The number one cliché of modern media: bad news travels twice as quickly as good news. Let’s narrow that difference by sharing published news articles that promise a future that either doesn’t resemble hell or better yet, a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.*
*The MacArthur Foundation coined this phrase and I haven’t come up with anything that better describes my hopes for society.
Florida executions on hold after court rules death penalty unconstitutional (The Guardian)
“I’m happy. This is an important ruling. My first reaction is relief that it’s going to require a unanimous decision from a jury to make the ultimate determination of whether or not someone should die,” said Rob Smith, director of the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard law school.
Forever quantum: physicists demonstrate everlasting quantum coherence (phys.org)
Physicists have implemented the first experimental demonstration of everlasting quantum coherence—the phenomenon that occurs when a quantum system exists in a superposition of two or more states at once. Typically, quantum coherence lasts for only a fraction of a second before decoherence destroys the effect due to interactions between the quantum system and its surrounding environment. The method presented in the new study does not attempt to slow down or correct decoherence, but instead it reveals a natural mechanism under which resilience to decoherence spontaneously emerges.
Almost anything involving Killer Mike makes me happy! What a happy mutant!
Physicists dispel the Rayleigh’s Curse
Rayleigh’s curse limits the minimum distance that can be distinguished with visible light: on the order of 0.1 micrometer (a bacterium, for example, has a size of 2 micrometers), “which is a great limitation to our ability to see finer details,” says Luis Sánchez Soto, Professor at the Faculty of Physics at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Be prepared for some EPIC microscope images of viruses in the next ten years…
I posted these in Have you seen THIS, but they don’t get much traffic.
The hard-working researchers at MIT just got the world a little closer to productive nuclear fusion:
Stable nuclear fusion involves a plasma’s particle density, its confinement time, and its temperature, reaching a particular value (the “triply product”) that keeps the reaction going. The plasma must be extremely hot (more than 30 million degrees Celsius) and it needs to be stable under intense pressure while remaining in a fixed volume. Adjusting the plasma pressure is most of the challenge.
Now, thanks to scientists working on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak fusion reactor at MIT, we are a step closer to controlling it. (Futurism)
“This is a remarkable achievement that highlights the highly successful Alcator C-Mod program at MIT,” says Dale Meade, former deputy director at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who was not directly involved in the experiments. “The record plasma pressure validates the high-magnetic-field approach as an attractive path to practical fusion energy.” (MIT News)
Dr David Kingham, chief executive of Tokamak Energy, said the important aspect of the MIT world record was that it showed extreme conditions can be created in small tokamaks: the volume of the MIT device is just one cubic metre. “The conventional view is that tokamaks have to be huge [like ITER] to be powerful,” he said. “The MIT people disagree with that view, as do we.” Kingham’s target is for his company’s compact reactors to produce their first electricity by 2025. (Guardian)
With the keel-laying of the RRS Sir David Attenborough today, attention is on her more famous offspring, the autonomous sub Boaty McBoatface.
The UK’s favourite new yellow submarine, Boaty McBoatface, is in training for a grand challenge.
Scientists plan to send the long-range autonomous vehicle under the sea-ice of the
Arctic - from one side of the ocean basin to the other.
Scientists have found the Higgs Bison!
Oh, come on. There was a much better name for this.
This thread needs more in it, stat.
About time.
(tempered by the fact the results suggest the final vote will be between Fillon and Le Pen)
Barrett Brown:
is out of prison:
Not “Good News” so much as “Cool News,” but:
Although I know anyone else Mr. Trump picks will likely be just as unpalatable, this is still pretty good news…
This man survived five hours under water with just his face exposed by doing what amounts to a yoga pose.
In addition to being good news, this might just bust some stereotypes about who knows poses.
Holy crap.
That sounds like literal torture.
Glad the guy made it out of there okay.
Yeah, that’s a super-grim situation. Sometimes it does work out.
