Stockholm

HAWKING SOLVED HOW INFORMATION COULD ESCAPE BLACK HOLES

Posted by

0


Stephen Hawking announced during at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, in Sweden, that he has solved how you could escape a black hole.

The presentation was made at the Hawking Radiation conference, which was co-hosted by the theoretical physics institute, Nordita, and the University of North Carolina, on the campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Hawking, said”

“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon. The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

Watch the vide. URL: https://youtu.be/DkRDmJpthXg

Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system.

Posted by

0


Physicist doubts work like Higgs boson identification achievable now as academics are expected to ‘keep churning out papers’
  • Peter Higgs: 'Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that'.
Peter Higgs: ‘Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that’. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Higgs said he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises”. A message would go around the department saying: “Please give a list of your recent publications.” Higgs said: “I would send back a statement: ‘None.’ ”

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 70s with the then principal, Michael Swann, who went on to chair the BBC. Higgs objected to Swann’s handling of student protests and to the university’s shareholdings in South African companies during the apartheid regime. “[Swann] didn’t understand the issues, and denounced the student leaders.”

He regrets that the particle he identified in 1964 became known as the “God particle”.

He said: “Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at Cern proves the existence of God.”

An atheist since the age of 10, he fears the nickname “reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?”

He also revealed that he turned down a knighthood in 1999. “I’m rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly. A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.”

He has not yet decided which way he will vote in the referendum onScottish independence. “My attitude would depend a little bit on how much progress the lunatic right of the Conservative party makes in trying to get us out of Europe. If the UK were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.”

He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn’t impressed.

 

Candy Crush Saga: The Science Behind Our Addiction.

Posted by

0


A year after the game’s mobile launch, we still can’t stop playing. The app’s designer and psychology experts weigh in on exactly what makes it so irresistible

If you haven’t heard of Candy Crush, it’s the mobile game that’s so addictive, players say they have left their children stranded at school, abandoned housework and even injured themselves as they try to reach new levels of the game.

Candy Crush

Candy Crush has been played 151 billion times since it launched as an app on mobile devices exactly year ago. And it’s the first game to ever be No. 1 on iOS, Android and Facebook at the same time. Candy Crush’s creator, King, a Stockholm-based company, says 1 in every 23 Facebook users plays it. And while Candy Crush is free, the in-game purchases that some players choose to make add up. Think Gaming, which releases gaming analytics, estimates that it takes in $875,382 per day. (By comparison, another insanely popular mobile game, Angry Birds, takes in an estimated $6,381 daily.)

All that adds up to some seriously distracted users. A survey by Ask Your Target Market polled 1,000 players and found that 32% of them ignored friends or family to play the game, 28% played during work, 10% got into arguments with significant others over how long they played, and 30% said they were “addicted.”

But there are lots of amusing games out there, so what’s so addictive about this one?

We asked Tommy Palm, one of the game’s designers, what the King team did to get us hooked. We also called a few psychology experts and players to understand the backstory on why their tactics worked so well. Here are the nine reasons they say Candy Crush is so irresistible:

1. It Makes You Wait

Perhaps the most genius element of Candy Crush is its ability to make you long for it. You get five chances (lives) to line up the requisite number of candy icons. Once you run out of lives, you have to wait in 30-minute increments to continue play. Or, if you’re impatient, you can pay to get back in the game — which is why it’s bringing in so much revenue. “You can’t just play all the time. You run out of lives,” says Andy Jarc, 22, one of the few players to reach level 440 in the game. “So the fact that they kind of constrain you — the whole mantra, ‘You always want what you can’t have.’ I can’t have more lives and I want them.”

“I think it makes the game more fun long term,” says designer Palm. “If you have a game that consumes a lot of mental bandwidth, you will continue playing it without noticing that you’re hungry or need to go to the bathroom. But then you binge and eventually you stop playing. It’s much better from an entertainment point of view to create a more balanced experience where you have natural breaks.”

2. We’re All Suckers for Sweet Talk

You flick four candies in a row, and they zap away. Candies above begin to cascade down, making even more matches. At the end words pop up on your screen, accompanied by a voice that says “Sweet” or “Delicious.” This feedback is essential for player immersion. “Positive rewards are the main reason people become addicted to things,” says Dr. Kimberly Young, a pioneering expert on Internet and gaming addiction who treats those addicted to the cyberworld. “When you play the game, you feel better about yourself.”

3. You Can Play With One Hand 

According to Palm, the icons and setup were created so players could multitask. You can play Candy Crush while carrying a drink, toting a purse or bag, clinging to a subway pole, or hiding your phone under the table. That’s a huge advantage and makes this game perfect for a train ride, a distraction while you’re waiting to see a doctor, or something to get you through boring meetings. Plus, you can play offline as well — so even if you’re stuck in a tunnel, you can be “crushing.”

4. There’s Always More

According to Palm, the Candy Crush team updates the game constantly and creates new levels every two weeks. Right now there are 544 levels. “Just three years ago, a game with 30 levels would be astonishing,” King says. “And now with this game, it has raised the bar with how much content a mobile game should and will have.”

Plus, on any single level, there’s no way to fail. If you run out of options on a board — and that happens once in a blue moon — the board immediately resets. You never get stuck. You can’t lose. “I believe this is part of the reinforcing pattern which keeps you playing,” says Dr. Dinah Miller, a psychiatrist who has written about the addicting elements of another popular game, Angry Birds. The game only ends when you’ve run out of your allotted number of moves “and you can end that frustration by buying your way out.”

5. You Don’t Have to Pay – but if You Want to, It’s Easy

King reports that of all the players on its last level — 544 — more than 60% of them didn’t pay a cent to buy extra lives or chances to get there. But if you want to pay, it’s easy. Connected to Facebook or the app store? Just click to pay.

6. It Taps Into Our Inner Child

“Many people have had a very positive feeling about candy since they were kids,” says Palm. “And it makes for a really nice visual game board with a lot of color and interesting shapes.” In fact, when you play you feel as if you’re transported into an entire Candy Land experience. The game pieces are candy, and the homepage for the game looks like the traditional Candy Land board, with your Facebook friends’ pictures displayed as pieces on that board, sitting at whatever level they’re stuck on.

7. It’s Social

Social games — any game that allows you to connect with your friends through a social-media platform like Facebook — have taken off. Whether it’s Words With Friends, Kingdoms of Camelot or Candy Crush, the ability to play with, or compete against, friends is irresistible. “Look, nobody’s coming to me because they have a clinical addiction to Candy Crush,” says Young. “It’s more of a social addiction, if you will.”

8. It’s an Escape

“When you read the research about gaming,” Young says, “you’re often looking at people who are distracting themselves from something in their lives.” The relaxing exercise of lining up candies to the tune of upbeat music is a perfect stress reliever.

9.  It Grows on You

This isn’t your average “line up three” game. “I started playing, and at first I was like whatever, it’s just bejeweled,” says Jarc. “But as I played more and more, it became addicting.”

King’s high-level of attentiveness toward updating gameplay has made it better quality than most casual games that are out there. When players took to Facebook to express their frustration with level 65 — notoriously one of the hardest levels in the game — King went into the game and altered the level to make it easier (though not too easy) multiple times.

 

 

Cesarean Delivery: Lower Immunity Building in Infants?

Posted by

1


  Cesarean delivery may result in lower bacterial diversity, lower abundance of the phylum Bacteroidetes, and lower circulating levels of Th1 chemokines in infants compared with vaginal delivery, according to a study published online August 7 in Gut. Lower diversity may lead to higher exposure to health risks such as allergies later in life.

Hedvig E. Jakobsson, MSc, from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues followed-up 24 infants born by healthy women, 15 by vaginal delivery and 9 by cesarean delivery, from birth through age 24 months. The women and children were part of a larger study on prevention of allergies by probiotics, and 20 (83%) of the babies were partly breast-fed up until 6 months of age.

The researchers analyzed stool samples collected from the mothers 1 week after delivery and from the infants at 1 week and 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months after delivery. They compared microbial gene sequences isolated from mother and infant stool samples. They also collected venous blood samples from the infants at 6, 12, and 24 months of age. None of the infants received antibiotics, and any mothers who received antibiotics did so only after birth.

Although microbiota developed in a similar fashion at the phylum level for infants in both delivery-method groups, the researchers found that vaginal delivery infants had significantly higher proportions of Bacteroidetes than cesarean delivery infants, particularly at 1 week, 3 months, and 12 months. They also found moderately lower levels of Th1-associated chemokines in blood samples from cesarean delivery infants, which could increase risk for immune-mediated diseases such as allergy, diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease.

This study comes only a few months after another study found that cesarean delivery, combined with lack of breast feeding, may negatively influence gut bacteria development and lead to health risks later in life.

“[Cesarean delivery] was associated with a lower diversity of the Bacteroidetes phylum when considering all time points (p=0.002),” the authors of the current study write.

“Our study corroborates earlier studies reporting a delayed colonization of Bacteroides in babies delivered by [cesarean delivery].” In addition, they write, the new gene sequencing data indicate that “specific lineages of the intestinal microbiota, as defined by 16S rRNA gene sequences, are transmitted from mother to child during vaginal delivery.”

The researchers point out that more knowledge of how delivery mode affects microbiota composition and building of immunity may lead to improved allergy prevention strategies.

Source: Gut.

 

Scientists confirm neutrinos shift between three interchangeable types.

Posted by

0


New research has shown that subatomic particles called neutrinos have a previously unseen identity-shifting property.

The results confirm early indications that neutrinos change between different types, or oscillate, in three ways where they had previously only been seen oscillating in two ways.

newseventsimages

Scientists from the T2K collaboration, which involves Dr Yoshi Uchida and Dr Morgan Wascko from Imperial’s Department of Physics, made the announcement at a meeting of the European Physical Society in Stockholm, today.

Following the new findings, the researchers are keen to explore whether neutrinos oscillate in a different way to their antimatter particles (called anti-neutrinos). Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were thought to have existed at the start of the universe but now everything that we know is made of ordinary matter.

If any such differences between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos can be found, this will help scientists explain how all the antimatter has disappeared from the universe, leaving only ordinary matter.

There are three types, or ‘flavours,’ of neutrinos – one paired with the electron (called the electron neutrino), and two more paired with the electron’s heavier cousins, the muon and tau leptons (called the muon and tau neutrinos).

The three different flavours of neutrinos can spontaneously change into each other, a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation. Interchanges between muon and tau neutrinos, and between tau and electron neutrinos have been confirmed by other experiments, but until now the third way had not been seen.

To explore the neutrinos’ oscillations, the T2K experiment fired a beam of neutrinos from the J-PARC laboratory at Tokai Village on the eastern coast of Japan, and detected them at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, 295 km away in the mountains of the north-western part of the country. Here, the scientists looked to see if the neutrinos at the end of the beam matched those emitted at the start.

In the new data, they found 28 electron neutrinos appearing in the beam of muon neutrinos, where they only expected to see an average of between four and five, which indicated evidence for the third type of oscillation.

In 2011 when early data was released, the scientists had only observed six instances of electron-muon oscillation. Now the team say they have enough evidence to confirm they have observed neutrinos oscillating in every way they expect to be possible.

Imperial physicist, Dr Yoshi Uchida, said: “Using huge volumes of data collected at the T2K experiment, we have been able to check and cross-check the results of our neutrino experiments, and are now ready to make a statement that stands up to scientific scrutiny. What was a strong indication in 2011 of a phenomenon that had never been seen before is now essentially irrefutable.”

 

T2K scientists have observed oscillations from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos, which is one of the experiment’s main aims. These oscillations are called ‘electron neutrino appearance’ since the electron neutrinos appear in a beam of muon neutrinos. These findings will be compared to future data with anti-neutrinos to test whether muon and electron neutrinos oscillate in a different manner to their antimatter counterparts, an asymmetry that could help explain why antimatter is so comparatively rare.

“The exciting thing is that electron neutrino appearance, combined with other neutrino experiments, can help us understand whether there is a significant matter-antimatter asymmetry in neutrinos,” Dr Uchida continued.

“The question now is, do the observations from different experiments fit together in a way that seems consistent – and does it help us understand more about the universe.”

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is the UK sponsor of particle physics and supports the universities involved in the T2K experiment.

Source: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk