Tag: science

Ambigram Viruses

Occasionally, sections of a genome will have overlapping sequences that code for different proteins. But in narnaviruses, the entire genome is an overlapping sequence: It can be read in its “reverse complementary” orientation. That is, the RNA is like an ambigram, a stylized script that still says something when flipped upside down.

Antimatter Containment

Antihydrogen does not naturally occur on Earth; physicists first synthesized it in 1995 at CERN. But these particles moved at nearly the speed of light and disappeared in 40 billionths of a second. It would take another 7 years before physicists could produce near-motionless antihydrogen that would not immediately knock into regular matter and annihilate. And it wasn’t until 2010 that they could successfully trap and store antihydrogen. Hangst’s team can now perform experiments for up to 24 hours at a time on the antihydrogen, 12 orders of magnitude in 25 years

50% crazy

When I invest in biotech, I have a sort of a model for the type of person I’m looking to invest in. There’s sort of a bimodal distribution of scientists. You basically have people who are extremely conventional and will do experiments that will succeed but will not mean anything. These will not actually translate into anything significant, and you can tell that it is just a very incremental experiment. Then you have your various people who are crazy and want to do things that are going to make a very big difference. They’re, generally speaking, too crazy for anything to ever work. You want to find the people who are roughly halfway in between. There are fewer of those people because of these institutional structures and whatnot, but I don’t think they’re nonexistent. My challenge to biotech venture capitalists is to find some of those people who are crazy enough to try something bold, but not so crazy that it’s going to be this mutation where they do 100 things differently.

Dusty Stars

Are we seeing 6 V838 Monocerotises orbiting our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole? It’s certainly possible. The number we see fits, the idea that they are stars embedded in dense dust clouds fits, the dynamics fit, and we have an example of just such a beast. There was a recent burst of star formation in the galactic center ~4–6 ga ago, which very well could have been when these binaries were born.

dust clouds with stars embedded in them.

Fluid Equation Singularity

In the same way that eddies in a stream alter downstream currents, Elgindi’s work itself prompted a new round of mathematical discovery. In October 2019, Hou and Jiajie Chen adapted some of Elgindi’s methods to create a rigorous mathematical proof of a scenario closely related to the one in the 2013 experiment. They proved that in this slightly modified scenario, the singularity they’d observed forming in the Euler equations really does occur.

“They took Elgindi’s ideas and applied them to the scenario from 2013”. The circle was complete.

There’s still more work to be done, of course. Hou’s new proof has some technical qualifications that prevent it from establishing the existence of the singularity in the exact situation he modeled in 2013. But after a remarkable 6-year run and with renewed momentum, Hou believes he’ll soon surmount those challenges, too. “I think we’re very close”.

2022-04-12:

Now another group has joined the hunt. They’ve found an approximation of their own — one that closely resembles Hou and Luo’s result — using a completely different approach. They’re currently using it to write their own computer-assisted proof. The team’s answer looked a lot like the solution that Hou and Luo had arrived at in 2013. But the mathematicians hope that their approximation paints a more detailed picture of what’s happening, since it marks the first direct calculation of a self-similar solution for this problem. “The new result specifies more precisely how the singularity is formed. You’re really extracting the essence of the singularity,. It was very difficult to show this without neural networks. It’s clear as night and day that it’s a much easier approach than traditional methods.”