Tel-Aviv University researchers have found that agreeing with people on controversial issues causes them to reconsider their opinions, becoming more accepting of differing points of view.
The study, “Paradoxical thinking as a new avenue of intervention to promote peace,” was completed by Boaz Hameiria, RoniPoratc, Daniel Bar-Tald, AtaraBielerb, and Eran Halperinb, and was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.
The researchers subjected study participants to videos of extreme versions of their beliefs–“consistent, though extreme, information” in the words of the researchers–and found that the participants sometimes came to view their opinions as irrational or absurd.
One hundred and fifty Israelis were repeatedly exposed to video clips that related to Palestinians, from the perspective of an extremist Israeli set of values. A control group watched neutral TV commercials.
The videos illustrated how the conflict with Palestine was consistent with many Israeli beliefs.
“For example, the fact that they are the most moral society in the world is one of the most basic beliefs of Israeli society,” said Eran Halperin, a psychologist at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel and one of the authors of the study. So when the researchers showed participants a video that claimed Israel should continue the conflict so that its citizens could continue to feel moral, people reacted angrily.
“You take people’s most basic beliefs and turn them into something that is absurd. For an outsider, it can sound like a joke, but for them, you are playing with their most fundamental belief.”
After being shown videos over a months-long period, participants were found to exhibit a 30 percent increase in willingness to re-evaluate their opinions on the responsibility for the conflict. The effects persisted one year after the study concluded. The study participants also reported voting more often for moderate parties, suggesting changed behavior in addition to changed opinions.
The researchers noted, however, that some study participants were effected in the opposite way, taking the videos at face value and assimilating the extreme messages into their opinions.
The significance of this work, according to the researchers, lies in a premise of most interventions that aim to promote peacemaking–that information that is inconsistent with held beliefs causes tension, which may motivate alternative information seeking.
The researchers said that they supposed facts were not at the heart of disagreements. “We truly believe that in most intractable conflicts, the real problems are not the real issues,” Halperin said. Although both sides of a conflict may know how to find resolution, “psychological barriers… prevent societies from identifying opportunities for peace.”
A recent study by Pennsylvania State and the University of Texas has looked at the varying levels of generosity exhibited by people around the world, and has found that, although some countries are much more generous than others, the issue is more complex than some might think.
The report, “Accepting Inequality Deters Responsibility: How Power Distance Decreases Charitable Behavior,” was completed by Pennsylvania State Smeal College of Business’ Karen Winterich, assistant professor of marketing, and Yinlong Zhang of the University of Texas-San Antonio, and will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research’s August edition.
“Our research examines whether cultural values can explain the different levels of charitable giving between different countries,” the authors stated. “Could power distance, which is the extent that inequality is expected and accepted, explain why some countries and consumers are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior, including donations of both money and time?”
The researchers looked at prosocial behaviors such as giving money, volunteering time and helping strangers, and found that some countries are much more generous than others. Across the world, 28 percent of people donate money, but in China, Greece and Russia, for example, only 10 percent or less do. In Australia, Ireland and Canada, over 60 percent donate money. Ten percent of Indians, Bulgarians and Singaporeans volunteer their time, while over 40 percent of Canadians, Americans and Liberians do.
The researcher found, however, that one notable factor had a marked influence on generosity in the least generous nations. The less generous nations were willing to aid victims of natural disasters and other circumstances deemed out of the personal control of the needy, but were not willing to help those people they considered to be “at fault” for their situation, such as the obese and sedentary.
The most generous nations were more willing to help all because, the researchers said, culturally they were less accepting or expectant of inequality in wealth and power.
“In a high power distance society, inequality is seen as the basis of societal order,” wrote the authors. “Uncontrollable need increases feelings of responsibility to offer aid among those who otherwise would not feel responsible to offer aid for a need that is controllable and may simply be part of the accepted inequality in society.”
A new joint collaboration between Tel Aviv University, Columbia University’s Medical Center, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has demonstrated that life events can effect the genetic heritage of an organism’s immediate descendants. The Columbia team was able to show that transgenerational memory is passed on through an organism’s short RNAs for at least three generations.
“It shows that our experiences shape our inheritance… and that’s there’s a memory of our ancestors’ lives,” Tel Aviv’s OdedRechavi, lead researcher on the project, told The Speaker.
The study, “Starvation-Induced Transgenerational Inheritance of Small RNAs in C. elegans,” was completed by Leah Houri-Ze’evi, SaritAnava, Wee Siong Sho Goh, Sze Yen Kerk, Gregory J. Hannon and Oliver Hobert, in addition to Rechavi. The study was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical institute and was published in the June 10 edition of Cell.
In its research, the team demonstrated that drastic environmental changes, such as famine, can cause genetic changes that are passed down through at least three consecutive generations.
The team demonstrated this using roundworms. The team starved roundworms for six days and examined their cells. The starved roundworms were found to have developed a specific set of small RNAs.
Small RNAs are a type of non-coding RNA (ncRNA), functional RNA molecules that are not translated into protein (as are DNA). Many ncRNAs have been newly identified in recent years, and have not yet been validated for their function. Small RNAs are involved in various aspects of genetic expression.
Dr. Oded Rechavi
“Small RNA-induced gene silencing can persist over several generations via transgenerationally inherited small RNA molecules in C. elegans,” stated Rachavi. Starvation induced changes in the roundworms’ small RNA were inherited by subsequent generations. The genetic inheritance took place apparently independent of DNA involvement.
Based on evidence of human famines and animal studies, it had long been suspected that starvation can affect the health of descendants, but the means by which such genetic inheritance was conveyed was not known.
“[E]vents like the Dutch famine of World War II have compelled scientists to take a fresh look at acquired inheritance,” said Oliver Hobert, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Animal studies have been conducted showing that, like humans who give birth during famine, animals such as rats can be caused to produce thin or obese offspring.
Roundworms were used in another small RNA-related study in 2011, when they were used to show that virus immunity developed during a parent’s life could be passed on to offspring for many generations through small RNA viral-silencing.
Hobert suspected that the small RNAs were somehow finding their way into the worms’ sperm and egg cells. “When the worms reproduced, the small RNAs could have been transmitted from one generation to the next in the cell body of the germ cells, independent of the DNA.”
How small RNAs were entering germ cells, and what types of biological experiences were registered by small RNA changes, Rechavi told The Speaker, “is a completely uncharted area.”
Rechavi said that the response to an organism’s environment was, however, “not necessarily only dietary related. In theory… any response that would produce a strong systemic small RNA response could be heritable. It’s not clear exactly how small RNAs find their way to the germline, but in worms several genes that enable cell-to-cell transfer of small RNAs have been discovered.”
In Rechavi’s previous work he has demonstrated that human immune cells, such as T or NK cells, can exchange small RNAs with other cells, and that some small RNAs can be found circulating in human blood.
“In general, I would suspect that it would be worth ‘memorizing,’ or producing a heritable response,” Rechavi told us, “cues which are really important for the survival of the organism.”
The implications of the study include that the biology of inheritance is more complicated than previously thought.
“[They] suggest that we should be aware of other things—beyond pure DNA changes—that may have a long-term impact on the health of an organism,” said Dr. Hobert. “In other words, something that happened to one generation, whether famine or some other traumatic event, may be relevant to the health of its descendants for generations.”
The study has also been said to give weight to the long-dismissed Lamarckian theory of genetics, which proposed that organisms adapt to their environment and pass on adaptations to offspring. Lamarckian genetics has traditionally been contrasted with Darwinian genetics, which theorized that all mutations were random, and the randomly mutated offspring were selected by nature according to their success surviving and reproducing.
Next for Rechavi and his team is to further pursue an understanding of the effects of environment on genetics. “We are testing how stable these effects are,” Dr. Rechavi told us. “exactly how the small RNAs are produced, and which regulated genes are most important in the process. We are also interested in examining the generality of this mechanism. This could be an important mechanism that acts side by side along with the traditional DNA-based inheritance mechanism.”
The area needed to meet the world’s current electricity needs–16,000 TWh/y–would be smaller than a 254 km x 254 km square section of the unused Sahara desert, theoretically. The demand of the EU states only could be met by a 110 x 110 km parcel. A single nation like Germany? 45 x 45 km, which is equal to less 0.03 percent of the suitable areas in North Africa.
This was the finding of the Technical University of Braunschweig’s Nadine May in 2005, when solar cells were much less efficient than today’s.
It is now possible to watch world-wide lighting strikes play live on your computer screen in real-time, and for free. Blitzortung is a free, live, lighting strike map developed by Heinrich-Heine-University of Dusseldorf professor Egon Wanke and LUCOM lead developer Tobias Volgnandt, who created the service “just to provide free and live lightning maps” for the world. Lighting strikes on the realtime maps are marked by a white expanding circle and a click-sound.
Blitzortung is, however, a community, according to developer Tobias Volgnandt. “Our great community behind the project should be in the foreground, not just we,” Volgnandt told The Speaker.
Small part of the Blitzortung community
Around the world, there are currently over 800 participants. Each of these participants has set up a lightning sensor (which are available from Blitzortung for less than 200 Euro–$270) and connected to the network of volunteers.
Currently, the network is composed of sensors mainly in Europe, North America and Australia, but the network is growing fast, and there have been requests from every continent (even Antarctica), Volgnandt told us.
Although the developers at Blitzortung make no money from the project, and created it just because they wanted to see it exist, they cannot currently handle the amount of requests they receive. The volunteers want to cover their own regions and ask for the hardware, Volgnandt told us. He stressed the community nature of Blitzortung. “We do not find volunteers, they find us. They do not do this for us, but for themselves and for our community.”
“They contact us, because they want to help. They are weather enthusiasts, amateur radio operators or have a general interest in electronics.”
Tobias Volgnandt
Volgnandt spoke to the origins and early days of the project, as well as recent developments.
“We are just enthusiasts and doing this as a hobby. We weren’t satisfied with the performance of existing lightning location hardware which private users can buy. Either it was not accurate enough or it was much too expensive. Egon Wanke created his own much cheaper hardware and locating method around 2008 which already produced very good results. This former community was much much smaller than today, but they made all this possible.
Egon Wanke
“Last year we (Egon Wanke, Tobias Volgnandt and Richo Anderson) released a new hardware generation, which is even better. We don’t have specific goals. We want to have some fun and gather experience all fields belonging to lightning locating (physics, mathematics, informatics, weather) community.”
How does the network work?
Lightning sensors located in over 800 locations around the world collect information from nearby electromagnetic storms. This information is sent via internet to the central processing servers–which receive millions of signals per hour at peak times–and the exact positions of the discharges are calculated. The data is published to the website and, within 3-6 seconds the strikes appear on users’ screens.
The question of how many sensors will be needed to cover the globe depends on many factors, according to Volgnandt, such as the constellation of the stations or their reception quality.
“At least four stations on different places are needed. They could already provide some very basic coverage in an area with 1000 x 1000 km when all parameters are good enough. The same could be true for an area of 100 x 100 km, depending on the station constellation.”
To use Blitzortung, or for information on participating and necessary equipment, please visit their site and click on the “What’s New?” page.
Researchers testing the amount of plastic garbage polluting the earth’s oceans have discovered a mystery. Instead of finding evidence of the millions of tons of durable plastic garbage expected to litter the ocean surface, they found only tens of thousands.
In the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 45,000 tons of plastic garbage reached the world’s oceans every year. Today the world produces five times as much plastic as it produced in the 70s, so researches expected to find evidence of millions of tons of plastic garbage in the oceans. They were surprised that after looking at over 3,000 samples, they found only 7,000 – 35,000 tons of plastic garbage.
The research was conducted by ecologists at the University of Cadiz in Spain. The report, “Plastic debris in the open ocean,” was completed by Andrés Cózara, Fidel Echevarríaa, Ignacio González-Gordilloa, Xabier Irigoienb, Bárbara Úbedaa, Santiago Hernández-Leónd, Álvaro T. Palmae, Sandra Navarrof, Juan García-de-Lomasa, Andrea Ruizg, María L. Fernández-de-Puellesh, and Carlos M. Duartei, and was published by the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers do not know where the missing garbage has gone. The researchers did find clues, however. A primary piece of evidence was that far fewer plastic fragments under 5 millimeters were found than larger fragments.
The researchers guessed that somehow the smallest pieces of plastic were finding their way to deeper waters.
Another guess was that mesopelagic fish, which inhabit the oceans at 660-3,300 feet below the surface, were feeding on the plastic fragments when they came to the surface at night. The researchers pointed out that the normal food of these fish is roughly the same size–zooplankton. When the fish excrete the debris, it may sink deeper, or the debris may be carried deeper when the fish die.
Another finding was that bacteria was growing on the plastic fragments. The bacteria’s weight may be pushing the fragments down, the researchers suggested.
These guesses were phrased by the researcher this way: “Our observations of the size distribution of floating plastic debris point at important size-selective sinks removing millimeter-sized fragments of floating plastic on a large scale. This sink may involve a combination of fast nano-fragmentation of the microplastic into particles of microns or smaller, their transference to the ocean interior by food webs and ballasting processes, and processes yet to be discovered.”
The surprising finding led the researchers to conclude a further question was pending. “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean,” the researchers stated.
Two marine researchers have published a report on two prominent near-bottom fish species of the northern seas, looking at how the two species fared in the warming waters of the past decade. The researchers looked at Bering Sea walleye pollock and Atlantic cod, and proposed that the differences in how the two species fared may be indicative of how other species will variously thrive or suffer during global warming.
The northern waters of both the cod and the pollock have warmed over the past decade, but one of the species appears to have prospered, while the other has diminished. “These response patterns appear to be linked to a complex suite of climatic and oceanic processes that may portend future responses to warming ocean conditions,” stated the researchers.
The report explained that Atlantic cod stock biomass has steadily increased since the 1980s, paralleling an increase in northern oceanic tempertures. Atlantic Cod, which spawn in the southern end of their territory, are thought to require warm temperatures to produce strong year classes. “During warming phases,” the report read, “the spawning stock biomass gradually builds up and the cod spawn rather north,” whereas in cooler phases spawning takes place further south. A similar trend of increasing fish stocks accompanied the warming period between the 1920s and the 1940s. The recent success of Atlantic cod stocks is thought to be the result of warmer weather, in addition to the effects of fishing limitations.
On the other hand, Bering Sea pollock–the largest fish stock in the northeast Pacific Ocean–declined in the early 2000. The stock began rising again before 2010, but did not reach pre-2000 levels.
The habitat and diet of pollock is thought to account for the difference. Bering Sea pollock feed throughout the middle and outer shelf regions and generally avoid bottom waters below 0 degrees Celsius–and so are usually found in the southern Bering Sea. The fish expand across the shelf in warmer years. The pollock stock is made up of several age groups, each of which has been affected by prey availability and the ability to accumulate winter stores of energy.
The pollock are thought to be affected by temperature most significantly in the first year of their life–due to the effects of temperature on their first summer.
The report concluded, “The response of seafloor fish species in the border regions between the boreal and Arctic domains to climate variability may provide clues to how future antrhopogenic climate change will influence fish stocks and marine ecosystems at high latitudes.”
The report also made more specific predictions about the future of Atlantic cod and Bering Sea pollock. The cod, which have already reached the shelf break and the deep polar basin, can advance no further north, and so may now advance eastward along the Siberian shelf as new habitats open up due to the loss of sea ice at the Siberian shelf and the Northeast Passage. The pollock face an uncertain future, because the suite of interacting processes that govern their health is more complex, and because sea ice is expected to continue to form in fall and winter, leaving a cold remnant in summer, making the cold pools inhospitable to the fish.
Neuroscientists and engineers at North Carolina’s Duke University have pioneered a method with which the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the brain can be measured. The Duke team has made it possible to measure the response of a single neuron to an electromagnetic charge–something that has not before been possible. The work offers the potential to improve and initiate novel TMS therapy approaches.
Dr Warren Grill
“This report focused on the innovative methodology that allowed us to record from single neurons,” Duke professor of biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and neurobiology and lead researcher on the team, Warren Grill, told The Speaker. The team was able to record an increase in a neuron’s firing rate in the wake of the short, rapidly varying magnetic field created by TMS. The increase in firing lasted approximately 100 ms after the TMS pulse, according to Grill.
The report, “Simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation and single-neuron recording in alert non-human primates,” was authored by Jerel K Mueller, Erinn M Grigsby, Vincent Prevosto, Frank W Petraglia III, Hrishikesh Rao, Zhi-De Deng, Angel V Peterchev, Marc A Sommer, Tobias Egner, Michael L Platt, in addition to Grill, was published in Nature and was supported by a Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Research Incubator Award and by a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a widely-used procedure wherein electromagnetic coils are held up to the skull and short electromagnetic pulses are run through the coil. It has long been understood that neurons react to TMS, and the procedure has been used to treat psychiatric disorders, substance abuse and other health conditions. Although preferable to other treatment methods because TMS is noninvasive, its mechanisms have always been poorly understood, making improvements difficult.
In part, the barrier to understanding the mechanisms of TMS is due to the difficulty of measuring neural responses during the procedure. The neural response is electric,and the current charging the TMS bears an overwhelmingly stronger electric charge.
Grill said of the difficulty in understanding TMS without measuring its effects, “Nobody really knows what TMS is doing inside the brain, and given that lack of information, it has been very hard to interpret the outcomes of studies or to make therapies more effective. We set out to try to understand what’s happening inside that black box by recording activity from single neurons during the delivery of TMS in a non-human primate. Conceptually, it was a very simple goal. But technically, it turned out to be very challenging.”
Although thousands of times smaller than the charge of the TMS, the neural response can be measured by the research team’s hardware. The team also overcame the obstruction posed by the recording device, which also emitted an electric current.
“Studies with TMS have all been empirical,” said Grill. “You could look at the effects and change the coil, frequency, duration or many other variables. Now we can begin to understand the physiological effects of TMS and carefully craft protocols rather than relying on trial and error. I think that is where the real power of this research is going to come from.”
The Duke team’s research is open to anyone with a lab, according to the researchers. “[A]ny modern lab working with non-human primates and electrophysiology can use this same approach in their studies,” said Grill. The team said they hope others would pursue this line of research, and contribute to improvements in TMS therapy.
“This research will allow us first to quantify and understand the effects of TMS on neurons, and subsequently to design novel approaches, including stimulation waveforms and stimulation coil design to amplify or modify those effects,” Grill told us.
Physicists at Delft University, Netherlands have teleported information. The teleportation took place over a distance of three meters (10 feet), and used a procedure called quantum entanglement. The team achieved this teleportation with 100 percent reliability and without altering the pieces of matter. Teleportation of this nature has never been accomplished before outside of fiction.
Optical element forest
The Delft team transported the information contained in one qubit to another qubit three meters away. The team accomplished this by trapping electrons in diamonds at very low temperatures, set upon and wired to microchip pedestals and surrounded by a forest of optical elements. The team then shot lasers–which were guided through the optical elements–at the diamonds to create cubits within the diamonds. The cold diamonds served as prisons for the qubits. The researchers then caused a spin state in one qubit, and recorded a correlating alteration of the spin state in the qubits contained in the second diamond. The team recorded the spin states by placing low-temperature microscopes near the diamonds.
Ronald Hanson
“We use diamonds because ‘mini prisons’ for electrons are formed in this material whenever a nitrogen atom is located in the position of one of the carbon atoms,” said lead researcher for the project Ronald Hanson. “The fact that we’re able to view these miniature prisons individually makes it possible for us to study and verify an individual electron and even a single atomic nucleus. We’re able to set the spin [rotational direction] of these particles in a predetermined state, verify this spin and subsequently read out the data. We do all this in a material that can be used to make chips out of. This is important as many believe that only chip-based systems can be scaled up to a practical technology.”
Phrased according to the report, the team “prepar[ed] the teleporter through photon-mediated heralded entanglement between two distant electron spins and subsequently encode[d] the source qubit in a single nuclear spin.”
The report, “Unconditional quantum teleportation between distant solid-state qubits,” was completed by Delft’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience’s W. Pfaff, B. Hensen, H. Bernien, S. B. van Dam, M. S. Blok, T. H. Taminiau, M. J. Tiggelman, R. N., Schouten, M. Markham, D. J. Twitchen, R. Hanson, and was published in Science Magazine.
Teleportation in fiction usually refers to a means of moving an object from one location to another without having to travel through the intervening space. Such teleportation is considered impossible according to the laws of physics In the Delft University report, an object is not transported, but a piece of information is. The Delft team transported the state of one electron to another without traversing the intermediate space–teleportation.
Small register of quantum bits under each dome
A qubit is a mechanical system, not a material. A qubit is composed of two states. For example, a photon–a single piece of light, is not a qubit–it is a particle of energy–but the process of polarizing a photon–making it rotate–is a qubit.
What is meant by quantum teleportation of a qubit is a process whereby the information of the qubit–its exact state –is transmitted from one to another qubit. How the information is transmitted through space is known as quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the quantum state of two particles cannot be described independently–instead, the quantum state refers to the system as a whole. Any changes to one qubit create corresponding changes in the other qubit.
Entanglement works to transport information, physicists believe, because of an unexplained interconnectedness between two particles. Distance is irrelevant, even across light-years.
“Entanglement is arguably the strangest and most intriguing consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics,” stated Hanson. “When two particles become entangled, their identities merge: their collective state is precisely determined but the individual identity of each of the particles has disappeared.”
The science of quantum information has faced the challenge of transferring quantum information between locations. Prior to the Delft study, an enormous error rate burdened this field of science in attempts to use entanglement to teleport information.
“The unique thing about our method is that the teleportation is guaranteed to work 100%. The information will always reach its destination, so to speak. And, moreover, the method also has the potential of being 100% accurate,” said Hanson.
Next for the Delft team is to extend the distance of teleportation. The team aims to shoot for 1,300 meters (4265 feet). The team plans to undertake this next phase this summer.
Delft team
The upcoming test, if successful, could provide evidence that would prove entanglement, and thereby disprove the rejection of the notion by Albert Einstein. There is a race in the community to be the first to prove entanglement through the “loophole-free Bell test,” considered one of the highest goals within quantum mechanics.
Implications of the research include the possibility for the development of the first true quantum computers, which are different from traditional transistor-based computers in that qubit-based computers are not confined to the 0 or 1 binary computation method, but are capable of superpositions of states–that is, quantum computers can simultaneously describe multiple values. The hope of quantum computers is that they will be vastly faster and make completely secure communications possible.
A video produced by the Delft team on teleportation:
Physicists at University of Queensland, Australia have simulated time travel using particles of light. The researchers achieved this by simulating the behavior of a single piece of light–a particle of energy–traveling on a closed timelike curve (CTC)–a closed path in space-time. The work may help to understand the longstanding problem of how time-travel could be possible in the quantum world and how the theory of quantum mechanics might change in the presence of closed timelike curves.
The work also shows how many effects, forbidden in standard quantum mechanics, may be possible inside a CTC and how light would behave differently depending on how it was created.
Martin Ringbauer
In the study, the research team simulated the behavior of a single photon that travels through a wormhole and interacts with its older self. This was achieved, PhD student Martin Ringbauer told The Speaker, by making use of a mathematical equivalence between two cases. In the first case, photon 1 “travels trough a wormhole into the past, then interacts with its older version.” In the second case, photon 2 “travels through normal space-time, but interacts with another photon that is trapped inside a CTC forever” (as shown in the illustration at top of the article). “Using the (fictitious second case) and simulating the behavior of photon 2, we were able to study the more relevant case 1,” said Ringbauer.
“We used single photons to do this,” said UQ Physics Professor Tim Ralph, “but the time-travel was simulated by using a second photon to play the part of the past incarnation of the time travelling photon.”
The paper, “Experimental Simulation of Closed Timelike Curves,” was completed by University of Queensland’s Dr Matthew Broome, Dr Casey Myers, Professor Andrew White, in addition to Professor Ralph and Martin Ringbauer, supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, and was published in Nature Communications.
In the team’s press briefing, Ringbauer commented on the relationship between the theory of general relativity and another important–but conflicting–theory, quantum mechanics. Time travel is thought to potentially help understanding the gap between the two schools of thought.
“The question of time travel features at the interface between two of our most successful yet incompatible physical theories – Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics,” said Ringbauer.
Time travel in the quantum world may avoid general relativity paradoxes such as the grandparents paradox–a timetraveller preventing his grandparents from meeting and so preventing his own time travel.
The authors of the study believe that such paradoxes can be resolved in a quantum regime, because a quantum model of closed timelike curves–such as traversable wormholes–can be formulated consistently with relativity”
Ringbauer explained the concept to The Speaker this way: “General relativity predicts the existence of closed timelike curves (e.g. by following a path through a wormhole that connects two different temporal locations in space-time). This would allow travel back in time. In the classical world this is unlikely to be possible, since it causes paradoxes, such as the grandfather paradox. In the quantum world, however, these paradoxes are resolved and time-travel can be formulated in a self-consistent way.”
Part of the reason time travel could be freed from such paradoxes in the quantum world is that the properties of quantum particles are “fuzzy” and “uncertain,” and therefore there is “wriggle room” to avoid inconsistencies in such situations, according to Professor Ralph.
Tim Ralph
Although Ralph said that there was no evidence that nature behaved differently than the laws of standard quantum mechanics, it had not been tested in vastly different environments, such as near black holes, where the extreme effects of general relativity play a role.
This is the value of the study, said Ralph. “Our study provides insights into where and how nature might behave differently from what our theories predict.”
“We see in our simulation (as was predicted in 1991),” Ringbauer stated, “how many effects become possible, which are forbidden in standard quantum mechanics. For example it is possible to perfectly distinguish different states of a quantum system, which are usually only partially distinguishable. This makes quantum cryptography breakable and violates Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We also show that photons behave differently, depending on how they were created in the first place.”
In 2012, California businessman Russ George illegally dumped 120 tons of iron sulfide over a 25,000 kilometer (15,000 mile) square area off the British Columbia coast in order to create a massive algae bloom to feed Pacific fish and increase catches. Now, salmon runs are setting a new records to the tune of an added 100,000 tons, and the results have been hailed a “a stunningly over-the-top success” in addition to being criticized by more wary environmental groups.
Russ George
Russ George initiated the precedent-setting iron sulfide test in July 2012. The test involved a geoengineering technique called ocean fertilization, whereby plankton are nourished with carbon dioxide–a source of nutrition which has decreased by 25 percent in recent decades. Russ George hoped to gain lucrative carbon credits from the project.
Iron commonly reaches offshore algae by being blown into the sea by dust storms on land, and sometimes iron enrichment occurs naturally, such as after the 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in Alaska, which spewed mineral-rich ash into the Northeast Pacific Ocean salmon pasture, causing the 2010 “volcano miracle salmon run.”
Iron nourishes the marine food cycle from the ground up, directly feeding zooplankton, which feed young salmon, which in turn feed larger fish and sea mammals.
Some of the waters that George seeded with iron, in the words of Timothy Parsons, professor emeritus of fisheries science at the University of British Columbia, were so nutrient-poor as to be a “virtual desert dominated by jellyfish.”
The iron sulphide was applied thinly from a fishing boat in an eddy 370 kilometers (200 miles) off the Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands, after George convinced the Old Masset village council to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) and offered to fund the project with $1 million of his own money. The corporation was also funded by $2.5 borrowed money from a Canadian credit union. The area covered by the dump was 25,657 km square, roughly the size of Lake Erie.
Evidence of the massive artificial plankton bloom has been provided by satellite images. The bloom is as large as 10,000 km square–10 times larger than any previous test.
Although the dump was illegal under Canadian Law (due to its scale) and United Nations resolutions (Seehere, here and here) , and although the Canadian government raided the headquarters of the offices of HSRC and George was compelled to resign from the HSRC presidency, recent evidence has suggested that the Canadian government may have known about the geoengineering scheme, but not stopped it.
George said of the project, “Let’s not make this a story all about CO2 and Carbon… it’s really about whether the ocean pastures come back to the abundance of life that they and we enjoyed 100 years ago. My hypothesis is that if we can help replenish and restore the ocean pastures we will see the results in the one thing that mankind is most connected to the ocean by, it’s FISH!
“Indeed my experiment, which at a size of 30,000+ sq. km. is perhaps the largest single experiment of its kind ever conducted, has demonstrated that the fish come back in incredible abundance, quickly… All species of fish have responded but the best data comes from those fish who swim back to us instead of making us go hunt them down.”
The largest run of Pink salmon–which take two years to mature–occurred 12-20 months after the iron seeding project took place.Salmon are able to grow bigger in rich environments and more frequently reach catchable size. In a rich ocean environment, salmon can gain more than one pound per month, it has been reported.
In the northeast Pacific Ocean, salmon catches more than quadrupled–from 50 million to 226 million–and in BC’s Fraser River, where catches only once exceeded 25 million, 72 million fish were caught.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently completed an assessment of the 2013 commercial salmon fishery. With the record pink salmon harvest of 219 million fish, the 2013 harvest ranks as the second most valuable on record. In 2013 the value of the Pink harvest was $691.1 million, below only the 1988 harvest value of $724 million. The total number of salmon harvested also set a new record at 272 million fish, well above the expected 50
million. .
This years Fraser River Sockeye salmon run is projected to be at a record high as well–twice the previous record set in 1900. Up to 72 million Sockeye are expected. In history, the number has not exceeded 45 million.
Some have hailed the project as a boon, such as leading sustainability media outlet Treehugger, who said George’s results “had truly amazing, positive impact,” and Robert Zubin, who in a piece for the National Review called the experiment “a stunningly over-the-top success.”
Other environmentalists have targeted the Haida First Nations and George for tampering with the marine environment.
“It appears to be a blatant violation of two international resolutions,” said senior high-seas adviser for the International Union for Conservation of Nature Kristina Gjerde. “Even the placement of iron particles into the ocean, whether for carbon sequestration or fish replenishment, should not take place, unless it is assessed and found to be legitimate scientific research without commercial motivation. This does not appear to even have had the guise of legitimate scientific research.”
George with algae bloom
“It is now more urgent than ever that governments unequivocally ban such open-air geoengineering experiments,” said Silvia Ribeiro, of the international anti-technology watchdog ETC Group. “They are a dangerous distraction providing governments and industry with an excuse to avoid reducing fossil-fuel emissions.”
One of the witnesses to an unprecedented 2012 orca group sighting commented, “If Mr. George’s account of the mission is to believed, his actions created an algae bloom in an area half of the size of Massachusetts that attracted a huge array of aquatic life, including whales that could be ‘counted by the score.’ . . . I began to wonder: could it be that the orcas I saw were on the way to the all you can eat seafood buffet that had descended on Mr. George’s bloom? The possibility . . . provides a glimpse into the disturbing repercussions of geoengineering: once we start deliberately interfering with the earth’s climate systems — whether by dimming the sun or fertilizing the seas — all natural events can begin to take on an unnatural tinge. . . . a presence that felt like a miraculous gift suddenly feels sinister, as if all of nature were being manipulated behind the scenes.”
Specific criticisms of the project include an idea of “ocean dead zones,” which result from too much plankton. George has responded to this criticism by saying that iron seeding “can only work in regions of the ocean far out to sea and where the water is miles deep… such locations are as different from the shallow near shore regions where ocean dead zones exist as are grasslands and mountain tops… .”
Another criticism is that the nourishment may create toxic blooms and “domoic acid.” George has responded to this criticism by saying that previous blooms in many areas did not cause such a feature in the ocean.
Scientists at Northwestern University have found evidence that four times the amount of water commonly thought to exist on Earth actually exists. The study, based on years of seismographical data, shows the existence of massive amounts of water located 255-400 miles (410-660 kilometers) under the surface of the Earth–equivalent to three times Earth’s oceans–and has caused a reassessment of the origin of Earth’s waters.
Evidence of the underground reservoir comes from years of US monitoring of subsurface movements. Researchers now believe they have found proof that a huge water reservoir exists in the transition zone–between the upper and lower mantle, the the two layers below the Earth’s crust.
The transition zone contains a mineral that has a high water storage capacity, called ringwoodite. Scientists believe ringwoodite fills the mantle.
Ringwoodite has been experimented on, and under extreme pressure, it has been found to trap water.
Ringwoodite (Photo credit: Richard Siemens)
The ringwoodite sinks into the mantle when oceanic crusts slide under adjoining plates and are forced further and further down. As even more weight bears on the ringwoodite from above, the water trapped in the mineral is forced out. This process is called hydration melting.
The amount of water held in subsurface ringwoodite is expected to be around three times the amount that fills the Earth’s oceans. Transition-zone ringwoodite would have to contain 2.6 percent water to bear this amount. The amount of water thought to be under the Earth, if it were on the surface, would only leave the tops of Earth’s mountains poking out as islands.
Given this information, scientists also believe there is more grounds to believe the Earth’s oceans came from within the Earth–the so-called “whole-Earth water cycle”–not from icy comets, the other popular theory.
The depth of the water is unreachable with contemporary tools, however. The deepest modern tools have drilled into the earth is 7.5 miles (12 kilometers)–halfway through the Earth’s crust. At that depth, the drill bit began to melt from geothermal heat.
Graham Pearson
The study supports the research of University of Alberta’s Graham Pearson, who found that a diamond from the transition zone expelled by a volcano contained water-bearing ringwoodite. Pearson has since found another ringwoodite crystal that also contained water.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a widely-used procedure wherein electromagnetic coils are held up to the skull and short electromagnetic pulses are run through the coil. It has long been understood that neurons react to TMS, and the procedure has been used to treat psychiatric disorders, substance abuse and other health conditions. Although preferable to other treatment methods because TMS is noninvasive, its mechanisms have always been poorly understood, making improvements difficult.
In the northeast Pacific Ocean, salmon catches more than quadrupled–from 50 million to 226 million–and in BC’s Fraser River, where catches only once exceeded 25 million, 72 million fish were caught.
