Credit: Johannes Zirkelbach/Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Topics: Applied Physics, Nanotechnology, Optics
At the focus of a laser, a 100-nm-wide gold nanoparticle can block more than half the light. If additional particles are added, the amount of blocked light increases exponentially, as modeled by the Beer–Lambert law. But theorists predict that in the right set of circumstances, the addition of a molecule would, counterintuitively, decrease the light blocked—that is, make the nanoparticle partially transparent.
Vahid Sandoghdar of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and his colleagues have now shown that predicted partial transparency for a near-field coupled dye molecule (red in image) and a plasmonic nanoparticle (gold). The phenomenon is a result of the interference between the light scattered from the two.
To achieve the required coupling, the dye molecule must be in a particular orientation and less than a wavelength away from the gold nanoparticle. Controlling those parameters is tricky, so Sandoghdar and his colleagues left them to chance. The researchers started with an array of nanoparticles and then coated it with a molten crystal doped with dibenzoterrylene (DBT) dye molecules. After the colorless crystal solidified, the result was a stochastic distribution of DBT molecules.
Their strong, distinctive fluorescence made the dye molecules easy to find optically. But the team members needed to verify that the molecule was near-field coupled to a nanoparticle. They identified a particle with two nearby DBT molecules and shined a tunable titanium:sapphire laser on it. The nanoparticle acts as an antenna, which enhances the molecules’ fluorescence. Relative to the other, one DBT molecule had telltale signatures of near-field interactions: enhanced and spectrally broadened fluorescence and a shorter excited-state lifetime—1.4 ns compared with the usual 8.1 ns.
Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics
Our right and left hands are reflections of one another, but they are not equal. To hide one hand perfectly behind the other, we must face our palms in opposite directions.
In physics, the concept of handedness (or chirality) works similarly: It is a property of objects that are not dynamically equivalent to their mirror images. An object that can coincide with its mirror-image twin in every coordinate, such as a dumbbell or a spoon, is not chiral.
Because our hands are chiral, they do not interact with other objects and space in the exact same way. In nature, you will find this property in things like proteins, spiral galaxies and most elementary particles.
These different-handed object pairs reveal some puzzling asymmetries in the way our universe works. For example, the weak force—the force responsible for nuclear decay— has an effect only on particles that are left-handed. Also, life itself—every plant and creature we know—is built almost exclusively with right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids.
When Luciana Leite arrived in the Pantanal on 2 September, she thought she would be celebrating her wedding anniversary. Instead, the biologist and her husband spent their eight-day planned holiday aiding volunteers and firefighters struggling to extinguish the burning landscape.
A common destination for ecotourists, the Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay.
But 2020’s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain — around 3.2 million hectares (see ‘Biodiversity Hotspot Under Threat’) — has succumbed to the flames, according to Renata Libonati, a remote-sensing specialist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose data are being used by firefighters to plan containment. That’s more than twice the area that has burnt in the record-breaking fires in California this year.
Scientists worry that the extreme blazes will profoundly alter the already fragile ecosystem of the Pantanal, and that research programmes investigating the region’s ecology and biodiversity will never recover.
“It’s apocalyptic,” says Leite, who studies humanity’s relationship with nature at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. “It is a tragedy of colossal proportions.”
Personal note: I’ve been offline prepping for my preliminary exam presentation, and grieving the loss of a friend I had known for 40 years since our freshman year at NC A&T. I was his best man. He did not die of COVID, but a heart attack. As such, my remarks were read at the funeral in Indiana, as the pandemic and social distancing concerns did not allow me to give my eulogy in-person. I hope you will forgive my absence.
This past autumn, a professor at Wuhan University named Jau Tang was hard at work piecing together a thruster prototype that, at first, sounds too good to be true.
The basic idea, he said in an interview, is that his device turns electricity directly into thrust — no fossil fuels required — by using microwaves to energize compressed air into a plasma state and shooting it out like a jet. Tang suggested, without a hint of self-aggrandizement, that it could likely be scaled up enough to fly large commercial passenger planes. Eventually, he says, it might even power spaceships.
Needless to say, these are grandiose claims. A thruster that doesn’t require tanks of fuel sounds suspiciously like science fiction — like the jets on Iron Man’s suit in the Marvel movies, for instance, or the thrusters that allow Doc Brown’s DeLorean to fly in “Back to the Future.”
But in Tang’s telling, his invention — let’s just call it a Tang Jet, which he worked on with Wuhan University collaborators Dan Ye and Jun Li — could have civilization-shifting potential here in the non-fictional world.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there “is” such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
― Martin Luther King Jr
From Middle English apocalips, from Latin apocalypsis, from Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis, “revelation”), literally meaning “uncovering”, from ἀπό (apó, “after”) and καλύπτω (kalúptō, “I cover”).Wiktionary
It is the 19th anniversary of September 11, 2001, now during a pandemic. What’s been revealed:
The Russians that attacked the 2016 elections are doing so in 2020, with the apparent blessing of their installed puppet. Not only is he deferential to Vladimir Putin, he’s nauseatingly gracious to him and any world dictator. He derisively nicknames everyone he meets to troll them. He hasn’t once Vlad, the impaler of democracies.
The criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party (Max Boot names them the “gang of Putin“) have conceded they have literally NOTHING they can sell the electorate on their policies: tax cuts for the rich don’t cause economies to grow, or jobs to “trickle down.” All they can give the rubes is “white power,” which doesn’t mean anything if you can’t buy a senator or congressman with your personal exchequer.
Confirming conservative judges hasn’t ended Roe vs. Wade, and even if it did, it wouldn’t eliminate abortion completely, just transfer the personal decision to individual states. The original intent by Margaret Sanger was to eliminate “lessers” and the “feeble minded,” which meant a lot of black and brown people, through involuntary abortions and sterilizations. Hell, America had a whole bureau for it. It backfired when it became a form of bodily agency for white women, wrongly attributed to lower birth rates. It didn’t HELP, but babies and daycare are expensive. That probably did it.
It does ensure that, once the demographics changes are complete in 2045, they will be the guards of white supremacy – not democracy – at federal and state levels. Even though White Anglo Saxon Protestants be in the numerical minority, they will still be in a similar state as Apartheid South Africa: diminished, but in-charge.
The Russian-installed puppet knew Coronavirus was airborne, that it would affect children: in February. He lied. We ran for our lives middle of March last semester. We were open, exposed. What would have been the result of a masking order February 8th? I have no doubt it still would have been horrific, but how many lives would still be with us? I don’t if we’d be heading for 200,000 soon; 400,000+ by the end of the year.
The Coronavirus reveals that America by far is not “united.” It is, in the title of author Isabel Wilkerson, arranged in a Caste system based on degrees of Melanin. Those with a preponderance of the pigmentation have to be demonized, violated, and killed. The reinforcement is by projection: monsters projecting their monstrosities on others. It is the origins of how we distribute wealth, resources, and health.
The near 100 fires on the west coast of America are visible from satellite. More will be said about how this is NOT climate change than about how this is the direct result of it. Other than the frenzied rush to qualify a vaccine, we have no warp drives, nor do we have a “planet B.” People in the midwest and other locations will shrug and ask, “why should they care?” This is similar to the resistance to give New York help during Hurricane Sandy. A repeat of item six, “United States” is an oxymoron.
Donald John Trump lied, and people died: hundreds of THOUSANDS of people. If he followed science, he would have had a mandatory mask mandate. If he followed science, he’d literally be sailing to re-election. If he just, didn’t LIE! He said he “didn’t want to panic us,” but he’s trying to scare the shit out of Levittown 1950s “suburban housewives” against the evil brown people from urban cities led by the scary black Senator Cory Booker, and invading hordes from the Mexican border!
“I felt like this was pretty urgent,” said De Kai, who was born in St. Louis, and is the son of immigrants from China. “I saw the country where I grew up, where my family lives [now mostly in the Bay Area], about to face this pandemic without knowing much about something as simple as wearing a mask to protect themselves and others.” In part, this comes from a cultural difference between East Asia, where masks have been routinely worn for decades to fend off pollution and germs, and other parts of the world. This includes the U.S., where people are unaccustomed to wearing masks, and, in the past, have sometimes been insensitive, even stigmatizing East Asians, many of whom had chosen to wear them in public prior to the pandemic, and had continued the practice in the aftermath of the SARS and MERS outbreaks. (In part, this habit was meant to show other people that they were concerned about transmitting the disease—something we in the West would do well to emulate.)
De Kai’s solution, along with his team, was to build a computer forecasting model they call the masksim simulator. This allowed them to create scenarios of populations like those in Japan (that generally wear masks) and others (that generally don’t), and to compare what happens to infection rates over time. Masksim takes sophisticated programming used by epidemiologists to track outbreaks and pathogens like COVID-19, Ebola, and SARS, and blended this with other models that are used in artificial intelligence to take into account the role of chance, in this case the randomness and unpredictability, of human behavior—for instance, when a person who is infected decides to go to a beach. De Kai’s team have also added some original programming that takes into account mask-specific criteria, such as how effective certain masks are at blocking the invisible micro-droplets of moisture that spray out of our mouths when we exhale or speak, or our noses when we sneeze, which scientists believe are significant vectors for spreading the coronavirus.
Here’s the ArXiv preprint paper to review. It takes ninth grade reading comprehension. What you don’t understand in terms can be discerned with a search engine.
Tomorrow is today, and every day, we’re being trolled by the so-called chief executive. He’s bankrupting the nation like one of his casinos. He’s exhausting us with his criminality, obvious mental deficiencies and endless gaslighting.
He’s revealing his ineptness, incompetence, and likely, complicit relationship with a foreign adversary. Of the 20,000 plus lies already documented from 2017 to this now, he cannot obfuscate his FIRST official lie as president*:
Before he enters on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:– I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 8
*Putin’s puppet is an accidental oval office resident, and a clear and present danger to the republic, as Oroborus (America) eats its own tail.
Natalia Herrera-Valencia and colleagues have successfully unscrambled entangled light after it has passed through a 2 m long multimode fibre. Led by Mehul Malik, the team at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tackled the challenge using entanglement itself. The research was done in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Glasgow and is described in a recent paper in Nature Physics.
Light passing through a disordered (or “complex”) medium like atmospheric fog or a multimode fibre gets scattered, albeit in a known manner. As a result, the information carried by the light gets distorted but is preserved, and extra steps are needed to access it. This gets especially tricky for the transport of entangled states of light because the medium muddles up the quantum correlations. The states get “scrambled” and “unscrambling” becomes necessary to retrieve the original entangled states.
Image Source: American Physical Society (APS) News
Topics: Astrophysics, Condensed Matter Physics, Diversity in Science, Women in Science
Dr. Joan Feynman was “Surely, You’re Joking,” Nobel laureate Dr. Richard Feynman’s baby sister, and an impressive scientist in her own right. We lost her in July. She broke through a lot of barriers that her science progeny are now, rightfully, walking through.
Joan Feynman, an astrophysicist known for her discovery of the origin of auroras, died on July 21. She was 93.
Over the course of her career, Feynman made many breakthroughs in furthering the understanding of solar wind and its interaction with the Earth’s magnetosphere, a region in space where the planetary magnetic field deflects charged particles from the sun. As author or co-author of more than 185 papers, Feynman’s research accomplishments range from discovering the shape of the Earth’s magnetosphere and identifying the origin of auroras to creating statistical models to predict the number of high-energy particles that would collide with spacecraft over time. In 1974, she would become the first woman ever elected as an officer of the American Geophysical Union, and in 2000 she was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.
Feynman’s choice in pursuing a career as a scientist was often at odds with the expectations for women, especially the expectations for a wife and mother, but she persisted to become an accomplished astrophysicist. During the 2018 APS April Meeting, where Feynman spoke at the Kavli Foundation Plenary Session, she recalled her mother discouraging her childhood interest in science, calling “women’s brains too feeble,” likely a common belief at the time.
For her fourteenth birthday, Richard gave Feynman a copy of Astronomy by Robert Horace Baker, a college-level physics text, that both taught her about physics and what was possible: Feynman credited a figure attributed to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for proving to her that women could indeed have a career doing science.
As part of her research at JPL, Feynman identified the mechanism that leads to the formation of auroras and developed a statistical model to determine the number of high-energy particles expelled from coronal mass injections that would hit a spacecraft during its lifetime. After her retirement from a senior scientist position in 2003, Feynman continued to conduct research on the impact of solar activity on the early climate of the Earth and the role of climate stabilization in the development of agriculture.
Quantum physics experiment has demonstrated an important step toward achieving quantum cryptography among many users, an essential requirement for a secure quantum Internet. Credit: ÖAW and Klaus Pichler Getty Images
Topics: Cryptography, Futurism, Internet of Things, Modern Physics, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics
Quantum cryptography promises a future in which computers communicate with one another over ultrasecure links using the razzle-dazzle of quantum physics. But scaling up the breakthroughs in research labs to networks with a large number of nodes has proved difficult. Now an international team of researchers has built a scalable city-wide quantum network to share keys for encrypting messages.
The network can grow in size without incurring an unreasonable escalation in the costs of expensive quantum hardware. Also, this system does not require any node to be trustworthy, thus removing any security-sapping weak links.
“We have tested it both in the laboratory and in deployed fibers across the city of Bristol” in England, says Siddarth Koduru Joshi of the University of Bristol. He and his colleagues demonstrated their ideas using a quantum network with eight nodes in which the most distant nodes were 17 kilometers apart, as measured by the length of the optical fiber connecting them. The team’s findings appeared in Science Advances on September 2.
Ruha Benjamin was the featured speaker on the DoSER webinar “Race to the Future? Values and Vision in the Design of Technology and Society.” | courtesy Ruha Benjamin
Technology is not unbiased, according to a scholar investigating the phenomenon of technological racism. As people recognize the embedded biases within technology, the growing and multifaceted tech justice movement is working to counter these biases, added the scholar.
Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and professor of African American studies at Princeton University whose work explores the social dimensions of science, technology and medicine, spoke during the “Race to the Future? Values and Vision in the Design of Technology and Society” webinar hosted on Aug. 13 by the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion program. DoSER facilitates dialogue between scientific and religious communities by hosting symposia and lectures on topics at the interface of science, ethics, and religion; training and supporting scientists on engagement with faith communities; and helping seminaries integrate science into their core curricula.
Webinar viewers were invited to consider which prejudices and values are incorporated into technologies such as search engines and AI algorithms, and to identify methods to dismantle technological racism.
Technology is often spoken about as if it were a force separate from human influence, Benjamin said. Yet “human beings are behind the screen: our values, our ideologies, our biases and assumptions.”
Benjamin also pointed out that the biases extend beyond individuals to the systems as a whole and the historical data inputted into the machines. Much in the way that racism exists in legal, educational and health systems, it also becomes codified in computer systems, she said. For instance, searching for images of “professional hairstyles” and “unprofessional hairstyles” on Google brings up results that equate naturally Black hair with a lack of professionalism – search results that echo real-life biases, she said.
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights
Public-opinion polling shows that Trump’s low opinion of American elections has practically become Republican Party orthodoxy. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday, Republicans have an “unprecedented” level of “concern and mistrust in the system.” Roughly 70 percent of Republican voters believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it’ll be due to fraud. In both this poll and an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, only half of Republicans say they’d accept a Clinton victory. (In the latter poll, by contrast, 82 percent of Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory.)
This suspicious Republican electorate is joined by growing ranks of conservative politicians, pundits, and intellectuals. They’re all increasingly willing to say that the existing American political system is hopelessly flawed and needs to be rolled back to the days before blacks and women could vote. On the most obvious level, this can be seen in moves by Republican governors all over America to make voting more difficult, through stringent voting ID laws, new hurdles to registration, and the curtailment of early-voting options. Equally significant has been the gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act by conservative Supreme Court justices in the 2013 Shelby Country v. Holder ruling.
Suspicion of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom. The evidence is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on November 8. Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the near future. But a whites-only party can’t win national elections. And over time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party doesn’t change dramatically. Or if the democratic system doesn’t change dramatically.
The 2008 electorate was on-record as the youngest and most diverse in Pew Research history. It’s why I think the right had a visceral reaction to President Barack Obama. He was the seventh African American to run for president in the modern era, and the first one to actually win. The trial balloon of a “post-racial” society was floated (see? We’re not racist, you finally have a negro president). The 2012 re-election sent them over a cliff of brief self-reflection with the post election GOP Autopsy, officially the Opportunity and Growth Project. That revelation was short-lived, and with past indicative revelations as prologue, quite reasonable and sane. State media/Fox propaganda and other conservative outlets couldn’t help themselves. The faux “controversies” from Michelle Obama’s bare arms (but not Melania Trump’s bare behind), Grey Poupon mustard on hot dogs and tan suits seems delirious, hilarious and deranged. It was a parade of the insane.
There is a pro and con to whether racism qualifies as a mental disorder. To those recipient of its attacks and largesse, it seems to fit the bill. I was the victim of a “Zoom bombing” recently, pornographic materials and the n-word repeated to an online crowd of African Americans in a Sunday School meeting studying the Book of James: We’d lean “pro.”
This demographics time bomb was set off by the aftermath of 1865: no longer having free slave labor, many legal machinations were attempted to re-enslave previously free African Americans using vagrancy laws, see “Slavery By Another Name,” by Douglas A. Blackmon. The American Prison System exploits a loophole in the 13th Amendment: anyone arrested by the system – state, federal or for-profit – according to The Constitution is technically a slave of the state. We have Asian citizens because Chinese immigrants were imported to replace freed slaves on plantations. ICE likes to raid Hispanics/Latinos at food processing plants, but are missing the bonanza of brown targets at home builders, who probably couldn’t offer their great home prices without company owners paying undocumented immigrants cash off-the-books, so as not to incur tax liabilities. Not a single home builder for example, has done a perp walk.
Chapter 2, page 33, subsection titled: Numerical Population Power
In a democratic society, the numerical majority wins, rules and decides. The theoretical rights of a minority, may or may not be respected, especially if they are a planned minority. Numerical population power is the power that comes to those groups that acquire power through their sheer size. The black population peaked in the 1750s when slaves and free blacks accounted for approximately 33 percent of the total population. The high numerical strength of blacks caused fear and concern among whites. They feared the loss of their own numerical power. Word of black Haitians successful slave revolt in the 1790s had spread across America and reportedly ignited several slave revolts in Southern states.
The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America to be a nation for “whites only.” The naturalization act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnics, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total percentage of the population declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured its dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (Latin): after this, therefore because of this. It is an informal fallacy, meaning the fallacy originates in an error of reasoning rather than a flaw in the logical form of the argument. (Wikipedia) So, what WAS the original “argument”?
American mythology teaches that the early United States was founded by men of conscience who came to the “new world” in order to practice their religious convictions in peace and freedom. John Winthrop (1588–1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in particular has been quoted as a source of inspiration by U.S. presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.
Yet Winthrop did not represent a tradition of either democracy or religious tolerance. He hated democracy with a passion. The state he created did not hesitate to execute people like the Quakers and even brought to the “new” world the very popular tradition of medieval Europe, the trial and execution of witches.
“A Shining City on a Hill”: Troubling information about a famous quote. The Puritan tradition of intolerance and John Winthrop, World Future Fund
We’ve taken The Constitution, our founding document, through historical apotheosis. Strict constructionists will say it is without flaw, and we should look for “original intent”; “breathing document” aficionados want constant change and continuous improvement, ever-becoming a “more perfect union.”
The story we tell ourselves becomes muddled over time. This is similar to the game of “telephone,” where my teacher whispered instructions to the first student in a line of fifth graders from a 3 x 5 index card. Twenty-students deep, what we said and the meaning of what they said has irrevocably changed, similarly through essentially a 232-year relay.
We are here from Crispus Attucks to George Floyd, from sacrifices in revolts from England to knees-on-necks, no-knock raids and killing teenagers carrying Arizona Tea and a bag of Skittles. We are here from Manifest Destiny, Trail of Tears, Black Wall Street-like genocides to Coronavirus pandemic. We are here because the original story of this country has become horribly distorted. That’s not to say the original picture was perfect. For this republic’s continuance, we desperately need to be honest with ourselves.
We’re here because the country was based on slavery: the wealth of the nation built on the backs of free, uncompensated, kidnapped-from-Africa labor for generations.
We’re here because those persons were described as a fraction, 3/5th’s, and their children sold away as so much cattle.
We’re here because the same slave owners defining us as inferior beings had unsolicited sex with us, siring Mulatto children in heterosexual rape of African women and “buck breaking” in homosexual encounters meant to emasculate African males in front of their females and families. Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson’s “lover”: the relationship (or, the rape), started when she was fourteen. That is BY definition, pedophilia, and like all the aforementioned sexual acts above, sadistic.
We’re here because the slaves, nor their descendants received reparations for years of enslavement, murder and terrorism by the KKK, “sundown towns” requiring a Green Book to navigate around, and white citizen’s councils.
We’re here because such wealth exchange as reparations would dismantle the current biased system of white supremacy, and the reason it is opposed so strongly.
We’re here because to justify the system, this nation built-in mythologies of superiority and inferiority, socially-engineered the society to self-fulfill the delusion, and codified it into laws. African Americans can be prejudiced, but they cannot be racist. Racism = prejudice + political power; the ability to codify your hatred with the strength of judiciary. Hitler did not “overthrow” the Weimar Republic: he won election, seized control, and cloned Jim Crow on steroids in Europe, the only lesson the United States refuses to take ownership of.
We are here because unlike the logical fallacy: our current “this” is logically followed by the obvious “that.” For us to have a new tomorrow – “[Built] Back Better,” we’re going to have to admit the sins of the nation’s past, and in the vernacular of scripture: repent.
Physics and Nano 