From Quarks to Quasars » The Center of a Black Hole: Infinitely Massive Singularity or Portal into another Universe?

From Quarks to Quasars » The Center of a Black Hole: Infinitely Massive Singularity or Portal into another Universe?

Black holes are one of the most naggingly peculiar objects in the universe. Beyond the event horizon of a black hole, our equations are turned upside down; they also get turned inside out when we attempt to fathom the singularity at its center when using the equations given to us by Einstein. To make life simpler, what if we removed the singularity all together? There is some math for that.

Quantum gravity is an attempt in theoretical physics to explain gravity and the behavior of gravitational fields at the quantum scale. In other words, quantum gravity is one possible ‘Theory of Everything’ scientists are considering. When you apply the framework of quantum gravity to a black hole, some very interesting things happen, among the most interesting is the vanishing singularity.


Instead of a singularity, quantum gravity replaces the center of a black hole with science-fiction’s best friend – a portal to another universe. How many times have we seen our hero (or the villain) fall into a black hole and avoid a crushing death by being transported to another universe? That might not be so far from the truth. Disregarding the fact that our favorite sci-fi movies get a boost of scientific accuracy, such a model immediately helps physicists resolve the black hole information paradox.

The paradox basically addresses two parts of scientific theory that are butting heads with each other. On one hand, general relativity combined with quantum mechanics seems to suggest that information can permanently vanish when it’s devoured by a black hole. In contrast, a common tenet of science states that information cannot be permanently destroyed.

Credit: Ashley Corbion

OK, back to the singularity, or lack thereof. As most of you are aware, flying into a black hole is a very poor life choice. According to relativity, tidal forces from the black hole will elongate you in a process affectionately called ‘spaghettification’ – and all of this happens before you cross the event horizon. After you pass the point of no return, you’ll continue to fall to the singularity (the point at the center of the black hole where gravity is infinitely strong and all matter is crushed into an infinitely dense point–fun times). What happens next? We have no idea. General relativity simply stops working and breaks down when trying to describe the singularity.

Singularities aren’t the only thing relativity has problems with. Einstein’s crowning achievement also breaks down when describing the big bang. In 2006, a team of physicists used loop quantum gravity in an attempt to explain the big bang; their results were very interesting. Again, the singularity commonly thought to exist at the start of the universe disappeared and was replaced with something the team described as a “quantum bridge” that brought the team into an older universe that existed before ours.

Relativity is a fascinating theory that is nothing short of remarkable, but maybe it’s playing with an incomplete deck when it comes to black holes and their inner singularities. Perhaps a comprehensive theory of everything will reveal hidden portals within one of nature’s most fearsome creations.

Wife Ann Druyan on Carl Sagan's death

“When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t... ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

― Ann Druyan

Sharing Information is What Makes Us Uniquely Human

Sharing Information is What Makes Us Uniquely Human

by Laurie Santos

December 19, 2013, 5:34 PM

The question of what’s uniquely human is a big one and depending on who you ask you might get really different answers. 

 

If I had to put my money on something that was actually uniquely human it seems to be our motivation to actually interact with others in a funny way.  

 

If you see something cool, you say, “Oh hey, look at this cool thing.”  And to psychologists this is a process of referring to information out there in the world. It seems like other primates lack at least the motivation to do this.  This leads to the fact that they don’t have the kind of communication that we have with things like language with nouns that can kind of point to things out there in the world. 

 

They also don’t seem to share their own desires and intentions with others, which leads to a lack of cooperation in a lot of domains. So if I had to put my money on what was uniquely human I’d go with the kind of motivation to share information with others.  

 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

 

 

Marijuana Businesses May Get Good Banking News In Early 2014

Marijuana Businesses May Get Good Banking News In Early 2014

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Matt.Ferner@huffingtonpost.com

 

A Feb. 10, 2012 photo shows medical marijuana growing in a Matthew Huron owned grow house in Denver. Medical marijuana is legal in 17 states, but the industry has a decidedly black-market aspect -- it's mostly cash-only. In Colorado, state lawmakers are attempting an end-run around the federal ban by creating a cooperative financial institution for state dispensaries and growers to allow them to store and borrow money. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski) | ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marijuana businesses may not yet get a full green light on the banking rights that non-marijuana businesses already enjoy, but they are likely to get a "yellow light" as soon as the new year, Jack Finlaw, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper's (D) chief legal counsel, said on a joint call Thursday.

"What we're being told," Finlaw said on the call hosted by Drug Policy Alliance, "is probably in the first quarter of 2014 there will be some guidance issued that's comparable to the Cole memo from the Department of Justice that will give, maybe not a green light, but a yellow light to banks to allow them to do business [with marijuana businesses] -- to take deposits, to set up checking accounts, to set up small business loans, to allow these businesses to accept purchases through debit cards or credit cards, to allow what normal businesses are allowed to do."

Last week, the Bank Secrecy Advisory Group had a closed-door meeting in Washington, D.C., to begin talks about reforming banking regulations so that banks can legally engage in services with marijuana businesses.

Currently marijuana businesses aren't allowed to set up legal bank accounts because the federal government still considers marijuana to be illegal. Worried banks fear that they could be implicated as money launderers if they offered traditional banking services to the pot businesses.

"It's my understanding that the ball is in the court of the Department of Treasury," Finlaw added. "The Department of Justice having issued the Cole memo and having signaled to Treasury that they would be willing to see some accommodation in the banking regulations, is working with FinCEN in Treasury."

FinCEN is a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury that analyzes financial data to mitigate against illicit use and money laundering.

Even if the DOJ and Treasury give the "yellow light" to banks, there would also continue to be some oversight by the banks to ensure that the marijuana businesses they work with are not a front for illegal activity, Finlaw said.

Thursday's news follows a DOJ announcement in August that it is "actively considering" how to regulate interactions between banks and marijuana shops that operate within state laws and don't violate other federal law enforcement priorities.

Although official regulations have not been set, for now, financial institutions and other enterprises that do business with marijuana shops that are in compliance with state laws are unlikely to be prosecuted for money laundering or other federal crimes that could be brought under existing federal drug laws, as long as those pot businesses don't otherwise violate the DOJ's enforcement priorities, a senior Department of Justice official said.

"My understanding is there is a discussion in Washington about how much of this can be accomplished administratively through FinCEN, Treasury and Justice, and how much Congress needs to do something," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance, on Thursday's joint call. "It may be the reason for putting out a yellow light instead of a green light, [it] may have to do with some constraints in federal law and the administrative agencies trying to figure out how far they can accommodate these legitimate needs for access to legal banking while staying within the constraints of federal law."

Finlaw also noted that no one in Washington had given timing on the release of a marijuana business banking memo, but that the first quarter was the hope and expectation based on how the process has been working thus far and how long it took for the DOJ's Cole memo to be released.
"The hope is that we can get this resolved in early 2014," Finlaw said.

Dan Riffle, director of federal policies at Marijuana Policy Project, told The Huffington Post that the hope is that the banking issue is resolved before recreational marijuana retail shops open in Washington in Colorado in 2014.

"This raises obvious safety concerns and tax compliance issues, and one of the primary reasons Colorado and Washington voters approved initiatives to regulate marijuana was to reduce the risk of violence and ensure sales of marijuana are taxed appropriately," Riffle said. "It's imperative that Treasury, FinCEN, and the DOJ work together to resolve this issue as soon as possible in order to honor the will of voters in those states."

Messages to DOT and DOJ regarding the possibility of a first-quarter announcement were not immediately returned.

Colorado's first recreational marijuana shops are expected to open on Jan. 1, 2014, with Washington state's opening later in the new year.

Reversing Aging: Not as Crazy as You Think

Harvard researchers find a new compound that can make old cells young again

By Alice Park @aliceparknyDec. 19, 2013

 

Original page:  http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/19/reversing-aging-not-as-crazy-as-you-think/

 

What makes cells age? Wear and tear, yes. But biologically, says, Dr. David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, it’s lack of oxygen that signals cells that it’s their time to go. Without oxygen, the energy engines known as the mitochondria become less efficient at turning physiological fuel such as glucose into the energy that the cells need to function. Eventually, they shut down.

But in a paper published in the journal Cell, Sinclair and his colleagues describe for the first time a compound naturally made by young cells that was able to revive older cells and make them energetic and youthful again. In an experiment in mice, the team found that giving older mice a chemical called NAD for just one week made two-year old mouse tissue resemble that of six-month old mice (In human years, that would be akin to a 60-year old’s cells becoming more like those belonging to a 20 year old).

As mammals age, says Sinclair, levels of NAD drop by 50%; with less of the compound, the communication between the cell and its mitochondrial energy source also falters, and the cell becomes vulnerable to common aging assaults — inflammation, muscle wasting, and slower metabolism. By tricking the cell into thinking it’s young again, with adequate amounts of NAD, aging can theoretically be reversed. “When we give the molecule, the cells think oxygen levels are normal, and everything revs back up again,” Sinclair says.

While NAD may be a key to the fountain of youth, Sinclair, who also investigated the anti-aging effects of the red wine compound resveratrol, isn’t ready to say that the chemical could lead to immortal cells. “I wouldn’t take it that far,” he says. “What makes reversing aging interesting is that it could buy more time than we are currently looking at.”

His next step is to put NAD in the drinking water of his mice, and see if they take longer to develop the typical chronic diseases linked to aging, such as inflammation, muscle wasting, cancer and diabetes. The pathway may become an important target for cancer researchers as well, since tumors typically grow in low oxygen conditions and are more common in older patients.

Because NAD is a naturally occurring compound that simply declines with age, Sinclair is optimistic that boosting its levels in people won’t have as many significant adverse effects as introducing an entirely new compound might. “If a body is slowly falling apart and losing the ability to regulate itself effectively, we can get it back on track to what it was in its 20s and 30s,” he says.

At least that’s the hope.
 

Alice Park @aliceparkny

Alice Park is a staff writer at TIME and covers health, medicine, nutrition and fitness.

Read more: Reversing aging: scientists say yes, it may be possible | TIME.com http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/19/reversing-aging-not-as-crazy-as-you-think/#ixzz2nyLAyGZm

Silencing Synapses to Deal With Addictions: ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily: Your source for the latest research news.

Dec. 17, 2013 — Imagine kicking a cocaine addiction by simply popping a pill that alters the way your brain processes chemical addiction. New research from the University of Pittsburgh suggests that a method of biologically manipulating certain neurocircuits could lead to a pharmacological approach that would weaken post-withdrawal cocaine cravings. The findings have been published in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers led by Pitt neuroscience professor Yan Dong used rat models to examine the effects of cocaine addiction and withdrawal on nerve cells in the nucleus accumbens, a small region in the brain that is commonly associated with reward, emotion, motivation, and addiction. Specifically, they investigated the roles of synapses -- the structures at the ends of nerve cells that relay signals.

When an individual uses cocaine, some immature synapses are generated, which are called "silent synapses" because they send few signals under normal physiological conditions. After that individual quits using cocaine, these "silent synapses" go through a maturation phase and acquire the ability to send signals. Once they can send signals, the synapses will send craving signals for cocaine if the individual is exposed to cues that previously led him or her to use the drug.

The researchers hypothesized that if they could reverse the maturation of the synapses, the synapses would remain silent, thus rendering them unable to send craving signals. They examined a chemical receptor known as CP-AMPAR that is essential for the maturation of the synapses. In their experiments, the synapses reverted to their silent states when the receptor was removed.

"Reversing the maturation process prevents the intensification process of cocaine craving," said Dong, the study's corresponding author and assistant professor of neuroscience in Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "We are now developing strategies to maintain the 'reversal' effects. Our goal is to develop biological and pharmacological strategies to produce long-lasting de-maturation of cocaine-generated silent synapses."

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Pittsburgh. The original article was written by Melissa Carlson.

Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

A "molecular eye" view of the vacuum chamber used for the measurement of the electron's EDM. Credit: B.R. O'Leary
  

A small band of particle-seeking scientists at Yale and Harvard has established a new benchmark for the electron's almost perfect roundness, raising doubts about certain theories that predict what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model.

  

"We know the Standard Model does not encompass everything," said Yale physicist David DeMille, who with John Doyle and Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard leads the ACME collaboration, a team using a strikingly different method to detect some of the same types of particles sought by huge experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. "Like our LHC colleagues, we're trying to see something in the lab that's different from what the Standard Model predicts."

ACME is looking for new particles of matter by measuring their effects on the shape of the electron, the negatively charged subatomic particle orbiting within every atom.  

 

In research published Dec. 19 in Science Express, the team reported the most precise measurement to date of the electron's shape, improving it by a factor of more than 10 and showing the particle to be rounder than predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model, including some versions of Supersymmetry.

 

This theory posits new types of particles that help account, for example, for dark matter, a mysterious substance estimated to make up most of the universe.  Researchers said they have shown that the electron's departure from spherical perfection—if it exists at all—must be smaller than predicted by many theories proposing particles the Standard Model doesn't account for. If the electron's shape is too round, many of these theories will be proven wrong, they said.

 

Many variants of Supersymmetry predict a less round shape for the electron than the ACME team found experimentally. If the particles predicted by those versions of Supersymmetry existed, they would have caused greater deformation of the electron, researchers said.

The ACME project looked for a particular deformation in the electron's shape known as an electric dipole moment.  "You can picture the dipole moment as what would happen if you took a perfect sphere, shaved a thin layer off one hemisphere and laid it on top of the other side," said DeMille, who helped establish previous landmark limits in electron deformation. "The thicker the layer, the larger the dipole moment. Now imagine an electron blown up to the size of the earth. Our experiment would have been able to see a layer 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, moved from the southern to the northern hemisphere. But we didn't see it, and that rules out some theories."

The ACME researchers measured the dipole moment using electrons inside the polar molecule thorium monoxide. The molecule's properties amplify the electron's deformation and diminish the possibility of effects that could fool researchers into thinking they had seen a tiny deformation when none exists.

"It is amazing that some of these predicted supersymmetric particles would squeeze the electron into a kind of egg shape," said Harvard's Doyle. "Our experiment is telling us that this just doesn't happen at our level of sensitivity."

Gabrielse, also of Harvard, said: "It's unusual and satisfying that the exquisite precision achieved by our small team in a university lab probes the most fundamental building block of our universe at a sensitivity that complements what is being achieved by thousands at the world's largest accelerator."

More information: "Order of Magnitude Smaller Limit on the Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron," Science Express, 2013.

Provided by Yale University