Webb Telescope sees Galaxies Too Large to Exist

[Music] foreign to this week's science news today we'll talk about computers made of human brain cells galaxies that are too big to exist how the Brits prevented a global chocolate disaster was the Milky Way's black hole is having for dinner how to get radioactive compounds out of water and impossibly efficient light sensor better lithium air batteries Googled second milestone on the way to Quantum Computing and of course the telephone will ring an international team of scientists centered at John Hopkins university has published a plan to create biocomputers powered by human brain cells they want to grow networks of simplified human brains called organoids to make computer processes an idea they call intelligence in a dish that sounds to me like a five thousand dollar appetizer on a West Hollywood menu which might be why they alternatively propose to call it organoid intelligence oh I for short they say a computer made from human brain cells would be faster better and use less energy than even the best silicon based machines using artificial intelligence and they might have a point today supercomputers are without doubt powerful but compared to the human brain they are energetically incredibly wasteful an adult human brain runs on about 20 watts of power the average supercomputing cluster requires about a million times as much 20 megawatts or more another advantage of the human brain is that it learns to solve problems from very little training data one study in 2018 showed that a human could learn to tell similar images from different ones after about 10 training samples but an artificial intelligence required more than 10 million training samples two breakthroughs have led to these hopes for organoid intelligence first researchers are now able to reprogram human somatic cells back into stem cells and then Cooks those stem cells into growing small brain cell clumps which make up the organoids they've already made brain organoids of about 100 000 cells and last year those many brains learned to play Pong that's the computer game pong not beer pong now researchers want to scale that up to 10 million neural cells to make it work they'll need a lot of innovating they'll need a system to keep the cells alive areas of microelectrodes for the organoids to communicate with each other and with silicon computers for readout and ways to store and process the information the researchers say these computers might one day Aid research on human neurological and psychiatric disorders such as dementia and schizophrenia and that these mini brains could one day be connected to many eyes which does not sound creepy at all then there are some ethical issues can these organoids feel pain do they build memories will they be implanted in animals making chimeros or human animal hybrids where we get to see a centaur play beer pong someone's got to think about that these are interesting times no doubt and while you're pondering the idea of tiny lap-grown brains this is what mid Journey had to say about intelligence in a dish which is about as far from reality as this paper you have probably seen the headlines the James Webb Space Telescope seems to have discovered six galaxies that shouldn't exist the news isn't all that new the data came out last summer and the analysis appeared on the preprint server it's just that now it's been published in nature so it's kind of official I guess the conundrum is that these galaxies are big but they existed already when the universe was only between 500 million and 700 million years old according to the standard theory of cosmology that's the one with dark matter this shouldn't be possible in a theory with dark matter galaxies grow slowly and very gradually by mergers of smaller galaxies this figure shows how astrophysicists think it works all the symbols here are galaxies and the larger the symbol the larger the Galaxy time increases from the bottom up at the beginning you have all these tiny galaxies and then they join to increasingly larger ones but what web has seen is what you could call a Curious Case of baby Galaxy gigantism you can see it in this image the red blobs appear to be six massive densely packed galaxies the mass of their stars is at least a billion times more than the mass of our sun and in one case about 100 billion times more the images were taken with the webs near infrared camera and then cross-checked with images from the Hubble Space Telescope which had previously looked at the same locations on the sky you probably read all this in the Popular Science News what you might not have read is that these big early galaxies were a prediction of modified Newtonian Dynamics also known as Monde I talked about this prediction in a video a year ago what these observations do is that they falsify dark matter and support Mont and it isn't the first observation which has done that it's happened several times before that Mont made correct predictions when Dark Matter didn't I think science writers should pay a little more attention to this what do you think Albert in February last year the European Center for disease prevention and control narrowly prevented a global outbreak of food poisoning from contaminated chocolate they have now put out a report in which they detailed what went right on February 17th last year the UK Health Security Agency raised the first alarm they reported a suspicious cluster of 18 children who had fallen ill with salmonella infections seven had to be hospitalized once alerted other countries began to watch out for unusual food poisoning in the next couple of days France began reporting cases too a month later 59 cases had been reported in five European countries the European Center for disease prevention put together an international task team which used genome sequencing on the bacteria samples it confirmed that the cases almost certainly had a common origin interviews with the affected families revealed that what they had in common was the the consumption of Kinder chocolate acts they traced the cases back to a factory in Belgium in which a tank of Buttermilk had become infected the factory was temporarily closed and just before Easter they issued the largest global recall of chocolate products ever it eventually reached one of the 30 countries in all 455 people were poisoned in 17 countries including some in the United States and Canada most of the affected people were children under the age of 10. they all survived this sounds bad but it could have been far worse if the recall hadn't come that quickly the European Center for disease prevention especially praise the salmonella surveillance in the UK that first raised the alarm hello hi Rishi a Brit GPT well it's a neural network that generates language without actually knowing anything about the real world I don't think you need help with that you're welcome bye astronomers have discovered that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is about to swallow a huge cloud of gas and dust they've been washing this dust cloud for two decades through the Keck telescopes perched on top of Mauna Kea on Hawaii and have given it the catchy name X7 the two cactilloscopes are 10 meter telescopes that can see both in the optical and infrared range they have an extremely impressive adaptive optic system that removes distortions caused by the turbulence of Earth's atmosphere you can see here how the system tidies up the images with all that observational data the astronomers have been able to track how X7 has changed over those years turns out it's changed a lot at first it was sort of a comet shaped blob with a flare tail now as you can see in this image from 2021 it's a long oblong this huge cloud has a mass of about 50 times that of Earth it's been yanked apart by the tidal forces of the black hole its length has now reached about three thousand times the distance between Earth and the Sun that's roughly double the length that it had at the beginning of the observations the cloud has now entered an orbital path around the black hole and the data crunching didn't just show the past of exome it also fought its future you can see here what the researchers think will happen by about 2036 the cloud will get so close to the black hole that it'll be entirely torn apart of course where 26 000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way so this really happened during the Stone Age but then they say time is an illusion anyway a team of Australian researchers has figured out how to capture radioactive waste from contaminated water concentrated and literally bake it into minerals for safer storage liquid radio active waste is difficult to handle traditionally the radioactive liquid is passed through filters packed with minerals that can attach to the contaminants but that's a slow and cumbersome process the Australian team has come up with a better way to do it they produce the type of clay that can be added to the water it quickly absorbs a large variety of radioactive substances and creates a mineral which can be easily filtered out of the water the radioactive compounds are then concentrated in the mineral but it's an unstable compound that'll crumble away within a few years not what you want to happen to Radioactive stuff the researchers therefore heated it up to more than 1 300 degrees Celsius this produced a stable material in which the radioactive substances were even higher concentrated you can see here two images of the final material taken with electron microscopes in the colored version on the right the red chunks are the enclosed uranium in the final product the radioactive substances are about 50 000 times more concentrated than in the original Wastewater I guess that just leaves the question of what to do with it a research team from argon National Laboratory says it's created better lithium oxygen batteries using a solid electrolyte lithium oxygen batteries have been one of the biggest hopes on the energy market for the past decade traditionally they feature a lithium anode that moves through a liquid electrolyte and combines with oxygen during discharge the chemical reaction yields either lithium superoxide in the single electron reaction or lithium peroxide in the two electron reaction the more electrons the higher the energy density of the battery the Illinois team experimented with the solid electrolyte made of a ceramic polymer material on discharge this material makes lithium oxide which produces four electrons they did a bunch of chemical analyzes to prove that this is what actually happens if they're right this means the energy density of these batteries could be higher than that of conventional lithium batteries by up to a factor of four better still the reaction happens at room temperature with oxygen from the air so it's quite convenient in their experiment the researchers reached an energy density of about 685 Watt hours per kilogram which is more than double that of most batteries in use today the battery lasted more than one thousand Cycles at least under lap conditions this all sounds really good but I found news about better batteries in material design to be like news about better Alzheimer's drugs in medicine they don't seem to convert to reality very well so don't get your hopes up too high hello so the vineyard Valley that they claimed was a meteorite crater actually turned out to be a meteorite creator yes that could be a sign of backwards causation I've always wondered by meteorites always Landing craters you're welcome Salu a team of researchers from the Netherlands has made an impossibly efficient light sensor that can monitor vital signs from across the room just like you can now pay with a credit card by getting it near a checkout terminal without tapping these new contactless devices can measure heart and lung function without touching you the researchers did it with something called a large area thin film photodiode that's about 100 times thinner than a sheet of newspaper the photodiode counts the number of photons it converts into electrons a quantity called external Quantum efficiency the Dutch researchers figured out how to make the diode do that so that it runs at 200 efficiency meaning it converts two electrons for every Photon astonishing the secret to the photodiodes enhanced Quantum efficiency is the addition of a green light to the layers of architecture within the diode the green light seems to rearrange the transferent collection of electrons allowing the diode to detect even extremely weak signals in low light though the researchers say they don't fully understand it themselves to show that it works the researchers shown a near and red light onto a volunteer skin and then reflected at 50 90 and 130 centimeters back to the photodiode they demonstrated that they could measure changes in arterial blood flow which correlates with blood pressure and heart rate the experiment also measured chest movements as a proxy for lung function it's been possible for some time to measure heart rates from video footage by picking up the pulsing blood flow Under the Skin but with normal cameras these methods are too unreliable for clinical applications photodiodes have previously been used to read Vital Statistics while touching the skin but this is the first time it's been done at a distance all that's missing now is the Twitter integration Google's Quantum AI team has announced they reached their second milestone on the way to building a commercially interesting quantum computer quantum computers could solve some mathematical problems much faster than conventional computers which is why they could be useful for business but they are prone to errors which has been one of the choke points in developing the technology the problem comes from the nature of quantum computers they work with entangled states which are extremely susceptible to even the slightest disturbances this creates errors very easily without correcting these errors building large quantum computers will be impossible at the same time however these Quantum States can't be copied to create redundancies and they can't be read out without destroying them which makes error correction very difficult reducing the error rate is therefore basically the Holy Grail of the quantum world it's one of the six Milestones Google has set for itself before Quantum Computing can become commercially viable the second one after the demonstration of quantum advantage that they achieved in 2019 now they say they've reached their second milestone and they just published the results of their experiments in nature over the past couple of years several experiments have been able to correct single errors with small correction codes but none has been successful enough to Merit scaling up now Google has used what's known as a surface code on a smaller 17 Cubit processor it resulted in 3.028 logical errors per cycle but on 49 cubits the percentage went down to 2.914 doesn't sound like a big difference but it's statistically significant in the universe of quantum Computing this is huge news because Loosely speaking it means bigger is better and if bigger is better this means bigger quantum computers could actually work but even Google says there's still a very long way to go most importantly it's not clear the code will continue to scale well if the devices get larger and then there are the other four Milestones but whatever they're up to next will keep you up to date so don't forget to subscribe you probably have accounts for hundreds of websites stores and services if you're anything like me you fill in your personal details very creatively but of course this isn't always possible if you want the carpet to be delivered to your door you have to actually give them your address right unfortunately a lot of companies sell off user information for money to data Brokers which is the reason you're getting all 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Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 438,844

Keywords: james webb space telescope, james webb, james webb telescope, dark matter, modified gravity, cosmology, astrophysics, brain organoids, computer made from cells, google quantum computing, quantum computing news, science news, weekly science news, science, technology, technology news, quantum, science funny, science humor, hossenfelder, science without the gobbledygook

Id: M3Ua_koAnSU

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023