Quotes from Saturday: Listening to birds’ dreams, protecting qubits, imagining impossible pool balls

Today is Saturday, which means in a universe where the arrow of time moves backwards, people have to go to work tomorrow. In such a hypothetical universe, it would be unimaginable that Garfield would hate Fridays. This week, we’re looking at hundreds of groundbreaking scientific advances, and I’m highlighting four of them here, including a new geoengineering study, a quantum information security breakthrough, and listening to the melodious dreams of birds.

cold clouds

As the light dimmed and the temperature dropped a noticeable eight degrees in Brooklyn during Monday’s solar eclipse, it occurred to me: Blocking out the sun is a great way to cool the atmosphere (I have an associate’s degree from an accredited junior college). It turns out that for decades, researchers have considered geoengineering approaches with interest (and often sheer horror).

Now, researchers at the University of Birmingham have modeled ocean cloud brightening and determined that it works primarily through increased cloud cover, accounting for 90% of its cooling effect. Previous models have focused on the effects of aerosol injection to increase cloud brightness and reflect sunlight directly back to its source. The idea is to eject tiny reflective particles into the atmosphere, which mix with clouds and increase their brightness; experiments are underway in Australia, where marine researchers are trying to reduce bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

In the current study, the researchers used machine learning models, satellite data and historical meteorological data to study natural aerosol emissions from the eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.During volcanic activity, they estimated that cloud cover increased by 50% and produced a cooling effect of up to -10 W m^-2 Regional.

fictional realization

Researchers at the University of Buenos Aires used their 20 years of research on muscle activation in birds to translate unconscious neural data from birds dreaming of territorial conflicts into synthetic bird calls. While sleeping, birds’ muscles exhibit activity patterns that correspond to known behaviors, including musculature signals associated with vocalization.

Likewise, humans and other animals display muscle activity during dreams that is similar to that seen during waking hours. The bird, a flycatcher known as the great kiskadee (named for its iconic song), was chosen for its well-studied physical singing mechanism. As the bird slept, the researchers observed it raising its crest of feathers in a posture associated with territorial behavior. The researchers used a dynamic model of the subsonic vocalizer to translate data on the bird’s syringe muscle activity into the greater Kiskady’s unique territorial calls.

Study author Gabriel Mindlin said: “I can’t help but sympathize with imagining that lone bird reliving a territorial dispute in its dream. We have more in common with other species than we often realize. .

snooker hypothetical

Researchers have long used the idealized game of pool as a model for mathematical and physical phenomena. For example, if you have a perfect pool table and a perfectly spherical cue ball with zero friction, the ball will always bounce off the walls of the table.

Theorists explore questions such as “Will the ball return to where it started?” “Does the ball ever reach every point on the table?” What happens if you change the starting point or the angle of the initial shot?

These problems are applicable to many mathematical contexts, including the exploration of chaos. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam has modified this thought experiment with a new constraint: What if the ball was constrained from crossing its own path? The result is that the size of the table becomes smaller and smaller. The new constraints show that the ball will eventually get stuck on the table on its own path, and that it will be more likely to get stuck in some parts of the table than others.

This is interesting to biologists because many species trace their own paths when searching for food, for example, to avoid previously explored areas. The researchers note that single-celled slime molds use this self-avoidance path. “These results will help us better understand these biological systems and perhaps even incorporate the lessons we learned to optimize this memory-enabled billiard ball for use in robots,” said co-author Mazi Jalal. Jalaal) said.

Quanta confused

Physicists at the University of Oxford know you don’t currently have a quantum computer at home, but if you do, they think you might want to upload photos and more to the cloud. I mean, there are some tough challenges in quantum computing, like finding a qubit that remains coherent at temperatures above absolute zero, just for starters. But hypothetically, if they do that and can mass-produce home appliances with quantum computing hardware, you’ll want your cloud connection to be secure.

Researchers describe “blind quantum computing,” an advance in secure quantum networks using trapped ions and single photons. In the lab, they connected quantum computing servers to photon detectors via fiber-optic network links. Through their system, they can access remote quantum systems, use secret algorithms to process confidential information, and verify whether the results are correct without revealing the secret information.

Corrections resulting from calculations must be applied to all subsequent calculations, requiring real-time information to comply with the algorithm. They envision a device that could be plugged into a laptop to protect data while using quantum cloud services.

2024 Science