waves.

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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Quantum fluctuations can jiggle objects on the human scale - MIT News

Life is complicated. Right now, we face so many challenges. Our perceived ability to control our world continues to slip through our fingers every day. But we are still designed for joy and for community. And we are agile enough to survive this. Were incredibly creative and adaptable. And though we sometimes use that adaptability and agility to further dig ourselves into a hole, we, for the most part, usually take two steps forward for every one step back. The long game is to our advantage. Have courage.

Perhaps, it would be worthwhile to consider that there is more to us than what we appear. The greater consciousness of humanity meaning what the majority of us are thinking or praying about at any one given time has been shown to play a part in how things unfold, including the ways that appear to be beyond our ability to intervene. Mysteriousness. Is consciousness at work in places we dont readily assume? Does our consciousness affect things? Things like the planet, perhaps? Were made of the exact same materials. Just how deeply does our divine spark reach? Just what might we be able to affect by all of us collectively directing our conscious thought toward the same idea?

While several different faiths have a similar idea to this, in Christianity, Jesus is quoted as saying, When two or more gather in my name, I am in the midst of them. Its an interesting statement. And Ive heard a few interpretations for it, including its usage in prayerful conflict mediation or to align its references to the Old Testament law recommending two to three witnesses in conflict resolution. Interesting to me that both of these explanations involve the repairing of relationship.

But there is perhaps a more esoteric thought to have about why it might be that if at least two or more gather together in the spirit of the same idea, surprising things can occur. It may be for the same reason that its good Old Testament advice to have two to three witnesses on hand when trying to resolve conflict. Theyre not just there to witness; they are there to add their consciousness to the proceedings.

In 1993, a national group of trained meditators created an experiment with the intention to decrease the crime rate in Washington, D.C. They predicted theyd be able to reduce it by over 20% and prepared to catalog the data empirically. Before the project began, the chief of police said the only thing that would create a 20% drop in crime would be 20 inches of snow. The study occurred in summer of that year, but it didnt snow. The crime rate began to drop immediately after the project began and continued to drop steadily until the end of it. Crime went down 23.3% below the prediction for that period of the year. Look that experiment up for yourself. Was consciousness there? If so, what does it imply about our capacity to affect physical reality on the level of our consciousness? What did those meditators affect and how?

This points to an idea that when a group of people choose to direct their thoughts toward a particular idea or reality or solution, stuff happens. Just how much is our consciousness capable of doing?

Lets then consider for a moment what consciousness itself might be. The primary definition of the word consciousness says only that its about our awareness of our own surroundings that we know a tree is over there and a house is over there and we know our standing in between them is, by definition, consciousness. The origins for the word conscious, though, are about special knowledge, really. Holders of a secret. And also an inner awareness of self, not just our surrounding environment. In the late 16th century, though, the word conscious came to mean an awareness of our own personal wrongdoing. In other words, self-conscious. It meant shame.

But we can also use the word consciousness to describe the part of ourselves that is larger than our physical bodies. The part of ourselves that is plugged into the divine. The part that is permanent and eternal and, true to the contemporary definition, utterly aware of its surroundings and its place within the universe. The part that is aware and self-aware but leaves the shame part to us humans. Shame is one of many classrooms of the human experience. Its appropriateness lies in the overcoming of it.

Back to consciousness, though. Does our consciousness have physics? In other words, are there rules to it? If we were smart enough, could we measure it? Could we invent a device to see consciousness? If we did, what would we conclude from empirically proving our consciousness exists? What might it change in us and how we more deliberately use consciousness as a tool of advancement?

I believe that when two or more gather in the name of something greater than themselves, magic happens. I think when a certain saturation point of our individual minds gathers together around a single thought, the thought itself can hear it. On the quantum-physics level, it seems that when we gather, we have a greater capacity to collapse a waveform around a particular potential into the reality we ultimately experience. I think I sounded very fancy there.

But thats the quantum physics way of saying that our expectations are often realized on the quantum level where our thought is provable to affect reality. You can look that up, too. I think whatever it is that makes that happen we could safely refer to as consciousness.

It could be thought of as a magic wand, of a sort. One that were not particularly sure how it works, or just how much power it has. And for which we probably should get a little bit of education. But its a power nonetheless. And one that we own for ourselves to do with as we wish.

Make an assumption that how you feel and the thoughts you project manage to accomplish something beyond your understanding. Create communities of those who wish to conduct their thoughts in the same direction with you for mutual benefit.

May your divine spark, along with the divine sparks of others, together light a firestorm of compassion and resolution for our world.

Wil Darcangelo, M.Div., is the minister at First Parish UU Church of Fitchburg and of First Church of Christ, Unitarian, in Lancaster, and producer of The UU Virtual Church of Fitchburg and Lancaster on YouTube. Email wildarcangelo@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @wildarcangelo. His blog, Hopeful Thinking, can be found at http://www.hopefulthinkingworld.blogspot.com.

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Try to consciously change the world it might just work - Sentinel & Enterprise

Scientists have measured the faster-than-lightning speed of a nuclear reaction using a supercomputer to model and compare hundreds of different reactions that take just a billionth of a trillionth of a second.

In Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe using fully microscopic approaches to observe and measure collisions of different kinds of nuclei. Their goal: quantify the energy and time these exchanges take in order to better understand how they affect quantum phenomena like dissipation, which is how, and how much, energy leaves a reaction.

The scientists modeled 13 pairs of nuclei and studied 600 kinds of interactions.

Since part of quantum mechanics involves how the physical interactions of particles cause them to behave erratically or otherwise, the relative magnitude of nuclear reactions can help researchers categorize the reactions by energy required and other parameters based on that timing. They found a tenfold difference in timea zeptosecond versus 20 zeptoseconds, basicallybetween larger nuclear exchanges and smaller motions.

Colliding the pairs of nuclei made them break apart in a realistic way, and the size of the pieces (fragments) determined the speed and magnitude of the subsequent interaction. This is one reason the time frames were so broadly distributed: Sometimes what happened was just a tiny nick, and sometimes the two nuclei collided head on and exchanged much larger amounts of particulate.

First, the protons and neutrons swap between the newly-united fragments, in order to equalise their neutron-to-proton ratio. Known as charge equilibration, the calculations showed this is the fastest process, taking only one zeptosecond, Cosmos explains.

Mass equilibration, with much more flow and exchange, took 20 times longer. And while these times varied greatly between different nuclear processes, the time didnt vary by which element was at play. Any combination of element nuclei took the same time for the same process.

A project at Vienna University of Technology is using a similar methodology, combining an electron microscope with a supercomputer molecule simulation in order to understand whats happening in a different kind of reaction: surface wear on metals. Both computer simulations involve powerful modeling of complex processes that are too tiny for scientists to meaningfully examine in realtime.

Instead of modeling individual atoms colliding, this simulation must imagine an entire surface in enough molecular detail to model wear. To make a simulation under 100 nanometers across takes weeks for the supercomputer to compile and run.

The nucleus experiment involves simulations of just two nuclei at a time in different combinations and dynamics, but the level of detail and time and energy measurement still requires massive computing power. Modeling realistic physics of how nuclei collide and break apart requires extensive programming and particles in the computer graphics sense.

Its like a very realistic, high-fidelity computer animationbut the results could inform the next generation of nuclear research.

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Want to Know the Speed of a Complex Nuclear Reaction? - Popular Mechanics

LONDON, United Kingdom In my 35-year experience of fashion, The Show has always been the thing. Every-thing, in fact, from a small but perfectly formed moment to a sweeping spectacle for the ages. It was my outsiders way in, equal parts invitation, inspiration and celebration. It was also the most vital distillation of a designers point of view, of the story of a season, of fashions every-so-often collision with the zeitgeist.

But despite the announcement of European fashion weeks this September, The Show, at least for the moment and as I have known and loved it, is dead, one more casualty of the pandemic that promises chaos-cum-change to established orders everywhere. A growing constituency will not mourn it. In a world confronted by social, economic, health and climate crises, The Show has been pilloried as another drain on precious resources, a curio, an irrelevance even. Holding that thought, lockdown has left me who, through a happy accident rather than grand design, has spent more than half his life sitting through thousands upon thousands of shows, filming some, writing about others to revel in my own irrelevance. And in that twilight state, Ive been brooding on my own personal history with The Show. All forms of human life were there: the beautiful, the hideous, the reactionary, the revolutionary, the assured, the ambiguous, the ass-paralysing.

Diana Vreeland, the enduring template of the fashion editor, memorably wrote about a Balenciaga presentation in the early 60s where everyone was going up in foam and thunder. Twenty-five years later, I saw Vreeland at a Geoffrey Beene show in the Plaza Hotel in New York. If it wasnt exactly foam and thunder, it was at least a cloudburst of emotion that swept the audience. The first time I saw tears, and I marvelled at such a reaction. Eventually, I too would feel similarly pricked, when the sound and vision would nudge me into overload, like the climax of a favourite film, or the last plangent chords of the soundtrack of my life.

I wanted to revisit these moments, review them anew, so thats what Im going to do over the next while, one every Friday, when I would once have been sitting by runways in the real world. I thought Id start at the beginning, with Yves Saint Laurents haute couture collection for Spring 1988, the first show I ever covered in Paris. Then I think I will follow a pretty random and entirely personal selection, some chosen because they have a deep and meaningful social resonance (a Gaultier, a McQueen, a Rick Owens), others because they evoke a particularly happy memory (Galliano, say, or Mugler, or Dries Van Noten). Its an evolutionary spectrum. Hard to fathom now that youd once wait months to see any kind of visual record of the season youd just sat through, and then it would be a page of thumbnails in one of those hefty collezione things out of Italy. A show would have to live in memory (or in the sketches or scribbles in a notebook) in a way that has since been thoroughly supplanted by digitalis, and the overwhelming demands of commerce and as-it-happens content creation.

A fashion show can be something so profoundly ceremonial that it attains the peculiar power of an occult ritual.

I can appreciate why there are people who feel the arc has been devolutionary, rather than evolutionary, but Im not one of those used-to-be-better types. True, the question Ive been asked more than any other is how Ive managed to sustain my interest over such a long stretch of time. Also true, fashion isnt as infinite as quantum physics. Still, I have hardly ever been bored by The Show: tested, yes, but in half an hour, Ill be somewhere else, and a world away. I cant make art or movies or music and Im fascinated by people who can, even when what they produce is dreadful. Same with fashion. Theyre all mysteries Ive never felt compelled to solve. Who needs quantum physics when infinite patience is your most virtuous self?

So, I come to praise The Show, not to bury it. Anyway, rumours of its death are clearly exaggerated. The coming weeks will see a wave of digital simulacra, and there is hubbub about physical get-togethers in September, Second Wave willing. So, consider present circumstances a state of suspended animation, like a beauty thats sleeping. I do know this: when it wakes, it will be a very different creature. For instance, my friend Jamie in New York is working with a company called Sensorium, who are trying to perfect the virtual fashion show with a multi-pronged approach that embraces traditional video and stills, 3D motion capture and 3D photogrammetry. They talk about transcending the physical runway I guess they have to, dont they? but intriguingly, they also emphasise presence, which I take to mean the feeling of actually being somewhere. VRs genuine ability to embed you in an alternate reality was devastatingly brought home to me by Alejandro Gonzlez Irritus Carne y Arena, a short film following a group of migrants as they cross the Mexican border into the US. The sensation of sheer physical terror was jolting.

The idea of bringing a similarly potent degree of immersive emotional engagement to bear on a VR alternative to the familiar show format obviously suggests all sorts of dazzling technical possibilities. But, in my role as booster or apologist or nostalgist, Ill say that the primal element that connects the wealth of shows Ive seen over the years is the focused physicality of an audience of people gathered together in a theatre, a museum, a ballroom, a garden, an underground carpark, an abandoned coal mine or a cave to take part in something so profoundly ceremonial that it can, at its pinnacle, attain the peculiar power of an occult ritual. And you dont need a budget of millions to spark this effect. Two words: Helmut Lang. I chose his last ever show because, though no one knew it at the time, it had the wonderful feeling of heading somewhere new. Which is exactly what Helmut did, though he left fashion behind to do it. So, hindsight inevitably colours my re-visit.

I did toy with the idea of projecting myself back into the past, into the purity of seeing the thing for the first time, but that required more of a performance than Im capable of, to un-see everything thats happened since. Besides, hindsight is hella fun. Ive always wanted to know what happened next: read the last page, skip to the last episode, and then track back, fore-armed with the future. But what does happen next for The Show? By the time we can get bums on seats again, will fashion have ceremonialised another way to present itself? Or to inject a pragmatic note of the utilitarian to generate that all-important content? After all, there is an industry that needs servicing.

Time will tell. For the moment, Im just going to have to poke around in this grab-bag of golden oldies and maybe someone else will winkle out ways in which the past can seed a glorious future. Im only happy and grateful I was there to see it.

Click here to read Tim Blanks' first review in the TopFashion Shows of All Time series.

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The Death of Fashion Shows? Not So Fast. | Tim's Take | BoF - The Business of Fashion

How did environmental conditions and climate change influence early human evolution? Can protein engineering be harnessed to block the virus that causes COVID-19? How do quantum mechanics affect biological functions, and how do our memory and learning work on a cellular level in the brain?

These are some of the big questions that will be explored by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) as part of a new strategic partnership that will allow faculty and students from the two institutions to combine resources to carry out high-impact research.

Each year, the University of Toronto Hebrew University of Jerusalem Research and Innovation Alliance will select projects to receive funding of $150,000 a year for up to four years, with each research group comprising faculty drawn from both universities and covering a range of disciplines. The alliance will also occasionally provide one-time seed funding to help get promising projects off the ground.

Launched with endowed funding of $5.9 million from the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University and the family of Roz and Ralph Halbert, the alliance also aims to eventually construct an innovation pipeline between U of T and HUJI to connect the entrepreneurship ecosystems in Toronto and Jerusalem and provide student entrepreneurs with exposure to each others universities and markets.

[HUJIs] mandate with respect to research is very closely aligned to U of Ts in terms of leading the world in a variety of areas, and thats always the kind of partner were looking for, said Alex Mihailidis, U of Ts associate vice-president of international partnerships and a professor in the Faculty of Medicine's department of occupational science and occupational therapy, as well as the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering.

We both recognize that international collaborations strengthen the research within each university, and thats why were excited to partner with them.

He added that the timing of the partnership speaks to U of Ts commitment to forge ahead with research partnerships despite the challenges of working and collaborating amid the pandemic.

From an international partnerships perspective, its business as usual, said Mihailidis, who is also cross-appointed to the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. Weve not shut anything down and weve not stopped collaborations. Were going full-speed ahead its looking a bit different, but we are still moving ahead both with existing and new partners.

Both researchersdeveloped an interest in the Kalahari Chazan as an archeologist analyzing early evidence of human activity and Matmon as a geologist carrying out dating techniques to study the evolution of the landscape and theyre now looking to combine their perspectives.

The next phase of work with this funding is to expand Aris geological work, particularly looking for evidence of wet environments, so we can try and understand when there was a shift to modern arid conditions, said Chazan. At the same time, Ill be working in the town of Kathu in South Africa, which is a major mining area today, and were looking at some very large sites and trying to understand what the conditions were when this place supported large groups of people.

So its a really new area of study that combines geological perspectives on how the landscape and hydrology evolved with an archeological perspective which is asking in more narrowly focused locations what the human behaviour was and what was drawing people to these sites.

Oron Shagrir, vice-president for international affairs at HUJI, said the partnership brings together the two leading universities in Israel and Canada, and that the call for research proposals resulted in several exciting submissions.

In these challenging and unprecedented times for societies and universities alike, international partnerships are an invaluable source of support and inspiration, said Shagrir, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science. They are not only an important asset and tool in advancing universities on all levels, but also serve as a valuable platform to promote and support collaborative research projects.

Chazan points to his project as an example of how the two universities can combine their respective strengths.

At U of T, were strong in terms of field archeology and geophysics, he said. Hebrew University is particularly strong in looking at the evolution of landforms over the period of the last two to five million years ... [and] that requires some very specialized labs.

Among the labs that Chazan and his students will have access to is a high-tech facility that blocks out any modern magnetic signals to precisely study fluctuations in the earths magnetic field. Having access to that is a major asset for the project and for our students, who get to learn how to operate in that kind of system, said Chazan.

Meanwhile, Sachdev Sidhu, a professor appointed to U of Ts Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, the department of molecular genetics and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, will be working with Professor Julia Shifman of HUJIs Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Science to study how the fast-growing fields of protein engineering and design can be leveraged to develop treatments for diseases, including COVID-19.

Their project will use insights gained from past outbreaks of coronaviruses to understand the functions of the proteins that power SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes COVID-19 and to develop molecules with the potential to disarm the virus and pave the way to a potential cure.

Additionally, the U of T HUJI Research and Innovation Alliance is providing $5,000 in seed funding to two projects.

The first will see Professor Dvira Segal of U of Ts departments of chemistry and physics and Professor Roi Baer of HUJIs Fritz Haber Research Center for Molecular Dynamics and Institute of Chemistry explore the role of quantum processes in natural and engineered quantum systems.

The second aims to better understand how the brain acquires and stores information in order to help prevent and treat debilitating memory and learning disorders. The principal investigators are Associate Professors Sheena Josselyn and Paul Frankland of the department of physiology in U of Ts Faculty of Medicine, Professor Melanie Woodin of the department of cell and systems biology and HUJI scholars Adi Mizrahi, Ami Citri and Inbal Goshen.

Ronald Appleby, a U of T alumnus and campaign chair at the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, said the research efforts made possible by the partnership speak to the two universities shared commitment to advancing interdisciplinary teams of researchers and students working on translational research, bolstered by mutual respect and friendship.

The attention paid to research in engineering and medicine, the sciences, the social sciences, humanities, and law reflects our mutual interest in creating novel solutions for some of the most pressing current issues, Appleby said.

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U of T and Hebrew University of Jerusalem launch research and innovation partnership - News@UofT