Contributing Correspondent Cathleen O’Grady joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a company that stores renewable energy by hoisting large objects in massive “gravity batteries.”
Also on this week’s show, Erick Lundgren, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, talks about how water from wells dug by wild horses and feral donkeys provides a buffer to all different kinds of animals and plants during the driest times in the Sonora and Mojave deserts.
Luxury home tours on YouTube are exploding, and transforming the way high-end real estate is discovered and sometimes sold. YouTube personality Enes Yilmazer walks us through the making of a video for his channel, which gets an average of 15 million views a month. Photo: Mikey Ayers
“Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre as it may seem, it is commonplace in quantum physics.”
Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.
Constructor Theory is a new approach to formulating fundamental laws in physics. Instead of describing the world in terms of trajectories, initial conditions and dynamical laws, in constructor theory laws are about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why. This powerful switch has the potential to bring all sorts of interesting fields, currently regarded as inherently approximative, into fundamental physics. These include the theories of information, knowledge, thermodynamics, and life.
Read more about Marletto and David Deutsch’s constructor theory at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to…
Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease, and they have been saving human lives for hundreds of years. Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease.
Ultra-precise measurements connect brain activity and energy use in individual fruit-fly neurons.
In this episode:
00:45 How brain cells use energy
A team of researchers have looked in individual fruit-fly neurons to better understand how energy use and information processing are linked – which may have important implications for future fMRI studies in humans.
Research Article: Mann et al.
07:04 Research Highlights
A tough but flexible material inspired by lobster underbellies, and research reveals that red meat consumption hasn’t dropped since the 1960s.
Research Highlight: Material mimicking lobster belly cracks the code for toughness
Research Highlight: Meat lovers worldwide pay climate little heed
10:15 Briefing Chat
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, early results for a new malaria vaccine look positive, and researchers unearth the latest chapter in a long-running plant experiment.
Nature News: Malaria vaccine shows promise — now come tougher trials
BBC News: Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough
New York Times: One of the World’s Oldest Science Experiments Comes Up From the Dirt
A team of MIT researchers have observed that when salty water evaporates from a heated, superhydrophobic surface the crystal structures that form can easily be removed or roll away on their own.
This phenomenon could make it possible to use brackish or salty water, without any pretreatment, rather than relying on freshwater sources, for cooling systems in power plants.
Clashes between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists continued after Moscow’s large-scale military maneuvers at the border. WSJ’s Georgi Kantchev reports from the front line of a conflict that is seen as a test for the Biden administration. Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
A growing number of colleges around the country will require students to get Covid-19 vaccinations before returning to campus. But the policies are igniting a debate over whether businesses and institutions like schools can make vaccines a condition of attendance. Photo: Northeastern University
To balance their budgets during the coronavirus pandemic, states including New Jersey and New York have raised taxes on the wealthy. Conservatives warn that it will cause many of those who left at the onset of the pandemic make those moves permanent since they’re no longer bound to the physical locations of their offices or their children’s schools. But available data from 2020 show that the so-called exodus wasn’t as pronounced as initially projected, and the urban exit that did happen, was to suburbs rather than low tax states.
It is hard to predict what the electric automotive future holds for us, but we say can one thing for sure: never again will the car designs be boring. To prove this statement, today we will cover the latest EV news and showcase the most prominent newcomers that not only have revolutionary propulsion systems, but also radical inside-out looks.
Boomers Daily 