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Gravitational wave detectors can now ‘autotune’ signals to harmonize the heavens

Gravitational wave researchers working on the world’s most sensitive scientific instruments have found a way to tune their detectors using a process akin to the pitch-correction used in music production.

Scientists at the international LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave observatory collaboration have employed the technique, which they call astrophysical calibration, to use gravitational-wave signals to measure the response of their incredibly sensitive instruments.

It enables them to ensure that they can clearly “hear” the sounds of colossal cosmic events like the collision of black holes, even when one gravitational wave detector is slightly out of tune. This is crucial to accurately interpret the signals and find their source location.

What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?

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It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible — but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter.

Want a very deep understanding of Black Holes? Check out the Black Hole playlist:
• Black Holes.

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Qatsi Director Godfrey Reggio: We Are in the Cyborg State!

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a filmmaker who had spent his life warning us about a future we are now living inside.

Godfrey Reggio is the director of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi, the Qatsi trilogy. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word. It means life out of balance.

In our conversation, he said something I have never been able to shake:

“It’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind. We become what we do. We become what we see. We become the routine that we are a part of.”

Read that again. Slowly.

Now look at your phone. Look at your feed. Look at the average screen time of the people around you, including yourself.

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Good vibrations for quantum communications: Engineers couple single phonon to single atomic spin

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated, for the first time, a single quantum of vibrational energy interacting with a single atomic spin, seeding a pathway to quantum technologies that use sound as an information carrier, instead of light or electricity. The results are published in Nature.

Led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, the researchers engineered a nanometer-scale mechanical resonator around a single color-center spin qubit in diamond. These color centers, atomic defects in the diamond’s crystal structure, act as quantum memory capable of storing quantum information. The researchers’ new system can host sufficiently strong spin-phonon interactions for quantum information storage—a key challenge thus far in the field.

“At the heart of the experiment is a phonon—the smallest possible unit of sound,” Lončar said. “When we listen to music, it takes countless phonons working together to move our eardrums and maybe even get us spinning on the dance floor. But qubits are far more sensitive: a single phonon can be enough to change their quantum state—to excite them, or, as in our experiment, to help them relax.”

Why The Multiverse Could Be Real

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The multiverse pops out of quite a few theories in physics, and has been proposed as a solution to certain vexing problems. But it’s also been argued that the very idea of a multiverse is just bad science. That it’s unfalsifiable and a dead-end to inquiry and as bad a violation of Occam’s razor as you could imagine. But the multiverse might also exist. Can something that exists be bad science?

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Genome Music: Rare Disease Sequences Turn Into Songs

The performance garnered a huge media attendance, allowing the team to accomplish their goal of bringing attention to SCID. Frishkopf hopes to perform the piece in a concert in the future.

Genome Music Raises Rare Disease Awareness from Concerts to Contests

From a serendipitous idea to physical compositions, Kantipuly and her collaborators have demonstrated the power of music to bring people together and work for a good cause. Recently, the team connected with another composer, Casey McPherson, who also produces genetic music but in more modern styles and the founder of To Cure a Rose, a nonprofit organization focused on developing a cure for a rare genetic disease.

Two to tango: Study shows dancers’ brains sync up as they move together

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered something that experienced ballroom dancers have long known: When dancers are in tune with each other, their brains may sync up, helping them move as one.

“When we dance, our brains are actually coupling,” said Thiago Roque, a graduate student in the Atlas Institute who led the study. “We are synchronizing our brains through our behavior.”

For the unique experiment, the researchers placed electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, or devices that measure electrical activity in the brain, on pairs doing the Argentine Tango—a sensuous dance where a leader and follower hold each other tight while moving together to music.

What If The Universe Is Math?

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In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by the observation that so many aspects of the physical world seem to be describable and predictable by mathematical equations to incredible precision especially as quantum phenomena. But quantum phenomena have no subjective qualities and have questionable physicality. They seem to be completely describable by only numbers, and their behavior precisely defined by equations. In a sense, the quantum world is made of math. So does that mean the universe is made of math too? If you believe the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis then yes. And so are you.

#space #universe #maths.

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Why Magnetic Monopoles SHOULD Exist

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What happens if you cut a bar magnetic in half? We get two magnets, each with their own North and South poles. But what happens if you keep on cutting, into fourths and eighths and sixteenths and so on? Will we ever get to a single pole? I’ll spoil the answer for you: we don’t know! But the idea of magnetic monopoles remains one of physics’ most tantalizing maybes.

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https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space…

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Dan Garisto & Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, Pedro Osinski, Adriano Leal & Stephanie Faria
GFX Visualizations: Ajay Manuel
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Assistant Producer: Setare Gholipour
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: / multidroideka.

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