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Mar 12, 2019

The Physics Still Hiding in the Higgs Boson

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics

But no other new particles have materialized at the LHC, leaving open many mysteries about the universe that the Standard Model doesn’t address. A debate has ensued over whether to build an even more enormous successor to the LHC — a proposed machine 100 kilometers in circumference, possibly in Switzerland or China — to continue the search for new physics.

Physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs boson itself. What’s known is that the particle’s existence confirms a 55-year-old theory about the origin of mass in the universe. Its discovery won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs and François Englert, two of six theorists who proposed this mass-generating mechanism in the 1960s. The mechanism involves a field permeating all of space. The Higgs particle is a ripple, or quantum fluctuation, in this Higgs field. Because quantum mechanics tangles up the particles and fields of nature, the presence of the Higgs field spills over into other quantum fields; it’s this coupling that gives their associated particles mass.

But physicists understand little about the omnipresent Higgs field, or the fateful moment in the early universe when it suddenly shifted from having zero value everywhere (or in other words, not existing) into its current, uniformly valued state. That shift, or “symmetry-breaking” event, instantly rendered quarks, electrons and many other fundamental particles massive, which led them to form atoms and all the other structures seen in the cosmos.

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Mar 12, 2019

Aging Analytics Agency Photo 2

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, policy

And Vetek Association present their list of the top 60 Longevity Influencers in Israel, whose efforts in science, technology, industry and policy are driving the growth of the Israeli Longevity Landscape.

Link to the Report: https://www.aginganalytics.com/longevity-in-israel

Aaron Ciechanover Anat Ben-Zvi, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist Boaz Misholi Dov Chernichovsky — דב צ’רניחובסקי Ehud Cohen Eyal banin Idan Segev Ilia Stambler Israel Issi Doron Itamar Harel Itamar Raz Jonathan Mandelbaum Michael Neeman Mooly Eden Nir Barzilai MD Rafi Eitan Raphael Gorodetsky Ruth Arnon Uri Alon Valery Krizhanovsky Yael Sorek-benvenisti Yechezkel Barenholz Yosef Gruenbaum.

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Mar 12, 2019

BBC announces Planet Earth for plants and new global series fronted by David Attenborough

Posted by in category: futurism

Will the new series make stars of our friends in the plant kingdom?


Mar 12, 2019

Your body has internet—and now it can’t be hacked

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, internet, security

Someone could hack into your pacemaker or insulin pump and potentially kill you, just by intercepting and analyzing wireless signals. This hasn’t happened in real life yet, but researchers have been demonstrating for at least a decade that it’s possible.

Before the first crime happens, Purdue University engineers have tightened security on the “internet of body.” Now, the network you didn’t know you had is only accessible by you and your devices, thanks to technology that keeps within the body itself.

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Mar 12, 2019

Japan’s moon rover will be made by Toyota

Posted by in categories: space, transportation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1kd2nFHAAtU

The team hope to deploy the vehicle to the lunar surface in 2029.

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Mar 12, 2019

When Science Journalism Becomes Dangerous

Posted by in category: science

As research is simplified to suit a mainstream audience, some things get lost in translation.


Science journalism in mainstream media tends to oversimplify, and sometimes distort, complex research. When this causes misunderstandings and a lack of personal responsibility, it’s a problem.

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Mar 12, 2019

New understanding of sophistication of microbial warfare

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, military

Scientists have known for a century that viruses attack and sometimes kill bacteria, much the way humans come down with the flu. But only recently have they begun to understand the biochemistry that happens as bacteria and virus strive for competitive advantage, with far-reaching implications for medicine and more.


Researchers explain how viruses make a molecular decoy that is used to subvert the CRISPR-Cas bacterial immune system.

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Mar 12, 2019

Volvo’s first electric driverless bus swings into action in Singapore

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Singapore is intent on positioning itself at the vanguard of self-driving technologies. Now it is looking to ramp things up even further, rolling what it claims to be the world’s first full size, autonomous electric bus onto a university campus in partnership with Volvo.

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Mar 12, 2019

Unmasking Clever Hans predictors and assessing what machines really learn

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

Is your AI intelligent or just looking like it’s intelligent? In many ways, this depends on your idea of AI and what it is supposed to do. Scientists at Singapore University of Technology and Design have worked out a way to check for the issue. Open Access Journal: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08987-4


Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly intelligent behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.

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Mar 12, 2019

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

Posted by in category: quantum physics

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

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