Science News Nov 9

Welcome everyone to this week’s science news. Today we’ll talk about experimental evidence for quantum effects in the brain, the discovery of a potentially dangerous asteroid, a new method to track turbulence in plasma, China’s scientific Rise and the British Space Program, viruses on microplastics, how lasers can trick an autonomous vehicle into running someone over, the link between intelligence and self-control – in jay, and a 15th century house excavated in Berlin. And of course the telephone will ring.

A lot of people have asked me to comment on a paper that claims to have found evidence of “non-classical brain functions”. Non-classical here doesn’t mean rock and pop, but it means quantum mechanical. I believe what sparked the interest is that the abstract starts with something about quantum gravity.

Here's what you need to know to understand the paper. Atoms are non-classical. Without quantum mechanics, electrons would be balls whizzing around atomic nuclei. They would radiate, lose energy, and plunge into the atomic nucleus. There’d be no atoms. In quantum mechanics, electrons sit in shells around the nucleus, and they don’t radiate. That’s why atoms are stable. This means everything made of atoms is non-classical, including brains, and all functions going on inside of brains. So far, so unremarkable.

But there’s a research area called quantum biology. No, it’s not about breeding Schrödinger’s cats but about biological processes that are “very quantum” in some more or less well-defined, for example because they rely on coherent states or entanglement. There’s some disagreement in the literature about just how to quantify what is “very quantum”. But it’s an interesting topic because the role of those very quantum processes in biological systems isn’t presently well understood.

Do very quantum processes also happen in the human brain? It’d be surprising if they didn’t, but it’s been difficult to find good evidence for it. This is what the authors of the paper were trying to do: find evidence that very quantum processes happen in the brain.

The authors did some magnetic resonance imaging of human brains and measured the decay time of the signals which depends on the interactions of nuclei with their environment in the brain. Some of those are spin-spin interactions that require entanglement. They claim that this means entanglement plays a role for certain brain functions, which means some brain functions would be “very quantum”.

What does that have to do with quantum gravity? Nothing really, except that the authors seem to have taken inspiration from research on quantum gravity. Our current theory for gravity is Einstein’s General Relativity. It doesn’t have quantum properties or, as physicists, say it’s a classical theory. If we found evidence that gravity has quantum properties, that’d be worth a Nobel Prize and even Albert himself would be impressed.

Turns out if you can use something to create entanglement between two objects, then that thing you used to create the entanglement with must also have had quantum properties. So, if you could show that gravity causes entanglement then that’d show gravity was also a quantum theory. There are some people trying to do those experiments now. I’m not super excited about this because I think that in practice it’ll be nearly impossible to demonstrate that the entanglement was created by gravity and not something else, but that’s another story.

To come back to the paper. They use a similar argument to say if brain functions caused the entanglement they observe in the MRI, then the function must have had quantum properties. And that’s right but it’s somewhat unremarkable because MRIs and all brain functions really work with electromagnetic interactions which we know to have quantum properties already. So, nice paper, but probably not as exciting as you thought it is when you asked me to comment.

Astrophysicists have discovered a new asteroid that could one day collide with Earth. But it won’t happen any time soon, so don’t cancel your dentist appointment quite yet.

The asteroid is one of three that hadn’t previous been spotted because they were hidden behind the sun. According to a paper that was just published in the Astronomical Journal the asteroids were discovered in a sky survey conducted with the Blanco Telescope in Chile. It showed up in observations that were done during dusk and dawn, when it’s still dark enough to see the asteroids but not yet so bright that the sunlight overwhelms the camera. The asteroid has been given the catchy name 2022 AP7.

It’s the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in eight years, with an estimated diameter between 1 point 1 and 2 point three kilometres. However, its path is predictable enough to tell that it won’t hit us for at least a few hundred years.

If an asteroid of that size were to hit earth, it probably wouldn’t kill all of us. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is estimated to have had a diameter of ten kilometres. That sounds like it’s not so far off the about two kilometres of the newly discovered asteroid, but the consequences of an impact go with the mass, not with the size. So a factor five less in diameter is more than a factor 100 less in impact.

It still wouldn’t be fun though. The biggest problem with an asteroid impact isn’t the actual impact. It’s that it would inject a lot of dust into the upper atmosphere. It would stay there for years, block much sunlight, and cause widespread crop failure and famines. So, we’ve got a few hundred years left to get those planetary defences up. And how is that going?

Well, in February this year, NASA carried out an exercise for a hypothetical asteroid impact, a planetary fire alarm drill, so to speak. The final report was released in August. In the exercise, a fictional asteroid was discovered 6 months before its impact. At present, 6 months isn’t enough time to get a redirect mission on the way, and in the NASA drill the asteroid wiped out the city of Winston-Salem in North Carolina. If you live there, please let us know how you feel about that.

One of the major problems that surfaced in this drill is that while NASA’s communication to the public was deemed good, they didn’t really know how to combat the spread of misinformation on social media. So, in the end it might not be an asteroid that kills us but twitter.

Elon, I have to work.

No, I don’t need your checkmark. Because look, I’ve made one myself. You can have one too, so that everyone knows it’s really you calling. It’s just 8 dollars.

Elon?

You’ll be back. I know you want one!

A group of researchers from the MIT and Switzerland have presented a new method to track turbulence in plasma. Controlling such plasma turbulence is the major obstacle on the way to nuclear fusion power. In a paper that was just published in Scientific Reports, they explain how they used several ways of machine learning to identify turbulent filaments in plasma, called “blobs,” and automatically track them. Yes, “blob” is a technical term. They also provided a publicly available dataset in the hope of lowering the barrier to entry for research on the topic.

This research is part of MIT’s efforts to develop their own nuclear fusion plant. They have partnered with the private fusion start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems and are building a small, compact nuclear fusion machine called SPARC. It will use the familiar tokamak design, but with particularly strong magnets that rely on high temperature superconductors. Other researchers in the field have questioned that the tokamak design will ever produce net energy.

On October 31st, China launched the third and final module of its space station. The Mengtian module docked with the Tiangong space station 13 hours after launch, completing Beijing’s effort to outdo the United States in space exploration. The Chinese Space Station has 23 scientific research facilities on board to conduct experiments in zero gravity.

The Chinese are heavily investing in foundational research at a time when many other countries are falling behind. In 2016, China overtook the United States as the country that publishes the largest number of scientific papers per year.Earlier this year, it also rose to the first place in most cited scientific papers. The Chinese also lead the “quantum revolution” in terms of new patents and if it goes on at that rate they’ll soon buy YouTube. Or maybe they have already, who knows.

We’ve known for some while that the Chinese are serious about going into space, but while everyone was busy making jokes about Brexit, the British put forward their first own National Space Strategy. Mid-November, a jumbo jet from the company Virgin Orbit will take off from an airport in Cornwall to carry a rocket up to about 35 thousand feet. The rocket will then hurl several small satellites into Earth’s orbit. This’’ll be the first satellite launch from British ground. And this is only the beginning of the great British space plan. Several other companies on the British Isles and in Scotland, for example the company Orbex, have their own plans to shoot stuff into space, both for commercial and scientific purposes.  According to the UK government, they want to “the leading provider of commercial small satellite launch in Europe by 2030”.

Hello again Elon,

You can’t fire me. I don’t work for you.

Oh, a joke. Yes, brilliantly funny. Love you too.

Scientists have found that viruses can survive on microplastics for more than ten days. Microscopically small pieces of plastic already contaminate air, soil, water, and food. A study from 2019, had found that humans eat between 39 thousand and 52 thousand microplastic particles a year and inhale a similar amount.

According to the new paper that was just published by researchers from Australia microplastics might be more harmful than previously realized  because they can carry viruses. The researchers found that microplastics become even more hospitable to viruses as they age because it becomes easier for the viruses to creep into the damaged surfaces.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough another study from researchers in Australia and the UK has found that non-stick cookware, such as teflon pans, release pieces of microplastics and other nanoparticles from their coating. According to a press release from Flinder’s university, that’s typically about a ten thousand per crack and several million per lifetime. This doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, but it might sound more alarming than it is. We regularly ingest naturally occurring microparticles from both organic and inorganic sources, such as microscopic pieces of leaves or sand, and they don’t do much harm. So it’s probably not necessary to throw out your pan, but maybe don’t scratch around it them quite as much as my husband does.

Self-driving cars can be tricked into running over pedestrians. According to a paper  that appeared on the pre-print server arxiv last week, shining lasers at the car in just the right moment can create a blind spot in the car’s radar system. They say this security risk could be exploited to cause crashes with pedestrians. The researchers have told manufacturers about the possible exploit and have begun taking measures to figure out how to circumvent the issue. Though it seems to me that if you need a group of people with PhDs in physics to figure out how to do it, it might be cheaper to call the mafia.

A recent study from researchers at the University of Cambridge  found that Eurasian jays are capable of foregoing an immediate reward for a better one that comes later. The study used a sample of ten Eurasian jays, which were given the option to take bread or cheese which were readily available or wait and receive mealworms, which they like better. All ten birds were capable of waiting for the mealworms, but the amount of time they’d wait varied.

The researchers then presented the jays with five cognitive tasks and found that the birds that were able to wait longer for the mealworm reward performed better on the cognitive task. The study is the first of its kind to link self-control and intelligence in birds.

The research draws on the idea behind the Stanford marshmallow experiment from 1972. In this experiment, children between the age of 3 and 5 were offered one marshmallow but were told if they waited 15 minutes without eating it, they’d get a second one. The researchers then followed those children as they grew up and concluded that delayed gratification is correlated with success. However, more recent studies have shed doubt on this conclusion. Economic background seems to play a significant role for whether or not children will comfortably wait for more food rather than eating the one they’ve got. So in the next bird study, they better ask those jays for their credit score.

Meanwhile in Germany. An excavation in Berlin has found parts of a well-preserved wooden house from the 15th century. The rooms are several meters below what is street level today and are believed to have been the basement of a larger house. The finding is remarkable because of the well-preserved household equipment such as pots, and toys such as die carved from bones.

And since we’re speaking of digging already, a group of Americans have built a sarcophagus to bury a bag of flaming hot Cheetos to uncover for future archaeologists. The Cheeto bag is sealed into resin and held securely in mid-air to survive the event of an earthquake. The only thing archaeologists will dig up in our basement are boxes inside boxes inside boxes.