Category: Science

nature.com

Neural network inspired by brain structure, developed to help solve contradictions in quantum mechanics, comes up with Copernicus-style formulas for Mars’s trajectory.
While it created the formulas by itself, it doesn’t understand them — a human still needs to interpret the results.
The network consists of two sub-networks, one of them learns from data, and the other uses those learnings to make new predictions and test them.
In the future, it’s possible that it could discover new laws of physics, but most importantly it could remove contradictions from current quantum mechanics laws.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 8, 2019

Study on 5 men and 5 women provides new clues to how we recognize familiar music.
Researchers played a familiar and unfamiliar song to study participants to measure the speed with which our brains respond to music that we know.
Recognition took between 100ms and 300ms on average, and started with rapid pupil dilation, followed by cortical activation related to memory retrieval.
The process of how the brain recognizes familiar music is a fascinating phenomenon, understanding it might lead to new music-based

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 1, 2019

Because ants self-regulate, and adapt when their pathways get crowded, they are able to avoid traffic jams.
Humans are worse at this because we all have different goals, whereas all ants work towards the survival of their colonies.
This was uncovered in a study consisting of 170 experiments with colonies of different sizes, connected to food sources with bridges.
Since a colony is a system of interacting particles, these findings will be of interest to researchers in molecular biology, statistical physics, and telecommunications.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 25, 2019

Giving strong antibiotics to mice, which wiped out most of their gut bacteria, caused the disruption of a mechanism known as extinction learning.
This mechanism enables mice to lose fear of something when it doesn’t cause them any harm anymore.
Mice that had no gut bacteria stopped in fear when hearing a sound, even when they didn’t receive a shock after it anymore.
Looking at their brains, the researchers found that the mice had different active genes, and changed neural activity in the brain regions for fear and learning.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 25, 2019

Sycamore, Google’s quantum computer powered by a 53-qubit chip, solved an abstract mathematical problem that can’t be solved by a standard computer.
Google researchers claim quantum supremacy, but the scientific community doesn’t agree, and one large complaint comes from IBM.
IBM states that they could solve the same problem with a supercomputer in 2,5 days (and not 10,000 as Google claims).
But they haven’t done it yet, so the quantum supremacy claim is left in a grey area for now.
Nonetheless, it’s an important step towards understanding and mastering the power hidden in quantum computing.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 25, 2019

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