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Submission + - Meteorite that Crashed Through Roof of Georgia Home Predates Earth (foxnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A meteorite fragment that burst through the roof of a home in Georgia, US has been determined to be billions of years old and to predate the Earth, according to University of Georgia geology professor Scott Harris.

"These are objects that go back to the original material formed 4.56 billion years ago," Harris explained. "So, in the days slightly before the formation of the planets themselves, and at least the rocky interior planets. And, you know, those are the basic building blocks then of our rocky planets and, so that's one of the reasons that scientists are interested in studying them is it shows us about some of the processes that were active during the early days of the solar system."

Submission + - Sweet disguise: Body hides its own RNA from the immune system with sugar (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: To our immune system, naked RNA is a sign of a viral or bacterial invasion and must be attacked. But our own cells also have RNA. To ward off trouble, our cells clothe their RNA in sugars, Vijay Rathinam and colleagues at the UConn School of Medicine and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children's Hospital report in Nature.

Submission + - SPAM: Genomic techniques can streamline breeding for grain quality

alternative_right writes: Small grains researcher Juan David Arbelaez-Velez knows the secret to making perfect rice—and it's not about how you cook it. Arbelaez and his team are investigating the genetic blueprint that determines different grain attributes such as appearance, cooking time, and texture. Their paper, published in The Plant Genome, offers a strategy that will help breeders improve grain quality holistically, while cutting costs and saving time.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - China's 'biggest threat' to US is a 'tech kill-switch' (the-express.com)

fjo3 writes: A cybersecurity expert has delivered a chilling alert that China represents the greatest technological threat to Western countries, possessing the ability to trigger a 'killswitch' on America's power grid at will.

In response to this disclosure, the United States has initiated numerous probes into Chinese-made technology, with various investigations revealing 'malicious, mysterious computer codes' that can be remotely triggered to disable critical infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines and electrical networks.

Comment What about other vehicles? (Score 1) 68

Hydrogen does not make a good fuel, tor a tonne of reasons, but nitrogen fuel would be less prone to nasty reactions and fewer problems. Could N6 combustion be controlled at levels suitable for heavy road vehicles or trains?

(Electric trains have their own problems, due to the fact that the junction needs to be poor and the cost of copper is so great that lines need to use far worse conductors to reduce theft.)

Submission + - History is best told as a story of organised crime (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

You are correct. That's precisely how MWI is thought to work.

The premise of the argument is that, to conserve superposition information, you would necessarily need to prove that it would be grouped with information QM requires to be conserved, when viewed in a space that permitted it to be conserved. If it isn't, then there's no mechanism to preserve it, so no MWI.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

Not strictly correct. You would be correct for all consequences over any statistically significant timeframe, but (a) I've purposefully included things that aren't actually outcomes, and (b) over extremely short timeframes (femtoseconds and attoseconds), differences would emerge very briefly, because different mechanisms take different routes.

Remember, the maths only concerns itself with outcomes, not the path taken, so identical maths will be inevitable for non-identical paths.

Submission + - Windows 11 = Windows 7 ? 1

J. L. Tympanum writes: It looks to me like Windows 7, 10 and 11 are all the same OS, just with a different-looking window manager slapped on top. Can someone with more knowledge of Windows internals verify this claim, or refute it?

Comment Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

I would contend that it should be possible to find an implication of each interpretation that only exists in that interpretation. If, for example, Many Worlds is true, then it necessitates that any sort of information cannot be destroyed and vice versa, when considering the system as a whole. If Many Worlds is false, then superposition information is lost when superposition collapses, you cannot recover from the collapsed wave a complete set of all superposition states that existed. I'm sure that someone will point out that superposition isn't information in some specific sense, but that is the whole point. Many Worlds is impossible if you can show that superposition ISN'T the sort of information that IS conserved, because Many Worlds requires, by its very nature, that it is.

This gives us a test that does not require us to look into other universes and can be done purely by theoreticians. If you regard the system as a 5D system, then is that information conserved or not? Yes or no. If yes, then that does not "prove" Many Worlds, but it does mean that only interpretations that preserve that information in some form are viable. If no, then Many Worlds, and all other interpretations that preserve that information in some form, are ergo impossible. Instead of filling out questionaires on what you think is likely, try to prove that it can't be possible and see if you succeed.

I would also argue that physicists thought that the Lorenz contraction was a neat bit of maths by mathematicians that had nothing to do with reality, until Einstein cottoned onto the fact that it actually did. You cannot trust physicists who have an innate dislike of mathematics. This doesn't mean that maths always represents reality, but it does mean that it does so unreasonably often and unreasonably well.

Submission + - SPAM: Engineers Weigh Up Returning to Ancient Roman Concrete Recipes

alternative_right writes: The ancient Romans might have taught us a thing or two about manufacturing sustainable concrete that lasts for thousands of years.

A new study has rigorously analyzed the raw materials and energy demands of their ancient recipe, revealing some useful ways to improve modern cement.

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Comment Re:Somehow... (Score 1) 45

I disagree. First, the bands used for astronomy are regularly used by others, which is one reason why radio telescopes have radio silence zones. Second, astronomy certainly trumps the need for cat videos or porn. Thirdly, you really really don't need all the frequencies that are currently being used for domestic purposes, because they're being used very inefficiently. You can stack multiple streams onto far fewer lanes and use multiplexing. Fourthly, whingers lost any sympathy they might have got from me by voting in twits who keep cutting the science budget. If we had space radio telescopes, you could do what the F you wanted on Earth, but because of the current lunatic situation, you're not only grabbing what scientists need, you're stopping them from alternative solutions as well.

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