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--------------------------------- 2612 - SCIENCE DISCOVERIES - IN 2018
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- Science is the study of the unknown until we have a theory to explain it. Then we learn something new that we can not explain and start all over again. Here are last years science restarts:
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- QUANTUM COMPUTERS - Quantum data got denser than ever. To build quantum computers, scientists will have to first figure out how to manipulate and effectively store information with quantum objects. Researchers hit a milestone in that effort, packing 18 qubits of quantum information into just six photons, a new record.
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- QUANTUM MECHANICS - In our world, temperature is just one thing. If a freezer is cold enough to make ice, any water you put inside it should freeze. But quantum mechanics allows for objects to exist in uncertainty between multiple states, in a sense to be more than one thing at the same time.
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- Just like Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead in his thought experiment. We learned that this applies to temperature as well. Quantum objects can, from a certain point of view, be both hot and cold at the same time.
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- QUANTUM PHYSICS - Time is supposed to flow in one direction, following the path set for it by causality. A bowling ball rolls down a lane and smacks into a pin, so the pin falls. The pin falling doesn't cause the bowling ball to roll down the lane and smack into it.
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- In the quantum realm, things are fuzzier. A team of scientists sent a photon on a journey, one that should have taken it down path A and then path B, or path B and then path A. That photon didn't follow one path before the other. It followed both of them, without bothering to pick an order.
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- In theory, quantum physics should work for objects of any size. But many researchers believe that life might be too complicated for any sort of meaningful quantum effects to emerge. But an experiment conducted in 2016 did seem to show bacteria interacting quantum mechanically with light in a very limited, subtle way.
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- Another group of researchers went back and looked at that experiment and found that something much deeper and stranger might have been going on, forcing us to re-evaluate life and the quantum world.
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- NANODUMBELLS - With joint spheres of silica, "nanodumbbells" just 0.000012 inches (320 nanometers) long and approximately 0.000007 inches wide (170 nm), using lasers, scientists blasted those dumbbells up to rotational speeds of 60 billion whirls per minute. Yes 60,000,000,000 rotations per minute.
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- PARA-WATER - There isn't really just one kind of water molecule, a quantum-physics experiment revealed this year. Instead, there are two. Both are made up of two hydrogen atoms sticking up from one big oxygen atom, H2O.
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- But, in one kind of water, called "ortho-water," those hydrogen atoms have quantum "spins" pointing in the same direction. In another kind of water, called "para-water," those spins point in opposite directions.
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- QUBITS ENTANGLED - A team of Swiss scientists has performed a massive test of one of the strangest paradoxes in quantum mechanics, a huge example of the sort of behavior Albert Einstein skeptically called "spooky action at a distance." Using a super-cooled clump of nearly 600 atoms, they showed that entanglement still works even at very large quantum-mechanically scales.
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- 20 qubits got entangled. Qubits are the fundamental unit of information in quantum computers, and making quantum computers work will involve entangling them with each other. An experiment managed to entangle 20 of qubits together and make them talk to one another, then read back the information they contained. The result was a sort of prototype of short-term memory for a quantum-computer system.
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- QUANTUM RADAR - got closer to becoming a reality. Military radar works by bouncing radio waves off objects flying through the sky. But in regions near Earth's magnetic north pole, those signals can get scrambled. And there are stealth planes designed to avoid bouncing radar waves back at their source .
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- Canada made progress on a quantum radar that would bounce light photons off incoming planes, after entangling those photons with other photons far away, at the radar base. The quantum radar system would study photons at the base to see if their entangled partners were being tampered with by quantum technologies.
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- QUANTUM RANDOMNESS - became a bit more democratic. Randomness is extremely important to cybersecurity. But true randomness, which is physically impossible to predict, is surprisingly hard to come by. One of the few sources of randomness in the world is the quantum realm, which is inaccessible to most of us.
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- But that changed in 2018, when scientists created an online randomness "beacon", a public source of random strings of numbers that anyone can access. They've since made that source more complex and useful, and there are more sources of public randomness coming soon.
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- LOCAL REALISM - Einstein believed in an idea called "local realism," meaning that objects have specific properties whether or not those traits are observed, and that information about those traits can't travel faster than the speed of light. A test showed once again that Einstein was wrong about this.
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- In the experiment, entangled particles seemed to "choose" matching states faster than light could have transferred information between them. This introduces two mind-bending scenarios: Either our observations of the world actually change it, or particles are communicating with each other in some manner that we can't see or influence.
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- BALL LIGHTENING - For centuries, credible reports have described "ball lightning," a strange phenomenon where lighting seems to persist as a sphere flying through space. But physicists have never been able to study this phenomenon, or to explain it.
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- New research suggests the effect could be the result of "skyrmions," tightly clustered groups of magnetic fields held together like interlocking rings. For the first time in 2018, scientists reported generating a true skyrmion in a lab, and its magnetic profile matched predictions for the magnetic system necessary to contain ball lightning.
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- BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATE - A fifth state of matter in space. You've probably heard of at least three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Plasma is the other bigger one. But there's at least one more: the Bose-Einstein condensate, a state in which super-cooled atoms clump together and exhibit quantum activity on unusually large scales. Researchers have made Bose-Einstein condensates on Earth before, but for the first time in 2018, NASA did it in outer space, in an orbital lab aboard the International Space Station.
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- ATTOCLOCK - A superfast "clock" measured an electron in action. Electrons move so fast that under normal circumstances researchers can't find them at a specific spot in space. But, researchers switched on a device called the "attoclock" that blasts electrons with extraordinarily fast bursts of laser light, knocking them off their host atoms.
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- The attoclock knows precisely when it fires its bursts of laser light, and measures precisely where the atoms land after they fly off into space. Using that information, they can figure out where the electron was in its orbit around the nucleus at the moment it was struck.
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- LEPTQUARK -Researchers hunted the leptoquark. Scientists haven't found it yet, but they think there's a kind of particle out there called the "leptoquark" that binds with two fundamental types of particle, the lepton and the quark. They didn't find it in 2018, but they did publish results this year that narrow down its nature further than ever before, bringing the actual discovery (if it's out there) much closer.
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- COSMIC RAYS - fired upward out of Antarctica's ice. A team recovers NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) after a successful flight. Under normal circumstances, cosmic rays crash into Earth from outer space. But, researchers showed that at least a few seemed to be bursting out of the ground as well in Antarctica.
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- Scientists don't know what’s causing this upward cosmic shower, but the best explanation is that there's some previously unknown high-energy particle out there, and it's penetrating all the way through the Earth and coming out the other side
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- NEUTRINOS - A high-energy neutrino finally told us where it came from the supermassive black hole at the center of a blazar galaxy emitting its stream of energetic particles toward Earth. Under normal circumstances, high-energy neutrinos are cosmic mysteries.
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- Neutrinos are ghostly particles, detectable under only limited circumstances, and we know very little about their ultimate source. A 4-billion-year-old neutrino crashed into an atom in a block of ice in Antarctica and gave up the goods.
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- Researchers pointed telescopes all over the planet back in the direction from which the neutrino came, and revealed its source. It turned out that a flaring blazar, a black hole with a galaxy wrapped around it, was firing gamma-rays at Earth at the same time and from the same direction as that neutrino emerged. It was the first-ever such successful hunt for a neutrino's home.
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- STERILE NEUTRINO - We may have glimpsed a new kind of neutrino. There's something happening in the universe that's making some of humanity's most advanced physics experiments contradict each other.
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- Some seem to be detecting a fourth "flavor" of neutrino, while others can't see it at all. Right now, there's no firm explanation for the discrepancy a lot more data emerged and scientists are suggesting that it could be something amazing: a never-before-detected "sterile" neutrino, which could fill in some of the gaps in modern physics
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- Other Reviews available:
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- 2539 - Science is moving fast. It is hard to keep up. Even harder to speculate what could happen in the next 20 years. Scientists in their respective fields have some ideas. Confucius say, “May you live in interesting times.” You do not need a different landscape, you just need different eyes.
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- 2538 - SCIENCE - 30 years of discovery? Review 2539 gives some predictions as to what will probably happen in science in the next 30 years. Probably! Actually! This review tells you what did happen the 30 years starting with the year 2010 and working backwards:
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- 2285 - We are like walking on the beach picking up little pebbles of knowledge with the whole ocean of the unknown expanding in front of us. Here are some of science’s great accomplishments from those shoulders we are standing on to see over the horizon of this ocean of the unknown that is still out there.
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- 2006 - Famous scientists you may not know.
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- 1968 - Lessons in science. Key steps to success in achieving new discoveries. Learn from the ancients and stand on the shoulders of giants. First become a student and a teacher will come. Being wrong is a major part of the learning process, especially in science.
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- 1649 - What is Science? How do we separate the product from the process. Science has shown that the majority opinion does not always work. If we are all thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking.
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- 1641 - New ideas to change your life. Here are some breakthrough technologies that could see a future in commercial products all of us can use. Supercomputers speed up time-to-market for these products.
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- -1463 - A lifetime of science starting with 1930 through 2011. 2 learn: http://jdetrick.blogspot.com 4 # 1463 , or request an e-mail copy.
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- 1463 - A Lifetime of Science. 3 decades 1930 to 1960.
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- 1464 3 decades 1960 to 1990
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- 1465 Science in 2 decades 1990 to 2010
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- 1466 Science last year in 2011.
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- 1194 - Fast Science, What’s Likely to Happen in Next 30 Years? Science is moving fast. It is hard to keep up. Even harder to speculate what could happen in the next 30 years. Scientists in their respective fields have some ideas. Confucius say, “May you live in interesting times.” You do not need a different landscape, you just need different eyes.
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- 1112 - A summary for the last 50 years of science is pretty much in two areas, space exploration and biochemistry / genetics. This is what has happened since I graduated high school. Hope you find it interesting. For the year 2009 the biggest science discovery was water on the Moon. A lunar space probe crashed into the Moon and the analysis of the impact debris confirmed the existence of significant reserves of water on the Moon.
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- February 9, 2020 2612
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--------------------- Monday, February 10, 2020 --------------------
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