Lifeboat Foundation

Topological wave structures are wave patterns that exhibit specific topological properties, or in other words, properties that remain unvaried under smooth deformations of a physical system. These structures, such as vortices and skyrmions, have attracted significant attention within the physics research community.

While physicists have carried out extensive studies focusing on topological wave structures in various wave systems, surprisingly their most classical example remains unexplored. These are water waves, oscillations or disturbances that propagate on the surface of water or other fluid.

Researchers at RIKEN recently set out to fill this gap in the literature, by offering a description of various water-wave topological structures. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, offers a theoretical framework that could inform future experiments aimed at emulating topological wave phenomena.

A team of scientists on board an exploration vessel off the coast of South America have made a startling discovery: four previously unknown massive underwater mountains, ranging from 5,200 to 8,800 feet tall. The discovery highlights just how little we know about the oceans covering much of our planet. According to recent estimates, more than 80 percent of the ocean has never been mapped, let alone explored.

“The tallest is over one-and-a-half miles in height, and we didn’t really know it was there,” Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Jyotika Virmani — whose team has been studying “seamounts” from on board the vessel Falkor — told New Scientist.

Using sonar equipment, Virmani and team investigated gravity anomalies while sailing down from Costa Rica to Chile. These anomalies are usually the result of a hard-to-discern mass — in this case, entire mountains sticking out of the ocean floor.

Meta presents MobileLLM

Optimizing sub-billion parameter language models for on-device use cases.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

Cira 2021: An ancient fragment of clay tablet dating back to 3,700 years ago, during the Old Babylonian period, contains what is now the oldest known example of applied geometry, a mathematician has discovered. That’s more than a millennium prior to the birth of Pythagoras.

And this history-altering artifact, known as Si.427, had just been sitting in a museum in Istanbul for more than 100 years.

“Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB) period — 1900 to 1,600 BCE,” said mathematician Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

While a lot of theories have been centred around attraction, the team found that the insects do not steer directly towards the light, but instead turn their dorsum towards the light. In natural light, this tilting helps insects to maintain the proper flight attitude and control. However, the models developed by the researchers showed that dorsal tilting creates the erratic flight paths around artificial light, causing the insects to continuously steer around the light and become trapped in a constant motion.

“It is the idea that short-range light entrapment is not a navigational disruption, but instead subversion of a basic flight stability reflex, predicting that requirements for stable flight can explain this phenomenon,” says Sondhi.

“The most standout result is that artificial lights confuse insects as to which way is up,” Fabian tells Physics World. “On the ground, we find this obvious. In the air, this is a lot more challenging. In-flight accelerations are indistinguishable from acceleration due to gravity. Simply taking the direction of light as being the sky works, even at night. The night has a lot less light, obviously, but the contrast between sky and ground is just as strong. This is a beautiful, robust way to work out which way is up – until we started lighting up the night.”

ウダサン creates a unique sort of magic.

“God looked upon his world and called it good, but Man was not content. He looked for ways to make it better and built machines to do the work. But in vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows.” Tinged with earthbound authenticity and verbal courtroom sparring straight out of “Perry Mason,” this classic episode finds a robot — Adam Link — on trial for the murder of the scientist who created him. “Star Trek’s” Leonard Nimoy turns in a fine performance as the cock-sure reporter who coaxes a crusty lawyer, Thurman Cutler (Howard Da Silva), out of retirement to defend the accused automaton. Based on the classic “Adam Link” stories first published in 1939’s “Amazing Stories” magazine, “I, Robot” asks the question: In the race for more complex technology, are we creating beneficial machinery…or futuristic Frankenstein monsters? In 1995, Nimoy will return to this story in the revival series of “The Outer Limits,” this time as the District Attorney.

Our history has been one of inventing ever more devastating and unstoppable weapons, and yet they may pale in comparison to those made to wreck whole galaxies or tear asunder reality itself.
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A team of economists from Switzerland and Germany has found, via model testing, that two leading theories created to explain why humans engage in cooperation with one another tend to fail under scrutiny. In their paper published in the journal Nature the group describes how further model and field testing showed that it was only when the two theories were combined that they proved able to describe scenarios where humans cooperated.

Humans cooperate with one another on a variety of levels and in different kinds of situations. Research suggests that the reason humans have evolved in a way that promotes cooperation is that it leads to an eventual payoff for both parties. Such research has also shown that it is much easier to explain how and why reciprocity works when it is clear that the person performing the first act is reasonably sure they will see the other person again, likely leading them to reciprocate.

Much more difficult to explain is why humans sometimes engage in behaviors that would normally be seen as a first move in cooperation, when there is no assurance they will see the recipient again, and thus may not reap a reward. In this new study, the research team tested theories that have attempted to explain such behavior.