Science News October 12

[This is the transcript of the video.]

Welcome everyone to this week’s science news that Brian Keating suggested I call the Sabinews, but I’ll resist. Today we’ll talk about what went wrong with spooky action in the headlines, ads in the nightsky, wormholes in plastic, pollution in the brains of unborn babies, how rising temperatures change the colour of lakes, the supercontinent Amasia, and renewable energy from dancing.

Last week’s Nobel prize in physics triggered an avalanche of headlines about Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”. But almost all got it wrong. Good thing you have me to sort it out.

The experiments that Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger did use entangled particles. Entangled particles are created from a common source. They share some property, but you don’t know which particle has which share. A typical example is two particles that each can have spin either plus or minus one. You know that the spins of both particles have to add up to zero, so one must have spin plus one, the other minus one. But you don’t know which has which.

If you move the two particles away from each other, this shared property will still be correlated, and the correlation is now non-local. This entanglement is NOT what Einstein meant by “spooky action at a distance”. There’s nothing “spooky” about it and there’s no “action” in it. In fact, non-local correlations don’t require quantum mechanics to begin with. I mean, look, I am literally creating one with my hands. And, maybe it’s not obvious, but I’m not a pair of electrons.

What Einstein worried about is this. Without quantum mechanics, the properties of non-locally correlated particles have a definite value even before you measure them. According to quantum mechanics, however, the properties have no definite value until you measure them. And that I can no longer show you with my hands.

In quantum mechanics, the moment you measure one of the particles, the property of the other particle is also fixed. This is called the collapse of the wave-function. If you interact with one of the particles without measuring it, that will NOT affect the other particle. But the collapse happens instantaneously, faster than light, and supposedly does something to the other particle. *This is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance”. Isn’t that right, Albert?

Now, the experiments that won the Nobel Prize tested some alternatives to quantum mechanics that do not require spooky action, and ruled them out. Many headlines promptly claimed that this means spooky action is real. But this is not correct. Rather, the experiments showed that you either have to stick with quantum mechanics and accept spooky action, or you reject spooky action and accept superdeterminism. Which is why I keep saying we need experiments to test superdeterminism. And I’m sure one day there’ll be another Nobel prize for that, you heard it here first.

Mr President.

The Nordstream leaks, yes.

No, that’s not what Einstein meant by spooky action a distance. Always at your service.

Elon Musk might have been the first to shoot fleets of satellites into Earth orbit, but he won’t be the last. A lot of other companies are following his tracks and soon we might have hundreds of thousands of those things circling around our planet. Now a group of Russian researchers suggested we could use some of those satellites to draw messages into the night sky.

In a paper that was just published they say that space advertisement is both possible and commercially viable with currently available technology. They propose that 50 satellites could be sent into space and controlled to rearrange themselves in a pattern to display a message.

They estimate the up-front cost to be around 65 million dollars, whereas the net income could exceed one hundred million in three months, so it’d be profitable. Each ad would cost about 4 point 6 million dollars. Alternatively you can ask the neighbours’ son if you can borrow his drones.

Elon, I told you not to call me at this number.

No, you can’t buy my channel.

I've got to work. Why don’t you go outside and play with your friends. Launch some more rockets and stuff. Draw your name into the sky! Bye-ee.

Three astronomers in Ukraine have spotted unidentified aerial phenomena, dark objects whose origin they could not infer that seemed to be using advanced technology.

They estimate that the objects were 10-12 kilometers away, 3–12 meters in size, with speeds up to 15 kilometres per second. That’s faster than any human-made aircrafts or rockets go.

The Astrophysicist Avi Loeb, best known for believing that the interstellar object Oumuamua was alien technology, looked at the report. He argued that an object moving that quickly through the atmosphere would heat up the air and have a visible glow which was not observed. He said the astronomers almost certainly overestimated the distance. The objects were probably much closer, smaller, and moving slower. The observations are then perfectly compatible with that expected for artillery shells. The Kyiv observatory later issued a statement that agreed with Loeb’s conclusion.

So it wasn’t aliens, who’d have thought. But this week we have a real wormhole discovery.

Achilles had his heel, Superman has his kryptonite, and plastics have … worm saliva? A beekeeper was cleaning out a hive after a waxworm infection and noticed that the worm’s larvae had begun eating holes into a plastic bag. This wormhole discovery now led to a paper in Nature Communications. Turns out that two enzymes found in waxworm saliva are capable of breaking down plastics. They work for polyethylene, which makes up roughly 30 percent of all plastic worldwide, and is used among other things for bags, bottles, and wrappings.

Different teams of scientists had previously found several bacteria that can break down plastic, which we talked about in this earlier video, but this is the first time they’ve found a worm with this ability. It remains to be seen how efficiently this method can be used in practical applications. So maybe we’ll soon all put our plastic into a worm tank, and whoever brings out the garbage, it won’t be me.

The UK government has selected a site for a new nuclear fusion power plant. The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, STEP for short. Its total cost is an estimated 20 billion pound. According to the government website, it’s supposed to put net energy into the grid by 2040. That seems very optimistic to me given that no fusion reactor to date has ever put power into the grid. It’s not that I’m against research on nuclear fusion, but let’s be realistic. Most likely by 2040 they’ll be 10 years behind schedule, 5 billion over budget, and 1 meter under sea level.

In case you thought that was depressing, now we get to the really depressing part.

A study by researchers from the UK and Belgium found airborne particles in the developing lungs and brains of unborn babies. Previous studies had shown that exposure of pregnant women to polluted air is strongly correlated with an increased risk of miscarriage, premature births, low birth weights, and problems with brain development. But this is the first study to show that nanoparticles can cross the placenta and accumulate in the developing fetus as early as the first trimester of pregnancy.

90 percent of the world’s population live in places where air pollution is above the guidelines by the World Health Organization. Many scientists now hope the results of the new study will lead to stricter regulations.

Climate change is a great inconvenience. For example, my institution now requires that I take the train to the airport. But it gets worse than that, because it turns out that climate change also affects the color of lakes. A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has found that warming temperatures will likely turn many lakes that are currently clear blue into a murky green or brown. The world has about 85 thousand lakes, and currently about one third of them are blue. But warmer water benefits the growth of algae which turns the water green or brown, when too much organic matter falls apart.

Besides losing aesthetic value, green and brown lakes are more costly to clean up and transform into safe drinking water. Excessive algae bloom can also negatively impact the entire ecosystem of a lake. Beyond the immediate results of the study, many scientists hope that the color of lakes could be used as a baseline to quantify the effects of climate change on freshwater ecosystems.

The cosmologist Max Tegmark, best known for believing that the universe is mathematics, has estimated the current risk of nuclear war to be one in six. He has supported his argument with a very sciency looking flow diagram, because of course, global politics is also just mathematics. As I keep saying, if it doesn’t have an uncertainty estimate, it’s not science. The risk of nuclear war is of course 100 percent, because it will certainly happen somewhere in the mathematical multiverse.

Ok, this was the grim part, now to some lighter news.

Scientists at Curtin University in Australia used a supercomputer to predict continental drift in the billion years. They found that most likely the Pacific Ocean will close in two hundred to three hundred million years, and the current continents will join to one supercontinent that they called “Amazia”. Isn’t that amazing.

It wouldn’t be the first supercontinent. Researchers believe that supercontinents have existed in the past and that the tectonic plates come together to one connected surface roughly every six hundred million years. This is known as the supercontinent cycle. They authors of the new study say that the thickness and strength of the tectonic plates under the oceans reduce with time. That makes it difficult for the next supercontinent to form by closing the younger oceans, such as the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The joining of the continents will almost certainly dramatically change ecosystems, ocean streams, and wind patterns.

A music venue in Glasgow has pioneered a system that stores and reuses the body heat of dancers. Vigorous physical motion releases a lot of energy that normally goes to waste. The new system carries of the heat by a fluid circulating under the floor. The energy is then stored in boreholes and can be reused later. The system is called “body heat” and was built by the company town rock energy. Several clubs in other countries have expressed interest in the idea.  Maybe they can use it in the parliament too, they certainly waste a lot of energy by dancing around.

Thanks for watching, see you next week.