The Official Science Thread

Future predictions by scientists........

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http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2013...omorrows-world

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Exciting stuff here.............


The Radical Projects Funded by Peter Thiel


The eccentric PayPal billionaire doesn't just invest in Silicon Valley tech companies. He's giving money for crazy projects that do everything from get power from the weather to find ways to program human cells like computers


HARNESSING TORNADOS FOR ENERGY AND MORE: THE RADICAL PROJECTS FUNDED BY PETER THIEL



Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel isn't the kind of guy who invests in mindless smartphone apps that make lots of cash. He's not anti-software by any means; he has sunk millions into accounting software company Xero. But Thiel also doles out cash to companies doing things that aren't just world-changing--they seem insane (in a good way). Could we expect anything less from the guy that's funding a floating startup incubator for foreign entrepreneurs?

Thiel's latest investment--a $300,000 bet-- is in AVEtec, a startup from Canadian engineer Louis Michaud that wants to harness the energy created by tornados. Michaud doesn't want to chase tornados a la Twister; he plans to generate man-made tornados that can be safely switched off if necessary.

Louis Michaud Michaud's design features warm air blown into a hollow cylinder, where it turns into a "controlled vortex" (aka a tornado) that's supported by the temperature difference between the heated air in the cylinder and the atmosphere. No carbon emissions are produced, no energy storage is required, the device can produce 200 megawatts of electrical power (the same as a coal power plant) and power can potentially be produced at just three cents per kilowatt hour.

Now Michaud just needs to build the proof of concept--a project that will be helped along by Thiel's cash. He's working on a 131 foot-tall, 26-foot-in-diameter prototype at Lambton College in Ontario.

AVEtec is one of 12 startups that Thiel is funding through Breakout Labs, a program of the Thiel Foundation that the organization calls "a revolutionary, revolving funding model through which successful projects fund the next generation of daring scientific exploration." Some of our other favorites are listed below.

Modern Meadow An alligator purse that doesn't require killing an animal. A burger that keeps cows intact. That's the far-out dream of Modern Meadow, a startup that could have test tube leather ready for large-scale production in five years. To make leather, the startup biopsies a living animal, isolates the necessary cells, multiplies them in a bioreactor, centrifuges them into spheres of thousands of cells, layers and fuses cell aggregates, matures the cells in a bioreactor, and harvests the skin tissue. All for your guilt-free leather accessory.

"At this point, the goal is to create products that are both biomimetic--very, very similar to real leather--and also to look at ways that we can improve upon it and make products that are superior to traditional leather," CEO Andras Forgacs told Co.Exist in an interview earlier this year. Down the line, Modern Meadow will move into test tube meat. Why buy a cow when you can get the meat from a lab?

Inspirotec This company has the ambitious goal of creating a universal system for gathering and identifying airborne toxins. The research for the project is being conducted at the Northwestern University Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Inspirotec is working on two different models: a portable air collector that collects samples which can be analyzed in a lab (available in 2013), and a more-ambitious sounding next generation portable collector that allows for real-time monitoring. The Inspirotec website explains that "It is based on well-established biological detection methods and connects with smart devices allowing for mobile applications." Funding from Breakout will be used to create a proof-of-concept device.

Immusoft Corporation This startup, founded by a computer security expert, is taking a programmer's approach to disease treatment: the company wants to program patients' cells to become tiny drug factories. The website explains: "Within 50 years, we will program human cells like we program computers. Envision a stand-alone device capable of modifying a patient's cells to manufacture biologic-based therapies for a wide range of disease including cardiovascular disease, cancers, infectious diseases, and lysosomal storage diseases. Programming a patient's cells to manufacture their own treatments could dramatically reduce therapy costs." With the price for certain cancer treatments hovering over $100,000 per year, that's a big deal.

Within 50 years, we will program human cells like we program computers. Immosoft is testing its methods first with a rare genetic disease called MPS I. If the company is successful, it will program the human immune system to generate cells that secrete enzymes to treat the disease, first in genetically modified mice before moving on eventually to humans. Immusoft has already conducted a proof of concept for its treatment where B cells were modified from a healthy human to create antibodies that neutralize HIV.

Arigos Biomedical Organ transplants are tricky, time-sensitive things--if an organ isn't transplanted within hours, there's a decent chance it will be rejected. That doesn't bode well for patients, who may have a perfectly good organ waiting for them--on the other side of the world. Arigos Biomedical is working on high-speed methods to cool organs for long-term preservation. One day, patients may be able to receive organs that have been preserved for months or even longer.

Arigos doesn't have a website (that we can find, anyway), but co-founder Tanya Jones told the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal: "We've done all the math that we can do to prove that this method will work, ... now it's a matter of actually beginning to use organs. We are hoping to basically have all the pictures and all the proof necessary." First up: testing the technology with animal organs.


http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...gy-and-2013-01

Below Absolute Zero-What Does Negative Temperature Mean?
Questions: What is negative temperature? Can you really make a system that has a temperature below absolute zero? Can you even give any useful meaning to the expression "negative absolute temperature"?

Answer: Absolutely. :-)

Under certain conditions, a closed system can be described by a negative temperature, and, surprisingly, be hotter than the same system at any positive temperature. This article describes how it all works.
Step I: What is "Temperature"?

To get things started, we need a clear definition of "temperature." Actually various kinds of "temperature" appear in the literature of physics (e.g., kinetic temperature, color temperature). The relevant one here is the one from thermodynamics, in some sense the most fundamental.

Our intuitive notion is that two systems in thermal contact should exchange no heat, on average, if and only if they are at the same temperature. Let's call the two systems S1 and S2. The combined system, treating S1 and S2 together, can be S3. The important question, consideration of which will lead us to a useful quantitative definition of temperature, is "How will the energy of S3 be distributed between S1 and S2?" I will briefly explain this below, but I recommend that you read K&K, referenced below, for a careful, simple, and thorough explanation of this important and fundamental result.

With a total energy E, S has many possible internal states (microstates). The atoms of S3 can share the total energy in many ways. Let's say there are N different states. Each state corresponds to a particular division of the total energy in the two subsystems S1 and S2. Many microstates can correspond to the same division, E1 in S1 and E2 in S2. A simple counting argument tells you that only one particular division of the energy, will occur with any significant probability. It's the one with the overwhelmingly largest number of microstates for the total system S3. That number, N(E1,E2) is just the product of the number of states allowed in each subsystem, N(E1,E2) = N1(E1)*N2(E2), and, since E1 + E2 = E, N(E1,E2) reaches a maximum when N1*N2 is stationary with respect to variations of E1 and E2 subject to the total energy constraint.

For convenience, physicists prefer to frame the question in terms of the logarithm of the number of microstates N, and call this the entropy, S. You can easily see from the above analysis that two systems are in equilibrium with one another when (dS/dE)1 = (dS/dE)2, i.e., the rate of change of entropy, S, per unit change in energy, E, must be the same for both systems. Otherwise, energy will tend to flow from one subsystem to another as S3 bounces randomly from one microstate to another, the total energy E3 being constant, as the combined system moves towards a state of maximal total entropy. We define the temperature, T, by 1/T = dS/dE, so that the equilibrium condition becomes the very simple T1 = T2.

This statistical mechanical definition of temperature does in fact correspond to your intuitive notion of temperature for most systems. So long as dS/dE is always positive, T is always positive. For common situations, like a collection of free particles, or particles in a harmonic oscillator potential, adding energy always increases the number of available microstates, increasingly faster with increasing total energy. So temperature increases with increasing energy, from zero, asymptotically approaching positive infinity as the energy increases.
Step II: What is "Negative Temperature"?

Not all systems have the property that the entropy increases monotonically with energy. In some cases, as energy is added to the system, the number of available microstates, or configurations, actually decreases for some range of energies. For example, imagine an ideal "spin-system", a set of N atoms with spin 1/2 on a one-dimensional wire. The atoms are not free to move from their positions on the wire. The only degree of freedom allowed to them is spin-flip: the spin of a given atom can point up or down. The total energy of the system, in a magnetic field of strength B, pointing down, is (N+ - N-)*uB, where u is the magnetic moment of each atom and N+ and N- are the number of atoms with spin up and down respectively. Notice that with this definition, E is zero when half of the spins are up and half are down. It is negative when the majority are down and positive when the majority are up.

The lowest possible energy state, all the spins pointing down, gives the system a total energy of -NuB, and temperature of absolute zero. There is only one configuration of the system at this energy, i.e., all the spins must point down. The entropy is the log of the number of microstates, so in this case is log(1) = 0. If we now add a quantum of energy, size uB, to the system, one spin is allowed to flip up. There are N possibilities, so the entropy is log(N). If we add another quantum of energy, there are a total of N(N-1)/2 allowable configurations with two spins up. The entropy is increasing quickly, and the temperature is rising as well.

However, for this system, the entropy does not go on increasing forever. There is a maximum energy, +NuB, with all spins up. At this maximal energy, there is again only one microstate, and the entropy is again zero. If we remove one quantum of energy from the system, we allow one spin down. At this energy there are N available microstates. The entropy goes on increasing as the energy is lowered. In fact the maximal entropy occurs for total energy zero, i.e., half of the spins up, half down.

So we have created a system where, as we add more and more energy, temperature starts off positive, approaches positive infinity as maximum entropy is approached, with half of all spins up. After that, the temperature becomes negative infinite, coming down in magnitude toward zero, but always negative, as the energy increases toward maximum. When the system has negative temperature, it is hotter than when it is has positive temperature. If you take two copies of the system, one with positive and one with negative temperature, and put them in thermal contact, heat will flow from the negative-temperature system into the positive-temperature system.
Step III: What Does This Have to Do With the Real World?
Can this system ever by realized in the real world, or is it just a fantastic invention of sinister theoretical condensed matter physicists? Atoms always have other degrees of freedom in addition to spin, usually making the total energy of the system unbounded upward due to the translational degrees of freedom that the atom has. Thus, only certain degrees of freedom of a particle can have negative temperature. It makes sense to define the "spin-temperature" of a collection of atoms, so long as one condition is met: the coupling between the atomic spins and the other degrees of freedom is sufficiently weak, and the coupling between atomic spins sufficiently strong, that the timescale for energy to flow from the spins into other degrees of freedom is very large compared to the timescale for thermalization of the spins among themselves. Then it makes sense to talk about the temperature of the spins separately from the temperature of the atoms as a whole. This condition can easily be met for the case of nuclear spins in a strong external magnetic field.

Nuclear and electron spin systems can be promoted to negative temperatures by suitable radio frequency techniques. Various experiments in the calorimetry of negative temperatures, as well as applications of negative temperature systems as RF amplifiers, etc., can be found in the articles listed below, and the references therein.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...mperature.html

Originally Posted by Rubenk

My understanding of quantum computings is that ANYthing can be computed just by using one piece of the puzzle. Quantum computers can do that on such an astronomicaly different scale than a supercomputer that it is hardly comparable.

Anyone who has watched Dr. Who and the regeneration cube(pandorica?) is familiar with the concept.

Originally Posted by SamDoe1

Just did some light reading on quantum computing. While they are substantially more powerful and can take advantage of substantially more data, it still doesn't explain how they can create something from nothing.

How is it possible to accurately generate a million random pixels from one random pixel without data error?

Also, Dr. Who is not a scientific journal...

Physicists have created a quantum gas capable of reaching temperatures below absolute zero, paving the way for future quantum inventions.

The chilly substance was composed of potassium atoms which were held in a lattice arrangement using a combination of lasers and magnetic fields. According to a news report in the journal Nature, by tweaking the magnetic fields the research team were able to force the atoms to attract rather than repel one another and reveal the sub-absolute zero properties of the gas.
“This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” said Ulrich Schneider of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich to Nature. “It’s like walking through a valley, then instantly finding yourself on the mountain peak.”

Schneider’s findings were published Jan. 3 in Science.


Previously absolute zero was considered to be the theoretical lower limit of temperature as temperature correlates with the average amount of energy of the substance’s particles. At absolute zero particles were thought to have zero energy.

Moving into the sub-absolute zero realm, matter begins to display odd properties. Clouds of atoms drift upwards instead of down, while the atomic matrix’s ability to resist collapsing in on itself echoes the forces causing the universe to expand outwards rather than contracting under the influence of gravity.

The ability to produce a relatively stable substance at several billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero will allow physicists to better study and understand this curious state, possibly leading to other innovations.

“This may be a way to create new forms of matter in the laboratory,” said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate at MIT, commenting in Nature on the results.

Source: Wired.co.uk


If temperatures exist below absolute zero, I wonder if speeds exist beyond light?

I posted my story above without reading the one above it first. ...lol

Same information, stated much differently.

That below absolute zero thing is way over my head, but I always thought temperature at the most basic level is how much a molecule moves when it has some energy. If it has no energy (absolute zero) then it doesn't move at all? How can something move less than not moving?

No wonder people can publish those things in Nature or Science, where quality has degraded over time. They read like popular science magazines to me now. Try Physical Review Letters for more serious work.

Sent from my SGH-I997 using Bimmer App

Originally Posted by atinybug

That below absolute zero thing is way over my head, but I always thought temperature at the most basic level is how much a molecule moves when it has some energy. If it has no energy (absolute zero) then it doesn't move at all? How can something move less than not moving?

There is no such thing as absolute rest. Even at 0 Kelvin, you have quantum fluctuations, which is a direct consequence of the uncertainty principle.

Sent from my SGH-I997 using Bimmer App

Originally Posted by atinybug

That below absolute zero thing is way over my head, but I always thought temperature at the most basic level is how much a molecule moves when it has some energy. If it has no energy (absolute zero) then it doesn't move at all? How can something move less than not moving?

True. It is not like it moves below zero, it is just that absolute zero is lower than previously known.

I would truely love to goto school full time as a physics student. If money were no option I wouldnt leave school till they had nothing left to teach me.

I remember reading a portion of string theory(forever ago) that basically theorized the "vibration" of strings is what made time happen. That lead me to wonder if temperature in relation to the energy state of things was related to time passing...that is, if something reached absolute zero, it ceased to exist, due to the string vibrations stopping. Perhaps that is the center of a black hole? All things seem to decay quicker at higher temps, aka higher energy states. Disclaimer: I have a very rudimentary understanding of the subject, probably only enough to get me in trouble with my thoughts.

remember a few weeks back nasa said something they found on mars would "rock the scientific community" or something like that? Did they release the info yet?

Yeah, and apparently NASA and Donald Trump use the same scale for what constitutes an "earth shattering" announcement because it wasn't anything spectacular; I don't even remember what it was.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Yeah, and apparently NASA and Donald Trump use the same scale for what constitutes an "earth shattering" announcement because it wasn't anything spectacular; I don't even remember what it was.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Yeah, and apparently NASA and Donald Trump use the same scale for what constitutes an "earth shattering" announcement because it wasn't anything spectacular; I don't even remember what it was.

They found "evidence of organic compounds" but the kicker is that they weren't sure if those compounds came to mars with the rover or not.

Originally Posted by SamDoe1

They found "evidence of organic compounds" but the kicker is that they weren't sure if those compounds came to mars with the rover or not.

well that's stupid

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Yeah, and apparently NASA and Donald Trump use the same scale for what constitutes an "earth shattering" announcement because it wasn't anything spectacular; I don't even remember what it was.

This. I only remember that it wasnt worth remembering, very disappointing.

sounds like modern nasa to me sadly...

I think NASA is quick to forget that what gets them amped doesn't necessarily register the same for the general public. They're in serious need of a marketing team.

Autodesk is teaming up with another company to develop 3D printers for human organs
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681116/a...you-new-organs

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

I think NASA is quick to forget that what gets them amped doesn't necessarily register the same for the general public. They're in serious need of a marketing team.

Same could be said of the rest of the government...

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Autodesk is teaming up with another company to develop 3D printers for human organs
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681116/a...you-new-organs

Bio 3D printers have been around for a little while now, my company has been investigating getting one on site to try and prototype different products. The biggest downside is how long it takes to actually create anything with them...

Printable, functioning, and non-rejecting organs would be huge but would require vastly more stem cells than are available now.