Lutungs shine with their coloured coats

 

   Lutungs shine with their            coloured coats

These South-east Asian monkeys sport striking shiny coats

LOOK AT THIS beautiful family. Named the ebony lutung (Trachypithecus auratus), these Indonesian natives belong to one of the most unique group of primates in the world, the lutungs.

Lutungs spend their days in the forests of Southeast Asia, including the Indonesian islands, Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Borneo and India, keeping to the coast and flanking the rivers where the trees offer the newest, most nutritious fruits and leaves.

As with all primates, their social lives are everything, and the males in particular have it pretty good within their family groups. It's often just one of them with a bunch of females, and sometimes there'll be as many as 40 females in a single harem. Not that the females mind too much - they groom each other and cuddle up in the trees and help each other with their young.

There's usually very little aggression within a family group, possibly because lutungs specialise in eating leaves, so there's always plenty of food to go around. It also helps that these monkeys feed while facing the tree trunks - if you don't know what your competition is eating, you can't get jealous!

The females will each have one infant per pregnancy, and these babies are born looking like furry little nuggets of gold.

In ebony lutungs, the infants are born golden before quickly developing the dark coat and skin of its parents, while in silvered leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus cristatus), the infant will retain its orange coat for up to five months.

In the subspecies Trachypithecus auratus auratus from East Java, some individuals will retain their orange coat throughout adulthood.

This special orange coat is called a natal coat, and researchers have suggested that its purpose is to make sure the dominant males don't kill their young sons before they have a chance to mature and form separate family groups of their own.

It could also help families to quickly locate their infants in a moment of danger, like when a rival group infiltrates their territory. Either way, it's one of the most stunning colours you could hope to see in a primate.

Computers can now automatically select the best embryos for life

Computers can now automatically select the best embryos for life

A new computer program can identify embryos with the highest potential for a successful pregnancy, raising IVF success rates to 76%.

Image: CARE Fertility

A team of researchers led by clinical embryologist Simon Fisher from Care Fertility in the UK has developed a program that uses time-lapse studies and predictive algorithms to determine the viability of individual embryos being used in IVF treatments. The results allow embryologists to classify each embryo as being of low or high risk of being chromosomally abnormal, which is the largest single cause of IVF failure and miscarriage.

According to James Baker at SPLOID, the program works with an algorithm that predicts the success of an embryo based on what it’s doing at specific stages in its development. Along with images captured at 10-minute intervals, these predictions are delivered to embryologists, enabling them to select the most viable embryos to carry through an IVF treatment.

“So far we have seen a 56 percent uplift compared to conventional technology, giving our patients … a 76 percent chance of a live birth rate," says Fisher, adding that the program can be used in any fertility treatment, and is non-invasive.

What causes Brazil's 'Meeting of the Waters'?

What causes Brazil's 'Meeting of the Waters'?

This is what it looks like when the Solimões River meets the Rio Negro in Brazil. 

Image: Danocoo1/Reddit.com

Almost 10 kilometres from the inland city of Manaus in northern Brazil, ‘the Meeting of the Waters’ is the point where two of Amazon River’s largest tributaries - a smaller river that flows into a bigger ‘parent’ river - converge but never mix.

The Solimões River forms the lighter half, its ‘cafe au lait’ colouring owed to the rich sediment that runs down from the Andes Mountains, including sand, mud and silt. Known as a ‘white water river’, the Solimões River stretches over a 1600 km distance. 

The darker side is the Rio Negro, and it gets its ‘black tea’ hue from leaf and plant matter that has decayed and dissolved in the water. It might look dark and murky, but the Rio Negro carries little or no sediment, and according to the European Space Agency website, is considered one of the cleanest natural waters in the world. On really clear days, water visibility in this black water river can exceed nine metres. 

If this really was milky coffee and black tea, the Meeting of the Waters would require the worst’s most humungous cup. Robert Meade, who spent decades studying these rivers for the U.S. Geological Survey, told Nasa’s Space Observatory website, “Put in terms of the sheer quantities of water, what we are seeing here is a volume of water at least a dozen times greater than the total of the water falling over the Niagara, Iguassu, and Victoria Falls combined.”

The Solimões River and Rio Negro flow side-by-side over distance of six kilometres. The reason they never mix is because of the stark differences in temperature, speed and water density between the two. The Solimões is faster, cooler and denser, its waters flowing up to 6 km/h at 22 degrees Celsius, and the warmer, slower waters of the Rio Negro flow at a more leisurely 2 km/h, and maintain a temperature of around 28 degrees Celsius.

After several kilometres, the two rivers eventually converge thanks to a blast of fast-moving whitewater, and become part of the Lower Amazon River.

A quadriplegic man has regained control of his arm thanks to a chip implanted in his brain

A quadriplegic man has regained control of his arm thanks to a chip implanted in his brain

For the first time ever an implanted neural microchip has restored control of a patient’s paralysed muscles.

Image: Sky News

In a HUGE breakthrough, researchers have implanted a microchip into the brain of a quadriplegic patient, and allowed him to move his hand using just his thoughts.

Ian Burkhart, 23, was paralysed in a car accident, but is now able to move his hand for the first time in four years thanks to a device called Neurobridge.

Developed by researchers at Ohio State University and Batelle, a not-for-profit research organisation located at the university, Neurobridge is a microchip that’s implanted into a patient’s motor centre - the area of the brain that relays signals that tell muscles to move. 

Usually these signal would be transmitted via the body’s nerves, but in patients who are paralysed due to nerve damage, the message can’t get through. This has long been thought be an irreversible disability.

The Neurobridge, however, use an algorithm to translate these brain impulses into signals and sends them directly to a muscle stimulation sleeve - in this case worn on Burkhart’s arm - effectively cutting out the middle man and giving the brain muscular control back. It's almost like an electronic spine.

And after years of research, the researchers have finally proved it works.

“Where we are now to me is still staggering in its implications,” Dr W. Jerry Mysiw, Burkhart’s doctor, explains in the Ohio State University Medical Centre video below.

The chip sends the impulses in less than a tenth of a second, so while the response isn’t as fast as biological pathways, the movement is almost instantaneous. This opens up huge possibilities for paralysed people and could eventually help them lead relatively normal lives.

The Neurobridge took three hours to implant into Burkhart’s brain back in April and is roughly the size of a pea.

Things still need to be fine tuned. In the groundbreaking video below, Burkhart moves his fingers for the first time in four years and attempts to hold a spoon, but he doesn’t have much dexterous control. But this is a big first step towards restoring movement to people who are paralysed due to injury and even stroke.

Optimus Prime explains why you need to be excited about the James Webb Space Telescope

The successor of the much-loved Hubble Telescope will be launching in 2018, and it'll use mind-blowing technology to help us see the birth of the Universe.

Image: NASA

You probably don't need to be convinced that Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be awesome. But in case you did, Peter Cullen, the voice of Transformers' Optimus Prime, has helped explain why it'll be so groundbreaking in this awesome videointroducing what will be one of humanity's greatest tools for understanding the Universe.

http://youtu.be/X1m68NSaTYs

As Michael Shara, from the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics,told io9, the James Webb Space Telescope will have 100 times the capabilities that Hubble does.

It's also much larger - the observatory will be launched to an orbit 1.6 million kilometres from Earth and will fold out a tennis court-sized sun shield and 6.4-metre-wide wide primary mirror. This beryllium mirror system is the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope, and is made up of 18 giant mirror segments.

The telescope also uses microshutters - new technology that will allow it to record the spectra of light from distant objects and simultaneously observe up to 100 objects in any field in the sky.

Basically all of this means that it's so powerful that it will actually be able to see the first stars forming and the beginning of galaxies after the Big Bang. Yep, that's right, this telescope will let us see the BIRTH of the Universe.

Astrophysicists also think that they'll be able to directly image planets orbiting other stars. But perhaps what is most exciting is that they really don't yet know the limits of the telescope or what its biggest discoveries will be.

Before Hubble, for example, we had no idea that Dark Energy existed - now as far as we're aware it makes up 70% of the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope will likely make similar unexpected breakthroughs.

Giant Foot Print 200 Million Yrs Old Found in South Africa

Giant Foot Print 200 Million Yrs Old Found in South Africa

South African Author, Scientist, Researcher and Explorer Michael Tellinger (often called ‘The South African Indiana Jones’) shows off what could be one of the best pieces of evidence that there were once giants living on Earth a long, long time ago. Geologists have been marvelling at this giant foot print in rough granite, about 4 feet long. Some still say that it is a natural erosion pattern, but for now it’s hard to say.

Prof. Pieter Wagener from UPE, suggests that “thereis a higher probability of little green men arriving from space and licking it out with their tongues, than being created by natural erosion”. It is located in South Africa, near the town of Mpaluzi, close to the Swaziland border. It is estimated to be between 200 million and 3 Billion years old because of our current understanding of the formation of granites in Earth’s history. This dating immediately causes great debate and argument – so I urge you to keep your mind open and focused on the evidence.

This amazing footprint in granite was discovered in 1912 by a hunter called Stoffel Coetzee, while hunting in the remote area. At the time this was a deeply remote part of South Africa known as the Eastern Transvaal, teeming with wildlife, including antelope and lions. It remains in the same condition as it was when first discovered and the possibility that this was a carved hoax is extremely low because of its remote location. Even today, it is difficult to find. The real mystery is how this amazing phenomenon occured – I have no idea – but here it is and we cannot wish it away. YES – It is granite – it is a well recognised geological part of South Africa and recorded on all geological maps – that is why this footprint is such an incredible mystery. It can be desribed as a “phenocrystic” granite, OR coarse porphyritic granite, that underwent several different stages of cooling. The result being an interesting mixture of large and small granules. This is why granite companies are keen to mine this area for granite because it will look really “pretty” when polished. In the official Geology Of South Africa, this outcrop is called Mpuluzi Batholith (Granite) and the official dating of this rock produced dates of around 3,1 billion years.

This is a real mystery that needs close scientific examination. I’ve included a second video below, so you can hear more about it.  If you want even more, make sure to do some research into Michael’s work. Much of it is truly mind blowing, especially when it comes to ancient Stone Circles and what are believed to be Annunaki gold mines.

A new spider species with a dirt armour has been discovered

A new spider species with a dirt armour has been discovered

A spider that encrusts itself in dirt was found lurking in the tropical rainforests of Veracruz, in eastern Mexico.

Image: Jorge I. Mendoza/UNAM

A previously unknown species of spider belonging to the genus Paratropis has been discovered in the tropical rainforest in Veracruz, eastern Mexico, in the natural reserve La Estación de Biología Tropical “Los Tuxtlas”.

According to the researchers from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, this is the first North American record of the Paratropididae family found in the tropical Americas. Other members of this family have been found in Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Panama and the West Indies.

Named Paratropis tuxtlensis, the spider is a master of camouflage. It covers its entire body with soil particles that stick to it, forming an armour-like ‘disguise’ that keeps them safe from potential predators. The spider, the researchers explained in a news release, "has glandular pores that excrete a sticky secretion to help stick the soil particles to its body".

The brownish-red spider with olive markings on its legs doesn’t burrow, it just hides under rocks and in the soil, waiting patiently for prey to come by.

“The specimens were collected in tropical rainforest, under boulders on the ground. They remained motionless when they were exposed by removing the rock that provided shelter, possibly as a defense mechanism because the soil particles encrusted on the body cuticle serves as camouflage with the moist ground," wrote the researchers in a paper published in the journal ZooKeys.

What causes a double red rainbow?

What causes a double red rainbow?

This beautiful pair of red rainbows is caused by fascinating optical phenomena.

Image: Manolis Thravalos

This amazing photograph, captured at sunset on 27 April 2014 by Manolis Thravalos from Samos Island, Greece, shows two red-hued rainbows. And no, it's not Photoshopped. 

So what caused this amazing spectacle? There are many optical phenomena in play, as io9 explains.

Firstly, you need to understand how a regular rainbow works - when sunlight passes through a raindrop, it refracts, and white light is split into an arc of colour. The wavelengths of light refract at different angles, which is why blue is always at the bottom of a primary rainbow. 

But not only does the sunlight refract through water droplets, some of it also reflects. A double rainbow occurs when there is an extra reflection of light within the water drop. As some light is lost when it hits the edge of the drop, this secondary rainbow is fainter than the first, and also has a reversed colour order.

So why are both the rainbows red in this image? The answer is Rayleigh scattering, which is the scattering of light by tiny particles in the atmosphere. This scattering is what causes the Sun to appear yellow and the sky to appear blue, and also results in red sunsets where the atmosphere is thicker around the horizon. 

And because of this optical phenomenon, only the longest wavelengths of light of these rainbows - the red ones - are visible.

New white dwarf star is an Earth-sized diamond

New white dwarf star is an Earth-sized diamond

Astronomers have identified a white dwarf star that’s so cold, its carbon core has crystallised to form one big diamond.

Image: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

White dwarf stars are formed when a red giant - like our Sun - runs out of fuel. With no more hydrogen to keep it burning, the red giant will collapse on itself, shrink down to about one hundredth of its original size, and gradually get colder and dimmer over billions of years. Called white dwarves, these ancient star remnants have become tightly packed nuggets of carbon and oxygen, with a mass comparable to that of our Sun squished into the volume of the Earth. 

All this cooling and compacting crystallises the white dwarf’s carbon core, and what does crystallised carbon make? Diamonds. In this case, a diamond the size of the Earth.

A new white dwarf star has been detected by a team of astronomers from observatories around the world, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array in the US and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and it's colder than any other white dwarf star ever found. Sitting around 900 light-years away from Earth, it’s about 11 billion years old - the same age as the Milky Way - and is 10 times fainter than any white dwarf ever discovered. This makes it super-hard to spot.

“It’s a really remarkable object," one of the astronomers, David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US, told Astronomy.com. “These things should be out there, but because they are so dim, they are very hard to find."

The only reason they found it was because it had a companion - a pulsar, named PSR J2222-0137. This pulsar spins around the white dwarf at a rate of 30 times per second. Pulsars are remnants of exploded stars, and unlike white dwarves, are easy to spot, thanks to the powerful radio waves that continuously burst from them into space. 

According to Astronomy.com, Einstein himself had a hand in connecting the pulsar to its companion white dwarf:

By applying Einstein’s theory of relativity, the researchers studied how the gravity of the companion warped space, causing delays in the radio signal as the pulsar passed behind it. These delayed travel times helped the researchers determine the orientation of their orbit and the individual masses of the two stars. The pulsar has a mass 1.2 times that of the Sun and the companion a mass of 1.05 times that of the Sun.

The newly discovered white dwarf star is the coolest white dwarf ever found, the researchers calculating its temperature to be around 2700 degrees Celsius (4900 degrees Fahrenheit). When you consider that some white dwarfs can reach temperatures of 200,000 degrees Celsius, our new diamond in the sky is pretty chilled.

Physicists have made it 72 times faster to boot up quantum computers

Scientists normally spend six hours booting up quantum computers each day, but a new algorithm has cut the process down to just five minutes.

Image: Erik Lucero/UCSB

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionise the way we analyse and store data, but they're also extremely sensitive. 

Even when working with a chip with just five quantum bits or 'qubits' on it, scientists need to spend hours each day calibrating and setting up the chip so that it functions properly. This is because quantum computers are extremely sensitive to tiny changes in the local environment, such as temperature, humidity and air pressure. If it's slightly warmer one day than the day before, the computer has to be completely recalibrated.

To do this, quantum physicists sit down each day and see how conditions have changed slightly from the day before. They then recalibrate the chip accordingly, and only a 0.1 percent error rate is allowable when measuring the ambient conditions. If the measurements are further out than that, the quantum computer won't work. To put it another way, just one in a thousand measurements can be slightly off for the computer to boot up, and each time around 50 different parameters need to be measured and compared to the day before. 

But now, a researcher from Saarland University in Germany has reworked the whole rebooting process. 

"We asked ourselves the question: Why is it necessary each and every day to understand how conditions differ from those of the day before?' The answer we eventually came up with was that it isn't necessary," said Professor Frank Wilhelm-Mauch, leader of the project, in a press release. "What's important is that the setup procedure produces the right results. Why it produces the right results is not so relevant."

Instead, the team came up with another algorithm that reduced the error rate to below 0.1 percent and sped the time up from six hours to five minutes. Even more importantly, the calibrations are done automatically.

"For the calibration procedure we used an algorithm from engineering mathematics, strictly speaking from the field of civil and structural engineering, as that's another area in which experiments are costly," explained Professor Wilhelm-Mauch.

The methodology has now been rigorously tested and proved by physicists from the University of California in Santa Barbara. The Saarbrücken methodology as its called, is known as Ad-HOC (Adaptive Hybrid Optimal Control). The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

The research means that experimental quantum physicists now just have to push a button and then go and get a coffee for five minutes before they can use the quantum computing system for a day of research - in the past by the time system was booted up there were only a few hours left for experiments.

Australian scientists are using genetics to breed more sustainable prawns

A new project will create tiger prawns that grow faster and are disease-resistant in the hopes of establishing the world’s largest and most sustainable tiger prawn farm.

Image: James Cook University

Prawns, alongside other Australian seafood, are becoming an increasingly popular culinary choice around the world. Now scientists from James Cook University are working with the latest genetic techniques to make them cheaper and easier to farm in order to keep up with the demand.

A team of researchers led by Professor Dean Jerry is working to unlock the genetic secrets of the black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon) so that breeders can use the information to develop strains that grow faster and resist disease. 

The newly funded program is known as “Unleashing the Tiger".

“There have been decades of struggling to expand in an exceedingly regulated and high-cost economy and reach the critical mass where the industry can support an efficient industrial-scale selective breeding program,” said Professor Jerry in a press release.

“In essence, Unleashing the Tiger will produce a farmed prawn that will be the most efficient and sustainable to farm globally, while producing a product with quality attributes that the whole world will want to buy and consume.”

While in the past genetic breeding practices, which involve studying desirable traits in individuals and then amplifying them through breeding, have been used to transform livestock and crop farming, this is one of the first projects that will assist aquaculture species.

New materials are as light as "frozen smoke" but 10,000 times stiffer

New materials are as light as "frozen smoke" but 10,000 times stiffer

Researchers have worked out how to 3D print super-stiff materials that are lighter than aerogel, and could revolutionise the aerospace and automotive industries.

Image: Ryan Chen/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The new materials are as light as aerogel, a synthetic porous material that's the lowest known density solid - but 10,000 time tougher. They were created by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US using an additive micro-manufacturing process. 

This means that the researchers first create 3D microscale super-tough "building blocks", so that the strength comes from the materials' geometric layout rather than their chemical composition.

Using this method, the researchers created materials out of polymer, metal and ceramic lattices that are unlike anything found in nature. The lightest of these is a ceramic-based material.

Most materials lose their mechanical properties as they get lighter because their structural elements are more likely to bend under extreme pressure. But the materials created using this new technique maintain a nearly constant stiffness per unit mass density, even at ultraslow densities, and could be used to create lightweight and super tough parts for aircrafts, space vehicles and cars. 

The team's research has been published in Science.

"These lightweight materials can withstand a load of at least 160,000 times their own weight," said Xiaoyu "Rayne" Zheng, lead author of the paper article from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in a press release. "The key to this ultrahigh stiffness is that all the micro-structural elements in this material are designed to be over constrained and do not bend under applied load."

Even better, they were created using a 3D desktop printer.

To begin with, the researchers first created a polymer core that acted as template for the microlattices. This was then coated with a thin-film of metal that ranged from 200-500 nanometres thick and the polymer was removed, leaving a light, tough tube of metal lattice material.

They then repeated the process with a 50-nanometre-thick ceramic coating. This resulted in a material around the same weight as aerogel, or frozen smoke, which holds the most word records of many material - in fact, the record holding graphene aerogel is 7.5 times lighter than air.

Image: Aerogel by JovanCormac/Wikimedia

"It's among the lightest materials in the world," co-author Chris Spadaccini said of the new ceramic material. "However, because of its micro-architected layout, it performs with four orders of magnitude higher stiffness than aerogel at a comparable density."

The team also created polymer-ceramic hybrid microlattice, with similar properties. According to the new paper, these materials are 100 times stiffer than other ultra-lightweight lattice materials previously reported in academic journals.

These new smart curtains respond to light and don't need batteries

These new smart curtains respond to light and don't need batteries

Scientists have made a new material out of carbon nanotubes that moves in response to as little light as that from a torch.

Image: whatsupic

Curtains that move in response to light could soon be a reality thanks to research conducted at the University of California, Berkley, in the US.

A team led by associate professor Ali Javey layered carbon nanotubes, which are tiny cylindrical structures made out of carbon allotropes, onto a plastic carbonate membrane to develop a new type of material that moves in response to light.

The carbon nanotubes absorb light, convert it into heat and transfer it to the plastic membrane, causing the membrane to expand and the composite material to bend.

“The advantages of this new class of photo-reactive actuator [a system for moving or controlling a mechanism] is that it is very easy to make, and it is very sensitive to low-intensity light,” Javey explains in a news release. “The light from a flashlight is enough to generate a response.”

The researchers believe this material could be used in energy-efficient buildings, where curtains could open and close automatically throughout the day.

The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications. Watch the video below to see how the material works.

"The 4th Dimensional Triangle"

The 4th Dimensional Triangle

"The 4th Dimensional Triangle"

Triangulation is Spirit's step to create form, enclosure, matter.
From the fertile union of Father and Mother, the Original 1 and 2,
a Child is born, the Essence of 3. It's name is Triangle.
Its next child is Volume called Tetrahedron or triangular-based pyramid
that is the leggo or basic building block of Earth's creations.
(If you had 5 cardboard-model tetrahedrons, ie: 5 Tetrahedra on your table, and you glued 4 of them around the 4 triangular faces of the 5th Tetrahedron, you would have this 4-Dim Triangle. Interestingly, if you shined a laser beam or light upon a wire-frame model of this,
its shadow would surprisingly create the 5-Pointed Star, which is the shape of all your proteins!).
From there, as we climb the Dimensional Ladder of Consciousness, our Stairway To Heaven,
is the 4th Dimensional Triangle, so mysterious, unfathomable, abstract, yet so simple, so pure, it has No Name;
it's progeny is All That Is, returning us, trinitizing us, back to The One.

Yes, staring at a screen all day DOES damage your eyes, and here's how

A new study has shown that working in front of a monitor for more than seven hours per day may lead to symptoms similar to those of dry eye disease.  

Image: bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock

Tears keep your eyes healthy, clean and lubricated. People who do not produce enough tears suffer from a condition known as dry eye, in which not enough moisture is produced to keep the surface of the eyeball lubricated. This leads to pain, grittiness, vision blur and stinging. According to the authors of a new study published in JAMA Ophthalmology, people who spend more than seven hours per day in front of a computer screen may experience similar symptoms. 

Researchers in Japan recruited 96 volunteers (60 men and 36 women) whose job requires long sessions in front of a screen. The scientists measured the quantity of the protein MUC5AC in the office workers' tears and asked them to fill in a questionnaire. MUC5AC is found in ‘tear film’, a layer of mucus that keeps the eye moist and is necessary for good vision, explained Robert T. Gonzalez at io9. 

When we stare at screens we blink less frequently and tend to open our eyes wider than when performing other tasks, such as reading a book, which contributes to faster tear evaporation. According to the study, people who continuously stare at computers screens have MUC5AC concentrations almost as low as those that have been diagnosed with dry eye. 

Participants who work with computer screens for more than seven hours a day had an average of 5.9 ng/mg of MUC5AC, while those who spend fewer than five hours in front of a monitor had 9.5 ng/mg. In comparison, people who definitely have dry eye measure an average of 3.5 ng/mg of MUC5AC, while people without the disease have 8.2 ng/mg. 

So what to do to keep your eyes moist and healthy? Doctors recommend keeping a humidifier in your office space and avoiding direct contact with air conditioners. One of the authors, Dr Yuichi Ochino also recommended over at The Independent: “The exposed ocular surface area can be decreased by placing the terminal at a lower height, with the screen tilted upward”.

Time travel has been simulated by Australian physicists

Using photons, scientists have simulated a way that quantum particles could travel through a wormhole back in time.

Image: edobric/Shutterstock

Physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia have used photons - single particles of light - to simulate quantum particles travelling through time and study their behaviour.

They were hoping to find out more about whether time travel would be possible at the quantum level - a theory first predicted in 1991.

In the study, the researchers simulated the behaviour of a single photon that travels through a wormhole and interacts with its older self. This is known as a closed timelike curve - a closed path in space-time that returns to the same starting point in space but at an earlier time. Their study is published in Nature Communications.

They did this by making use of a mathematical equivalence between two cases, lead author Martin Ringbauer told The Speaker. 

In the first case, photon one "travels trough a wormhole into the past, then interacts with its older version,” Ringbauer explained. And in the second case, photon two travels through normal space-time, but interacts with another photon that is trapped inside a closed timelike curve forever.

"We used single photons to do this but the time-travel was simulated by using a second photon to play the part of the past incarnation of the time travelling photon," said University of Queensland physics professor Tim Ralph. 

The research will hopefully help researchers bridge the gap between two critical theories, said Ringbuaer.

"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," Ringbuaer explained.

"Einstein's theory describes the world at the very large scale of stars and galaxies, while quantum mechanics is an excellent description of the world at the very small scale of atoms and molecules,” he added.

According to Einstein’s theory, it could be possible to travel back in time by following a closed timelike curve. However physicists and philosophers have struggled with this theory given the paradoxes such as the grandparents paradox, where a time traveller could prevent their grandparents from meeting, thus preventing the time traveller’s birth in the first place.

But in 1991 it was suggested that time travel in the quantum world would avoid these kinds of paradoxes because the properties of quantum particles are “fuzzy” and “uncertain” - and this is the one of the first times anyone has simulated the behaviour of such a scenario.

“We see in our simulation (as was predicted in 1991) how many effects become possible, which are forbidden in standard quantum mechanics,” said Ringbauer. “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.”

Fat is not that bad for you after all

A new controversial study found there’s no link between saturated fat and heart disease.

Image: shaiitka/Shutterstock

After reviewing nearly 80 studies involving more than half a million people, researchers at Cambridge University found that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.

The study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, also shows that ‘good’ fats do not lower the risk of heart attack.

So is it time to stop demonising fat?

“It’s not saturated fat we should worry about,” says Dr Rajiv Chowdhury, lead author of the study. “It’s the high-carb or sugary diet that should be the focus of dietary guidelines.”

Carbs and sugar contain more artery-clogging particles than saturated and non-saturated fat, and the researchers suggest these should be the focus of new dietary guidelines.

In October 2013, cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who works at Croydon University Hospital in London, published a report in the British Medical Journal saying there’s no link between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk. “Indeed, recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk. Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective."

Malhotra believes that our ‘fat obsession’ comes from “The Seven Countries Study”, which started in the late 1950s and was published in 1970. It was the first study to investigate the correlation between diet, lifestyle and heart disease in different countries, and it established that saturated and trans fats intake was associated with higher mortality rates. It was also the first one to high-light the many benefits of the Mediterranean diet.

The results of Chowdhury and Malhotra's studies, however, shouldn’t be an excuse gorge butter and cake. “It would be unfortunate if these results were interpreted to suggest that people can go back to eating butter and cheese with abandon,” said Alice H. Lichtestein, a nutritional biochemist at Tufts University, to The New York Times.

Over the past few years we’ve been advised to cut fat intake to 30% of total energy and saturated fat to less than 10%, and we should stick to those guidelines until new ones are published.

Are you an indigo? See if any of these traits resonate with you!

Are you an indigo? See if any of these traits resonate with you!

Are you an Indigo?

“Indigo children” is the name given to the new type of human being born in this generation.  Displaying amazing feats of intuition and intelligence beyond their years, these indigos have started to become a much more common concept within the spiritual community.  This is a list developed by play therapist Jan Yordy, a former elementary school teacher and child counselor who has been working with parents and children for 25 years.

As we go over the list, see if you resonate with any of these traits:

1. May be strong willed independent thinkers who prefer to do their own thing rather than comply with authority figures/parents

 

2. Have a wisdom and level of caring beyond their youthful experience

 

3. Traditional Parenting and discipline strategies don’t appear effective  with these children. If you try to force an issue, a power struggle is the typical outcome.

 

4. Energeticly, Indigos are vibrating at a much higher frequencey so they can get scrambled by negative energy (human or machine)

 

5. Emotionally they can be reactive and may have problems with anxieties, depression or temper rages if not energetically balanced

 

6. Are creative right brain thinkers, but may struggle to learn in a traditional left brain school system

 

7. Often Indigos are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD since they appear impulsive (their brain can process information faster) and they require movement to help keep them better focused.

 

8. Indigos are very intuitive, and may see hear or know things that seem unexplainable.

 

9. Indigos have more problems with food and environmental sensitivities, since their system is more finely tuned.

 

10. When their needs are not met, these children seem self centered and demanding, although this is not their true nature.

 

11. These children have incredible gifts and potential, but they may be shut down when not properly nurtured and accepted

THIS is what an indigo child looks like in action!

- See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/are-you-an-indigo-11-traits-of-indigo-children/#sthash.WcmbymFL.dpuf