Science FTW

Obviously.

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To be honest, they had me at pancake.

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I’m impressed. I got to “Qua” and then it was

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When you get close enough to absolute zero, you start getting strange effects from quantum mechanics (or really not being able to ignore quantum mechanics). For instance, you know the speed of the atoms must be very close to zero…which means their position can’t be well defined. So depending on the type they either push each other away or merge into a fuzzy blob called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Something else odd happens when you stir those up. No surprise it starts swirling around, like any other fluid, right? But how fast something moves depends on its wavelength, and you have to have a whole number of waves going around a circle so the ends match up. Since the atoms here are blurry enough to go all the way around, that means the swirls are quantized…the angular momentum has to be multiples of a fundamental unit.

People have been studying those a lot in substances like helium, which are relatively simple in that the atoms are basically spheres. Now though people have also started making Bose-Einstein condensates out of magnetic atoms, which are different because they have specific poles. That’s been predicted to change all sorts of things about how the quantized vortices work…but what do they actually end up looking like? Well, the pictures in this paper, apparently.

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Sounds like some interesting studies of the superflud state:


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Is there an “unethical science” topic?

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No, but you could start one…

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Ouch. I think i sprained my brain.

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I love this study!

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You might be interested in Lars’ new book, then:

It makes sense that animals that need to learn their environment would play. Reward of exploring, trying new things and interacting with novel objects to see what they do is really helpful for learning about your surroundings

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They’re arguing that Standard Time year-round is better, not that we should keep changing twice a year the way we do.

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If we could only get them to pass the bill to reverse it, but it’s stalled in the HoR.

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Likely, many folks here don’t need this info, but it is a really good summary of why you can’t fit sexuality orcgender onto a bumper sticker.

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Vaccine doubles brain tumour survival rate

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They are almost certainly correct

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