Climate Scientist Boasts About Fudging Own Paper

[Music] foreign to our weekly science news today we'll talk about a bubble of galaxies a climate scientist who made his own paper worse double magic oxygen a chemical reaction slowed down 100 billion times Maxwell's demon in biology intelligent life on Earth the launch of a new x-ray space mission drone racing and of course the telephone will ring astronomers in Hawaii have spotted a massive bubble of galaxies it's approximately 820 million light years from Earth and one billion light years wide they called it Hawaiian for murmurs of Awakening because they believe it's a direct remnant of murmurs from the time our universe awoke the astronomers weren't specifically looking for this Galactic bubble but at that size it was kind of hard to miss but it's a bubble means the Galaxy seemed to be more likely to be located it on a giant sphere this observation fits neatly with our current model for the early Universe which you probably know has it that the early Universe was filled with hot plasma which then rapidly expanded according to this model there were density waves in this hot plasma they kind of like ripples in a pond but in three dimensions they are known as baryon acoustic oscillations acoustic because they're like sound waves and baryons are a type of subatomic particles that includes neutrons and protons the constituents of atomic nuclei when the universe expands the plasma cools and begins to Clump and then it forms stars and galaxies in the places where the plasma density was higher there'll later be more galaxies this should give rise to bubble-like structures exactly like what they observed you see it's not just kids who like making bubbles the young universe was like that too you though with a bubble of 1 billion light years in size maybe somewhat of an overachiever the bubble is like a mega structure of Mega structures and contains previously known giant conglomerates of matter like the coma cluster the Hercules cluster and the slow and Great Wall this bubble is so big it's hard to wrap your head around it unless possibly your head is a billion light years wide in which case I think you could do better things with it than watching YouTube the most depressing story of the week is a climate scientist who single-handedly damaged the reputation of his entire discipline here's what happened the climate scientist Patrick Brown recently published a paper about extreme wildfires and they're linked to climate change in the journal Nature now that the people's life he explained on X formerly known as Twitter that while his paper considered climate change as one drive of wildfire risk it did not properly account for other factors such as changes in land use vegetation and human behavior and he did this deliberately because he believed it had improve his chances to get published he claims that there is a formula to getting published in high impact journals that requires focusing on the impact of only one variable it's not like he falsified any data but he left out relevant contacts that he full well knew about Brown defended his action by saying that why considering other factors would have made for a more realistic and useful analysis he didn't want to muddy the waters often otherwise clean story however the peer review 5 for bronze papers public and even the reviewers argued against him editors from nature have denied that leaving out relevant variables reduces the chances of getting published the episode is fueled to the fire of climate change deniers who needs enemies with friends like this hello hi Rishi Iceland reintroduces whaling oh well foreign just tell them it's an experiment looking for dark matter because the whales have been eating up the stuff oh don't worry some physicists will come up with a theory for it you're welcome a group of experimentalists at the Japanese reichen facility as for the first time managed to produce a heavy isotope of the oxygen nucleus and found a few surprises the oxygen in the air around us is Oxygen 16 it has eight protons and eight neutrons in the atomic core and is stable Atomic nuclei are subject to quantum mechanics and they have shells and excitations just like the electrons around them and like the electrons around the nucleus the nucleus itself has shells that can be more or less full if you remember the structure of the periodic table comes from filling up the electron shells how full the electron shells are determines much of the chemical properties of the elements noble gases for example have their electron shells full that's helium neon argon and so on since the shells are full they are slow to react it's why they're called noble noble people don't explode the same is the case for nuclei some are more others less explosive so to speak when it comes to Atomic nuclei the four shells are called Magic numbers but since Atomic nuclei have two different constituents protons and neutrons there are two numbers a nucleus which has a magic number of both neutrons and protons is called doubly magic the common oxygen oxygen 16 is doubly magic and it's stable that a nucleus is doubly magic doesn't necessarily mean it's stable though it's more complicated than that it should however at least be strongly bound and hold together reasonably well after Oxygen 16 you expect the next doubly magic oxygen to be oxygen 28 that has eight protons and 20 neutrons it's difficult to produce nuclei without many neutrons and not only do you need to produce them you then also need to to measure them but that's what they did in this new experiment the researchers started by firing calcium 48 at a beryllium Target this results in a lot of lighter atoms including fluorine 29 they isolated out the fluorine and then dumped that into liquid hydrogen to remove one of the protons this process generates the oxygen 28 but contrary to expectations the oxygen 28 turned out to not be doubly magic the oxygen 28 decayed readily by spitting out four neutrons leaving behind oxygen 24. this is really interesting because clearly there is something about nuclear structure which we don't fully understand by the way don't do this at home free neutrons are really not healthy an international group of physicists and chemists has simulated an essential property of chemical reactions this allows them to look at the process 100 billion times slower than a curse in nature and confirmed an essential prediction of quantum chemistry chemistry is all about electron energy levels and how the electron wave functions reshape when two atoms get close to each other one particularly essential feature of wave functions is that well they're waves so they can interfere in particular they can interfere with themselves this can lead to very interesting effects if you have a particle whose wave function goes around an obstacle on both sides because then what happens on the other side of the obstacle depends on how the wave functions overlap on the other side they might cancel out or they might add up this surf interference around an obstacle is a really famous Quantum effect and it's believed to play a role in chemical reactions such as those contributing to photosynthesis problem is in an actual chemical reaction this all happens in a matter of factor two seconds a femtoseconds is 10 to the minus 15 seconds and to give you some context that's the approximate duration of summer in the UK in the new experiment they simulated this process with an iron sharp in such a trap a charged atom is held in an electromagnetic field in this case they did this with a configuration of four lasers these electromagnetic fields generate an energy potential around one axis the wave function of the ion can't go through this axis so it goes around and then wobbles back the observations agree with theoretical predictions amazingly well this is an example of a direct Quantum simulation that needs no quantum computer okay so you might say but if it agrees with prediction that's kind of boring yeah but down the line this could become a useful method to better understand the quantum effects and chemical reactions I wish to apologize to all Chemists in the audience but this is more proof that chemistry is really just applied quantum mechanics a group of biologists in Switzerland have found a Maxwell demon in cells Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment for beating the second law of Thermodynamics that's the one which says that entropy cannot decrease the thought experiment goes like this if you have two boxes of gas at different temperatures and combine them then the second law says the Garces will mix and reach equilibrium at a temperature somewhere in the middle in that process entropy increases Maxwell said let's suppose we enter a wall to separate the boxes again and we add a little person that's the demon which lets Fast Gas atoms through to the right and keep slow ones on the left then that a decrease entropy and shouldn't be possible that confuse people greatly at time but we Now understand that this only works if the demon itself has information about the system which requires low entropy and the entropy of the demon increases while that of the gas decreases so the second law remains valid the still this has been a very interesting thought experiment because it's led to some ideas for how one can convert information to low entropy the biologists now found that nature was well ahead of Maxwell they say that there are certain proteins known as ATP binding cassette Transporters ABC for short that work pretty much the same way these proteins control the movement of molecules and help cells regulate energy flow just like tiny Maxwell's Demons of course they don't violate the second law either they use energy from the ATP molecules which is a low entropy Reservoir so physics once again hello Mr President a study has found that Seafood tastes better by the seaside well that's interesting yes you're entirely correct this must mean that junk food tastes better near the rubbish bin you're welcome or without your service NASA together with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the European Space Agency have finally launched their shared x-ray Imaging and spectroscopy Mission extrasm now that it's in orbit it can get to work capturing the Dynamics between Galaxy clusters helping us understand the chemical makeup of the universe and measuring the way black holes affect star formation the X-ray Imaging and spectroscopy Mission contains two main instruments one called extend consists of four detector areas that pick up on UltraViolet visible and near infrared light the other code resolve is an x-ray calorimeter when photons hit this detector they'll warm it up changing the conductive properties of the instrument from which the energy of the photons can be inferred resolve requires helium to stay cool enough to operate and because the satellite Can Only Hold enough helium for three years that's about how long we can expect to obtain data from this Mission so the universe is getting an X-ray let's hope nothing's broken astrophysicists say that the James Webb Space Telescope has found that there's intelligent life on Earth fool that's some relief in a new pre-print that just appeared on the archive a group of astrophysicists chose that if the web telescope were to look at Earth it could confirm both the potential for and the presence of intelligent life they arrive at this conclusion by looking at a bunch of molecules in the atmosphere that the telescope can detect this includes water carbon dioxide nitrogen and methane but also more complex substances like CFCs they say that these not only make life possible but they also imply the presence of technologies that might be created by intelligent civilizations combined with contextual data like temperature pressure altitude and so on the presence of these gases signal that life forms like ours might be near they conclude that the web telescope would be able to confirm the presence of intelligent life on Earth with 88 accuracy this study is prove that the web telescope isn't just for taking pretty pictures of the cosmos indeed the telescope's potential is much wider in scope and might even help us locate those aliens American officials have been blabbing on about engineers at Intel and the University of Zurich have used artificial intelligence to build a super fast self-flying Zone it's so good at finding the optimal routes and making quick turns on it's capable of beating even the most experienced human drone races the Drone is based on an AI system called Swift it collects data through a camera and an integrated inertial measurement unit which monitors the drone's environment and acceleration this data feeds into Swift's deep neural network it works in real time and decides the best route forward and the most efficient Maneuvers to make the system beat three of the world's best human drone races in multiple 100khz kilometer per hour is races but speed isn't everything Intel and the University of Zurich also found that human drone operators were more adaptable than Swift meaning they were able to handle changing conditions and unpredictable challenges more easily if there was too much light in the room for example Swift's lack of adaptability slowed it down human races were also better at adjusting their flight strategies to reduce their odds of crashing but if all goes well soon enough we'll all be completely unnecessary and can leave the world to self-flying intelligent drones science is the only news Stuart brand famously wrote but I think that's only half of the story because we don't just need science news we also need new ways to learn science if you want to try a free and easy way to learn science I recommend you have a look at brilliant.org who have been sponsoring this video brilliant offers courses on a large variety of topics in Science and Mathematics and they're adding new content each month although courses come with interactive visualizations and follow-up questions some also have videos for demonstration experiments or executable Python scripts this really gives you a feeling for what is going on whether you want to know more about solar panels neural networks astrophysics special relativity or computational biology brilliant has you covered I like to look things up on brilliant and I even have my own course there that's an introduction to my favorite topic quantum mechanics it's a beginner's course and covers topics such as interference superpositions and entanglement the uncertainty principle and Bell's theorem and after that you can continue learning more about Quantum objects or maybe Quantum Computing to give it a try yourself use the link brilliant.org Sabina and sign up for free you'll get access to everything brilliant has to offer for 30 days and the first 200 subscribers using this link will also get 20 of the annual premium subscription thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 449,796

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science news sabine, science humor, astrophysics, bubble of galaxies, quantum simulation, XRISM, x-ray space mission, space, universe, maxwell's demon, physics, quantum physics, nuclear physics, doubly magic oxygen, doubly magic nucleus, quizwithit

Id: bgKiMokFr3o

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023