Nearly 167,000 rainbow trout had to be sent to a private landfill instead of local lakes earlier this week due to an outbreak of botulism in their rearing pond at a WDFW hatchery in Mason County.
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Simplifying complex ideas in sketches
What would you see if you tried to travel alongside a light wave at the speed of light? And suppose you held a mirror in front of you as you zipped along. What would you see in the mirror? This and similar thought experiments were posed by the young Albert Einstein to himself in his teens. It’s come to be known as Einstein’s Mirror and is also the title of a popular book on relativity. It would at first seem that light, reflected off your face, could never reach the mirror to, in turn, reflect back into your eyes to see it. So what would you see? It was only years later that Einstein developed a theory that answered this puzzle. And it required some fundamental adjustments to how we understood the world, which still bend my mind to think about them. These include: You can’t travel at the speed of light. Time is not fixed; it is relative. The speed of light is a universal constant—it is the same, independent of the motion of the source. Einstein wrote: “After ten years of reflection, such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c [the velocity of light in a vacuum], I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing…” — Autobiographical notes, 1949 I’ll try to explain a little as I understand it. Our usual experience is that velocities are additive. Suppose I am on a moving train carriage and I throw a ball from the back of the carriage to the front. For an observer outside the train, that ball moves at the speed of the train plus the speed of the ball relative to me. But light behaves differently. As you approach the speed of light, the energy required to keep accelerating approaches infinity. In effect, you can’t reach the speed of light. So an observer of a flying Einstein wouldn’t see light travelling from him to the mirror at twice the speed of light. What changes is time. For the high-speed Einstein, the light would appear to travel away from him to the mirror and back at its usual immense speed. However, for an observer, what would only seem a moment for the high-speed Einstein might take years for the rest of us—the experience of time changes with velocity. It’s a remarkable turn for a simple and fascinating question. It’s amazing to me that the young Einstein would both pose this question, continue work on it, and then think to question some of the most self-evident facts of our world as we experience it: that time is not fixed, that a speed cannot be reached, and of course, ultimately, that energy is matter. The book Einstein’s Mirror is co-authored by my Dad (respect!). It’s full of photographs, fascinating stories, and the characters that moved physics forward. It includes the people, events and science central to another of Christopher Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer. Perhaps Christopher read it 🤔 Related Ideas to Einstein’s Mirror Also see: Laplace’s Demon Redshift Looking back in time The Doppler Effect Sonic Boom The most beautiful equation — Earlier this year, we attended a showing of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar at the Royal Albert Hall in London with Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack played by a live orchestra. It was a fantastic way to experience a remarkable film—a film that manages to make black holes, wormholes, and time slippage both understandable (largely) and part of the plot. It strikes me as an astonishing achievement for a mainstream film.
New atlas reveals more about how the body’s ‘master gland’ really works
A new study has created a detailed map of the pituitary gland, often called the body’s “master gland” because it controls important functions such as growth, stress and reproduction. Researchers from the Center for Craniofacial & Regenerative Biology combined data from many studies to build a single, clearer picture of how this gland works. They created the Consensus Pituitary Atlas, along with an easy-to-use website where scientists can explore the data and analyze their own.
Over the past 10 years, scientists have used a method called single-cell RNA sequencing to measure how genes work in individual cells. This method has also been used to study the pituitary gland. Since 2018, researchers have collected data from 1.3 million pituitary cells across nearly 40 studies.
However, these studies were often small, used only a few animals, usually male, followed different analysis methods, and employed inconsistent naming conventions for cell types. This made results hard to compare and sometimes unreliable.
A natural chemistry laboratory in protostar shockwaves
Life exists because elements combine to form complex organic molecules. Astrochemistry studies this process, trying to understand how nature creates carbon-based molecules critical for life. One source for these types of molecules is the outflows emitted by protostars.
Protostars grow by accreting gas, and while they do so, they also emit energy. Protostars haven’t begun fusing hydrogen yet, so their energy comes from shocks on its surface generated by in-falling gas. They can also emit high speed streams of gas as astrophysical jets. These jets carry away excess angular momentum, allowing the protostars to keep growing. These jets also create illuminated shocks in the interstellar medium (ISM).
Shock fronts like these are where energy and matter are concentrated, and that’s where Nature does its thing. They’re like a chaotic speed-dating event for chemicals. The heat and pressure splits some molecules apart and binds others together and it all happens quickly.
Ray Kurzweil Predicts AI Will Change Humanity Completely by 2030
Two of my favorite people. Definitely worth a view if you are interested in either.
Few thinkers have shaped our understanding of the future as profoundly as Ray Kurzweil. An American inventor, computer scientist, futurist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author, Kurzweil is widely regarded as one of the most influential technological forecasters of our time. For decades, he has accurately predicted many of the innovations that now define modern life, from mobile computing and artificial intelligence to digital assistants and large language models often years before they entered the mainstream.
In this special conversation, Tony Robbins sits down with Ray Kurzweil in San Francisco to explore one of the most important questions facing humanity: What happens next?
Together, they examine the accelerating pace of artificial intelligence, the path toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the rise of autonomous agents, the future of work and education, breakthroughs in healthcare and longevity, and how these technologies may transform society over the coming decade.
Kurzweil explains why his long-standing prediction of AGI by 2029 now appears increasingly conservative, why the next few years may bring more change than any period in human history, and how humanity may ultimately merge with the very technologies it creates.
When less is more: Scaling law explains why ultrathin materials get stronger as they get thinner
One of the most fascinating aspects of physics is that nature often behaves in ways that seem completely counterintuitive. A good example comes from ultrathin materials. If I take a sheet of material and make it thinner and thinner, most people would expect it to become weaker. After all, there is less material left to bear a load.
Yet over the last decade, experiments and simulations have repeatedly shown something surprising: when certain materials become extremely thin—only a few nanometers or even a few atomic layers thick—they can become dramatically more resistant under extreme mechanical loading.
This phenomenon has been observed in systems as different as graphene, graphene oxide, and ultrathin polymer films. The effect was clear, but the reason behind it remained unclear. Why should materials with completely different chemistry and structure all exhibit a similar trend?