Australian National University

New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking At It

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According to a well-known theory in quantum physics, a particle’s behavior changes depending on whether there is an observer or not. It basically suggests that reality is a kind of illusion and exists only when we are looking at it. Numerous quantum experiments were conducted in the past and showed that this indeed might be the case.

new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it

Now, physicists at the Australian National University have found further evidence for the illusory nature of reality. They recreated the John Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment and confirmed that reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, at least on the atomic scale.

Thought-provoking findings

Some particles, such as photons or electrons, can behave both as particles and as waves. Here comes a question of what exactly makes a photon or an electron act either as a particle or a wave. This is what Wheeler’s experiment asks: at what point does an object ‘decide’?

The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts.

“It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.

The experiment

The original version of John Wheeler’s experiment proposed in 1978 involved light beams being bounced by mirrors. However, it was difficult to implement it and get any conclusive results due to the level of technological progress back then. Now, it became possible to successfully recreate the experiment by usinghelium atoms scattered by laser light.

Dr. Truscott’s team forced a hundred of helium atoms into a state of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate. After this, they ejected all the atoms until there was only one left.

Then, the researchers used a pair of laser beams to create a grating pattern, which would scatter an atom passing through it just like a solid grating scatters light. Thus, the atom would either act as a particle and pass through one arm or act as a wave and pass through both arms.

Thanks to a random number generator, a second grating was then randomly added in order to recombine the paths. This was done only after the atom had already passed the first grate.

As a result, the addition of the second grating caused interference in the measurement, showing that the atom had traveled both paths, thus behaving like a wave. At the same time, when the second grating was not added, there was no interference and the atom appeared to have traveled only one path.

The results and their interpretation

As the second grating was added only after the atom had passed through the first one, it would be reasonable to suggest that the atom hadn’t yet ‘decided’ whether it was a particle or a wave before the second measurement.

According to Dr. Truscott, there may be two possible interpretations of these results. Either the atom ‘decided’ how to behave based on the measurement or a future measurement affected the photon’s past.

“The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said.

Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. Perhaps further research in the field of quantum physics and more thought-provoking evidence like this will completely change our understanding of reality one day.

 

Australian scientists just set a world record for solar thermal efficiency

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97% conversion of sunlight into steam.

Scientists at the Australian National University have set a world record for efficiency for a solar thermal dish generating steam for power stations.

The team halved energy losses and achieved a 97 percent conversion of sunlight into steam through a new receiver for a solar concentrator dish. This beats commercial systems by about seven percentage points.

“When our computer model told us the efficiency that our design was going to achieve, we thought it was alarmingly high,” says John Pye, from the ANU Research School of Engineering.

“But when we built it and tested it, sure enough, the performance was amazing.”

The ANU team has already had commercial interest in the solar thermal system.

“We’re actually talking seriously with a company that’s seeking to use our new receiver in some large mine-site applications, for provision of both heat and power to the site,” Pye told Business Insider.

The design was presented at the SolarPACES conference.

Solar thermal systems use reflectors to concentrate sunlight and generate steam which can drive conventional power station turbines.

It can be combined with heat storage systems and can supply power on demand at a significantly lower cost than solar energy from photovoltaic panels which has to be stored in batteries.

“This new design could result in a 10 percent reduction in the cost of solar thermal electricity,” says Pye.

The aim is to get costs down to 12 cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity.

The ANU solar concentrator is the largest of its kind in the world at 500 square metres. It focuses the power of 2,100 Suns onto the receiver, through which water is pumped and heated to 500 degrees Celsius.

The new receiver design is a cavity that resembles a top hat with narrow opening and a wide brim. Water pipes spiral around the underside of the brim and up into the hat.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/Yy6En56Mw4k

Obesity Tied to Brain Volume Loss

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Being overweight or obese is associated with poorer brain health in cognitively healthy adults in their 60s, according to new data from the long-running Australian PATH Through Life Study.

After adjustment for multiple factors, participants who were overweight or obese had smaller hippocampal volume at baseline and experienced greater hippocampal atrophy over 8 years than their normal-weight peers.

“The results further underscore the importance of reducing the rate of obesity through education, population health interventions, and policy,” Nicolas Cherbuin, PhD, from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, said in a statement.

He reported the findings in Washington, DC, at the Society for Neuroscience 2014 Annual Meeting.

Increased Dementia

Obesity is a “major concern” and has been linked to an increased risk for dementia, Dr Cherbuin said during a media briefing. The hippocampus plays a key role in long-term memory, and hippocampal atrophy is a hallmark of cognitive decline.

Dr Cherbuin reported on 420 cognitively healthy adults aged 60 to 64 years participating in the PATH study on aging. As part of the study, body mass index (BMI) was recorded and high-resolution T1-weighted MRI was performed at study outset and then 4 and 8 years later.

At baseline, BMI was negatively correlated with left hippocampal volume (estimate per unit BMI above 25: –10.65 mm3; P = .027) and right hippocampal volume (estimate: –8.18 mm3; P = .097).

During follow-up, participants with higher BMI experienced greater atrophy in the left (P = .001) but not the right (P = .058) hippocampus, even after adjustment for age, sex, education, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, and depression.

Each 2-point increment in BMI at baseline was associated with a 7.2% decrease in left hippocampal volume during follow-up. “This is particularly significant in an aging population, and further research should be conducted to determine how obesity affects thinking abilities,” Dr Cherbuin said.

“We did not investigate the relationship between shrinkage and function, but other studies in this research field have shown that greater shrinkage in the hippocampus is linked with a greater risk of cognitive decline and a greater risk of dementia as well,” he said.

In an interview with Medscape Medical News, Ralph DiLeone, PhD, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who moderated the media briefing, said more information on outcomes would be of interest.

“Because the hippocampus is so important for memory function, mood regulation and is implicated in cognitive aging and dementia, it will be very interesting to see if the researchers can correlate some of those brain changes with specific behavioral deficits or disease states,” he said.

Australian scientists are a step closer to converting sunlight and water into fuel

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Scientists have replicated a crucial photosynthetic reaction for the first time, taking them a step closer to creating sustainable, cheap fuel from water and sunlight – just like plants do.

Kastoori-and-RonWeb

Image: Australian National University

Plants use photosynthesis to turn water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen and the energy they need to power their systems. And for decades scientists have been trying to replicate this reaction in order to create biological systems that can produce cheap, clean hydrogen fuel.

Now, for the first time ever, scientists from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, have managed to modify a naturally occurring protein, and use it to capture energy from sunlight, a key step in photosynthesis. Their results have been published in BBA Bioenergetics.

“Water is abundant and so is sunlight. It is an exciting prospect to use them to create hydrogen, and do it cheaply and safely,” Kastoori Hingorani, the lead research from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, said in a press release.

Hydrogen has the potential to be a zero-carbon replacement for the petroleum products that we currently rely on. But up until now, we haven’t been able to find a way to create it as safely and efficiently as plants do. To replicate this step in the reaction in plants, the research team took a naturally occurring protein called ferritin, and modified it slightly.

Ferritin is found in almost all living organisms, and it usually stores iron. But the team replaced iron with the common metal manganese, so that it closely resembled the water splitting site in photosynthesis. They also replaced another binding site with a light-sensitive pigment, Zinc Chlorin.

Once these changes had been made, the researchers shone light onto the modified ferritin and saw a clear indication of electrical charge transfer, just like the one that occurs in plants. The researchers describe this as the “electrical heartbeat” that’s the key to photosynthesis.

The researchers now need to work on using this protein to create biological, water-splitting systems. But this is an important first step.

“This is the first time we have replicated the primary capture of energy from sunlight,” Ron Pace, a co-researcher in the study, said in the press release. “It’s the beginning of a whole suite of possibilities, such as creating a highly efficient fuel, or to trapping atmospheric carbon.”

One of the most exciting things about this research is that, because this protein is powered by the Sun and does not require batteries or expensive metals, the entire process could be affordable for developing countries.

“That carbon-free cycle is essentially indefinitely sustainable. Sunlight is extraordinarily abundant, water is everywhere – the raw materials we need to make the fuel. And at the end of the usage cycle it goes back to water,” said Pace.

New theory uncovers cancer’s deep evolutionary roots.

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A new way to look at cancer – by tracing its deep evolutionary roots to the dawn of multicellularity more than a billion years ago – has been proposed by Paul Davies of Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science in collaboration with Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University. If their theory is correct, it promises to transform the approach to cancer therapy, and to link the origin of cancer to the origin of life and the developmental processes of embryos.

Paul Davies

Davies and Lineweaver are both theoretical physicists and cosmologists with experience in the field of astrobiology – the search for life beyond Earth. They turned to cancer research only recently, in part because of the creation at Arizona State University of the Center for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology. The center is one of twelve established by the National Cancer Institute to encourage physical scientists to lend their insights into tackling cancer.

The new theory challenges the orthodox view that cancer develops anew in each host by a series of chance mutational accidents. Davies and Lineweaver claim that cancer is actually an organized and systematic response to some sort of stress or physical challenge. It might be triggered by a random accident, they say, but thereafter it more or less predictably unfolds.

Their view of cancer is outlined in the article “Exposing cancer’s deep evolutionary roots,” written by Davies. It appears in a special July issue of Physics World devoted to the physics of cancer.

“We envisage cancer as the execution of an ancient program pre-loaded into the genomes of all cells,” says Davies, an Arizona State University Regents’ Professor in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “It is rather like Windows defaulting to ‘safe mode’ after suffering an insult of some sort.” As such, he describes cancer as a throwback to an ancestral phenotype.

The new theory predicts that as cancer progresses through more and more malignant stages, it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient. Davies and Lineweaver are currently testing this prediction by comparing gene expression data from cancer biopsies with phylogenetic trees going back 1.6 billion years, with the help of Luis Cisneros, a postdoctoral researcher with ASU’s Beyond Center.

But if this is the case, then why hasn’t evolution eliminated the ancient cancer subroutine?

“Because it fulfills absolutely crucial functions during the early stages of embryo development,” Davies explains. “Genes that are active in the embryo and normally dormant thereafter are found to be switched back on in cancer. These same genes are the ‘ancient’ ones, deep in the tree of multicellular life.”

The link with embryo development has been known to cancer biologists for a long time, says Davies, but the significance of this fact is rarely appreciated. If the new theory is correct, researchers should find that the more malignant stages of cancer will re-express genes from the earliest stages of embryogenesis. Davies adds that there is already some evidence for this in several experimental studies, including recent research at Harvard University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

“As cancer progresses through its various stages within a single organism, it should be like running the evolutionary and developmental arrows of time backward at high speed,” says Davies.

This could provide clues to future treatments. For example, when life took the momentous step from single cells to multicellular assemblages, Earth had low levels of oxygen. Sure enough, cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar.

Davies and Lineweaver predict that if cancer cells are saturated with oxygen but deprived of sugar, they will become more stressed than healthy cells, slowing them down or even killing them. ASU’s Center for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology, of which Davies is principal investigator, is planning a workshop in November to examine the clinical evidence for this.

“It is clear that some radically new thinking is needed,” Davies states. “Like aging, cancer seems to be a deeply embedded part of the life process. Also like aging, cancer generally cannot be cured but its effects can certainly be mitigated, for example, by delaying onset and extending periods of dormancy. But we will learn to do this effectively only when we better understand cancer, including its place in the great sweep of evolutionary history.”

Source: asunews.asu.edu

World’s Oldest Trees Dying At Alarming Rate

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tree

According to a disturbing new report, the world’s oldest and largest trees may be dying off — and fast.
The study determined that trees between 100 and 300 years old are perishing “en masse” because of a deadly combination of large destructive events like forest fires, and other, more incremental factors like drought, high temperatures, logging and insect attack. The steady increase in threats means old trees are dying at 10 times their normal rate, researchers concluded. Their study appears in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal Science.

“It’s a worldwide problem and appears to be happening in most types of forest,” explained lead author David B. Lindenmayer, of Australian National University, in a release. “Large old trees are critical in many natural and human-dominated environments.”

The scientists originally discovered a “very, very disturbing trend” while inspecting Swedish forestry records from the 1860s, then realized forests in Australia, California’s Yosemite National Park, the African Savannah, Brazilian rainforests, and other regions of Europe had also suffered large losses of old trees.

Critically, “Big, old trees are not just enlarged young trees,” Jerry F. Franklin of the University of Washington, another of the study’s authors, told the New York Times. “Old trees have idiosyncratic features — a different canopy, different branch systems, a lot of cavities, thicker bark and more heartwood. They provide a lot more habitat and niches.”

They also capture and store significant amounts of carbon, notes The Telegraph, and recycle surrounding soil nutrients, which in turn encourages new growth.

Scientists warn that unless an urgent “world-wide investigation” can assess the loss and create conservation programs with time-frames that span centuries, the world’s oldest trees are gravely imperiled.

 

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

 

 

 

Nautilus stops work on Papua New Guinea deep-sea mine.

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Underwater1_Nautilus.jpgControversial plans to build the first deep-sea mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) remain stalled, which has prompted the firm behind them to stop building specialised seabed extraction equipment and lay off staff.

A dispute with the PNG government over its equity holding in the project has led Nautilus Minerals to suspend operations, says Michael Johnston, its chief executive officer.

When Nautilus received a licence in March 2011 to mine metal-rich vents called Solwara 1 near New Britain, the government agreed to take a 30 per cent stake in the project and co-finance it.

But the PNG government convened a legal process in June 2012 to determine whether it was obligated to contribute to funding.

“We were paying for it all ourselves and it was becoming too costly,” Johnston tells SciDev.Net. “We were at an expensive stage of the build. We were spending US$3 million or US$4 million a week. For a company of our size, we couldn’t continue to pay for that ourselves.”

Shadrach Himata, deputy secretary of Papua New Guinea’s Department of Mineral Policy and Geohazards Management, confirms that the dispute is about the country’s equity holding in Nautilus.

He tells SciDev.Net that he cannot comment further because he does not want to “pre-empt the arbitration”.

According to Colin Filer, an associate professor at the Australian National University, the Papua New Guinea government has a legal right to take out equity in any company that extracts resources, although it is not obliged to do so.

The previous government, under Prime Minister Michael Somare and acting Prime Minister Sam Abal, preferred to take equity ownership in most projects, he says. The new government, which came to power in August 2011 and retained power after a year-long skirmish with the previous government, has taken a more strategic approach, Filer says.

“It was probably a bad idea for it to contemplate taking an equity stake in something that was technologically and economically a rather risky venture,” Filer tells SciDev.Net.

The Papua New Guinea government has bigger priorities than deep sea mining, Filer says, adding that its main project focus is to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG) for export to Australia.

The first large project in Papua New Guinea led by energy firm Exxon Mobil — a floating LNG production and processing plant plus pipelines — is set to start work in 2014. A second Exxon Mobil LNG project is planned after the first scheme is up and running, he says.

The government cannot pay for all the projects including the mine without seeking credit from other countries, Filer says. Papua New Guinea’s mining rules require the government to ensure that money is available to invest in equity and that projects will make a profit.

The Nautilus project has gained notoriety, prompting questions about its viability and environmental risks and becoming “politically awkward”, Filer says. The government is likely to be hoping that “it will go away”, he says.

Nautilus Minerals may have better luck if it explores the seabed in other parts of the Pacific, such as the Cook Islands, where it faces less political opposition, and then return to Papua New Guinea once it can demonstrate a successful track record, Filer says.

However, PNG’s mining rules limit the period that a company can own a mining tract without working it, he says.

“If it was an attractive project,” he adds, “why can’t the firm get money from the capital markets or find a joint venture partner?”

Despite the setback, the company said in a release last month that it remains committed to “developing the world’s first commercial seafloor copper-gold project and launching the deep water seafloor resource production industry, whilst maintaining an environmentally and socially responsible approach”.

“Nautilus has a highly prospective ground position, which includes 19 identified prospects in Tonga, including the recent high grade discoveries in the NE Lau Basin and a 410 million tonne Inferred Mineral Resource in the Central Pacific,” it said.

Source: SciVx

 

Earth’s plates move slower than thought.

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The mystery of erratic changes in the history of Earth’s past and current plate motions has been cracked by academics from The Australian National University.

Dr Giampiero Iaffaldano, from the Research School of Earth Sciences in the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, led a team that found true changes in plate motions occur on timescales no shorter than a few million years.

“The scenario arising from recent data was puzzling because plates appeared to move erratically and significantly over geologically-short periods of less than one million years,” said Dr Iaffaldano.

“This posed a conundrum, as the forces that would be required to explain their sudden motions far exceed the most optimistic estimates we could make.”

Dr Iaffaldano’s research focused on the detailed records of plate motions across the mid-oceanic ridges in the South Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. After accounting for data noise – the portion of data that was unrelated to Earth’s plate motions – he found that true changes in plate motions occur on timescales no shorter than five million years.

“A major discovery of the study is that, upon noise reduction, true changes in plate motions occur on timescales no shorter than a few million years. This yields simpler movement patterns and more plausible dynamics,” he said.

“We showed that noise is in fact a significant bias to our understanding of the forces shaping Earth’s surface, particularly as more and more measurements of plate motions are made available.

“This does not mean that these measurements are wrong, but we need to reduce noise as much as possible before making any geophysical conclusions. In our study we provide for the first time a method to do so in a simple and efficient way, by statistically determining the likelihood of a certain plate-motion change at a given time in the geologic past.”

Source: Science Alert