Unfortunately, that's not a picture of the amplituhedron. I'm pretty sure that's like glass or something. The amplituhedron is a high-dimensional object that can't be meaningfully viewed by humans, which doesn't make it stand out significantly from most of the stuff that theoretical particle physics pumps out. Also, while it simplifies certain computations immensely, it's still unclear (after three years) whether it actually applies at all outside of a very specific toy case that is almost certainly not what our universe consists of; again, not significantly different from most of the stuff that theoretical particle physics pumps out. Also the article completely botches the description in many, many ways. Again, not a significant difference. It is kind of elegant as a construction, though.
there's a sketch of a simplish amplituhedron about 3/4 down the page :) (as far as how useful it is, I mostly just thought that it was Really Fucking Cool to think about)
are the diagrams lower down accurate then? because there was one that just does not work to me also here's the original research paper on the digital morphing wing for anyone interested
According to the paper Arkani-Hamed and Trnka put on the arXiv, that diagram down below (the one triangles) is just a 3-dimensional facet of a 4-dimensional object. The rest of the pictures are either not directly related, like the twistor diagrams with all the circles and the Feynman diagrams on the stamp, or completely unrelated, like the colored picture at the beginning of the article which apparently they just got off of Flickr.
Cross-posting with the math thread: here is a mathematician's experience at an ecology conference and things he learned about the differences between the cultures. Perhaps an interesting read for both mathematicians and biologists.
Anyway what that blank post was supposed to be was a link to an article about the first clouded leopard born in captivity from an artificial insemination
hello friends i am applying for a research this summer and !!!???!!! apparently i have a decent chance of getting it too because of how few physics students there are at my school compared to like, bio and chem and etc., so... not guaranteed but a very good chance, so im told!! right now my title is "Tracing Meson Decay in Proton-Electron Collisions from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider", is that....too vague? i mainly ask bc my friend and i swapped proposals for proofreading and her title is "Calculating Optimal Blackening of Light Guides to Minimize Cherenkov Radiation in Quartz Detectors for the MOLLER Experiment" which is LONG and SPECIFIC and im just v worried about doing things Right because ive never done this before and i dont wanna ruin my shot OTL
anyways, actual science: i'm VERY EXCITED, it's for a relativistic heavy ion collider and potentially discovering new states of matter and its very exciting, here is a link to the facility that my research group works with, ahhHH http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/phenix/WWW/intro/
One of the people who invented the lithium-ion battery was leading the team of scientists that invented a glass-sodium battery that's much better!
Cephalopods are even cooler than we thought they were, and edit their RNA while keeping their DNA mutation rates low! Scientific American article Research paper from Cell
And his name is John B. Goodenough, which is... In other news, a new room-scale wireless power transfer system has been developed, allowing transfer of up to 1.9KW anywhere in a metallicised room, without need for cables. This system was developed by Disney. Because that's apparently a thing they do.
You guys holy shit, so you know the naked mole rat? This fucker here lives in subterranean tunnels in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, and their tunnels can get to being fifteen miles long. Their tunnels sometimes don't have enough oxygen to keep them going, so they switch from using glucose for energy to using fructose for energy, a process that doesn't require oxygen. Nbd just turning into a plant for up to 18 minutes, preserving all my organs from oxygen starvation, and then carrying on as normal as soon as I start breathing in oxygen again. Even better, the scientists who discovered that they do this think it might be possible to trigger the same metabolic shift in humans who've had heart attacks or strokes, which do the damage they do because they starve cells of oxygen, destroying them.
We're getting an objective kilogram! By which I mean one defined in terms of universal constants, rather than a block of metal in a vault in France. That's the one remaining basic physical unit that hadn't already been revised to use something reproducible and theoretically constant. Apparently we haven't had the tech to perform the experiment we're going to be using to define the kilogram at the required accuracy until quite recently. Source: The Guardian, but a bunch of major news outlets are mentioning this.
Yeah I've been excited about it for over 2 years now!! God I can't wait!!!!! Other things are changing, too! The Kelvin will be replaced, instead of using water they'll use Boltzmann's Constant, which is cool, and the Coulomb will now be defined in terms of the charge of an electron instead of the magnetic force a certain current causes. And then there's the mole. Oh man, the mole. I have no idea how they're gonna deal with it. They're thinking of maybe changing Avogadro's Constant to be just. A number, instead of being defined through the mass of carbon-12 Honestly, I like it. It really puts into light how much it's not a unit - rather, it's a scaling factor that we use for convenience, in the same way that using degrees instead of radians is. The only problem is, are they gonna redefine the Dalton? I really, really hope they do. It would make absolutely no sense to redefine Avogadro's Constant but keep the carbon-based Dalton. They need to go either one way or the other, and I really hope that they go the fully numeric route instead of carbon-based. Edit: I may be a bit spergy about this whoops
Sad news everybody. The Opportunity Rover on Mars has been officially declared dead by NASA, being unresponsive and almost certainly out of power. Source
