Mutant Cockroaches have learned to evade sugar traps
According to a new study in Science, some roaches’ tastes are evolving to the point where they’re refusing to gobble down glucose, a form of sugar commonly found in plants. “They now perceive glucose as bitter,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University and one of the report’s authors. And while that might sound like good news for the roach-infested, it’s not: sucrose is the key attractant used in roach traps — and many of the nasty little creatures are no longer interested.
How did this happen? Turns out it may be our fault.
When prehistoric roaches lived in the wild, experts have theorized, it made sense to be glucose-averse—that mutation helped them avoid glucosides, or toxic glucose-containing molecules found in certain plants. “They’re nasty substances,” says Schal.
But when cockroaches joined us in caves, and ultimately in homes—away from the threat of glucosides—“they would have lost this trait, because it became maladaptive,” says Schal. Regular sugar, after all, is a highly concentrated source of energy, and if roaches were wired to avoid it, their odds of survival would drop. “If you brought them a Krispy Kreme donut,” Schal explains, “they couldn’t eat it.”
The mutation remained in the genome, though. And when humans began putting glucose in roach poison, we reactivated it—so much so that when some roaches now taste sugar, Schal says, “they jump back as though you’ve given them an electric shock.”
Fun with Qubits
If you look at a cylindrical block from the bottom, you see a circle. If you look at it from the side you see a square.
Imagine a cylindrical block that is spinning around amazingly fast. When you look at it, it stops spinning and snaps into either a circle or a square.
This is similar to how a qubit will behave. Whereas a normal bit has a value of either one or zero. A qubit is both. A qubit has some amount of one and some amount of zero, however when you measure it the qubit will always snap into a one or zero. These measurements are probabilistic and will not be the same each time.
USB Drives have a quantum spin of 1/2 and exist in the fourth dimension
Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible
Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.
Full Story: Io9
This is the world’s smallest snowman - at 10 micrometres across, it’s only 1/5th the width of a human hair. The tiny guy was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.
(via sosungalittleclodofclay)
Source: we-are-star-stuff
How do blackholes affect light?
Assuming we could get close enough to a blackhole without dying, how would it affect what the surroundings look like? How will the bending of light impact what we see?
The reddit user, entropyjump, synthesized what a blackhole would look like (before it sucked up a bunch of stuff). Watch the video and read the below description:
The youtube movie shows a simulated view of a small black hole, if it were suspended in the air about a meter away from the camera. I wrote the simulation in Python, and used a spherical panorama image available online. In the movie clip, the camera is orbiting the black hole to show what the environment looks like as light is traveling through strongly curved spacetime close to the black hole. In some movie frames, a so-called ‘Einstein ring’ can be seen: this feature appears when there is an object exactly behind the black hole as seen by the camera. Light from this object passes around all sides of the black hole on its way toward us, forming a ring around its shadow.
Although this black hole is tiny (it has a Schwarzschild radius of about 1.8 centimeters), its mass is about twice that of Earth. Such a black hole would wreak havoc on our planet if it were to come in the vicinity of Earth. So, this is just a visualization of how light would behave close to it, and not a full physical simulation of the other effects the black hole might have on its environment.
All of this hurricane talk has put me in the mood to talk about global warming…
(Source)
(via kenobi-wan-obi)
Source: jimharris.com
What are the practical complications of turning energy into matter?
Question:
Lets just say I had practically inifinte energy. How do I go about turning this into a stream of protons? Dont hold back on the quantum field theory. Smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want(protons) is not a good enough answer.
Answer:
The first practical complication is that you cannot (as far as we know) create matter without also creating an equal amount of anti matter. Of course the fact that the observable universe is mostly regular matter indicates that there is some lopsidedness to this summitry and so it may be possible to find conditions that at least create slightly more matter then antimatter. Still, this is a problem that you would need to be overcome to get your pure stream of regular matter protons.
Another problem is the fact that to create particles we simply amass a very large amount of energy in a very small space and see what pops out. We have no way to command that only certain particles be created. For example, even if I amass enough energy to allow for the spontaneous creation of a pair of protons (the proton and its anti matter partner) i have no way to know if the protons are what is going to be created, or other particles whose combined mass and energy add up to the mass of the proton pair. We can only predict the frequency that certain particles will be created.
Finally, although the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy is a common occurrence in nature, and an entire industry (the nuclear power industry) has been made possible by our understanding of the transition we still aren’t anywhere close to having a mass-energy conversion machine.
I can try and explain the conversion machine and our current methods of conversion if you want, but I think its off the topic of your question, and it looks like I’ve mad an ugly wall of text already.
If any of you reading this see something that I’ve got wrong, or want to explain in more detail please do! This is a topic I’ve been curious about for years.
Edit: I saw your post in r/physics. No, we can’t do better then smash particles together and see what comes out. Think of it this way. We don’t create matter, we simply create the conditions that allow matter to be created. The conditions that are needed are a very high concentration of energy, and the only way we have to achieve those conditions are particle collides. Unfortunately if we have enough energy to allow for the creation of a proton, then we have also allowed for the creation of many smaller particles that will need to be filtered out. So I’m sorry if smashing existing particles together & filtering out what we want is not a good enough answer, because right now its the only answer.
Source: thenextweb.com
