[Post any interesting sciency stuff] - You know any interesting concept, field of research, that others might not know about?

Notice: Discussion thread is over > here <


I want to pick your brains!

Share anything you find interesting broadly related to science and engineering that others might not know about. (Computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, material science, geology, metrology, meteorology …)
Write the name of the topic on the top of the comment and at least one link below with a short description. Credit to @metamachine @FaunCB and a few others who gave me the idea with this and this thread. Feel free to add interesting links, videos and such.


Table of contents: (work in progress)

All Topics in posted order

Reversible computing :hot_pepper:
Number of particles in the Universe - Video
30-Second Quantum Theory
Ultimate physical limits to computation
A Fully-Integrated Flexible Photonic Platform for
Chip-to-Chip Optical Interconnects

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory
Concrete Problems in AI Safety
The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
Unikernels
Visualization of Quantum Physics
Programmable protein circuits in living cells :hot_pepper:
Black holes as an efficient power plant
What Is Spacetime, Really? - Blog Post
Healthy Mice Born From Same-Sex Parents - News Article
Light Transistors of the future - Level1 thread :hot_pepper:
The Antikythera Mechanism - Video Series
Peryton radiation - Paper and Articles
Anisotropic conductive film (or paste)
Biofilm Lithography enables high-resolution cell patterning
Active Interposers and multi die architectures
Metal–organic framework
Measuring spin rate of stars - video
Image restoration - Digital image processing
The Kibble Balance and defining base units of measurements using physical constants
In-Memory-Computing
Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab
Exploiting Correcting Codes: On the Effectiveness of ECC Memory Against Rowhammer Attacks
Curucumin makes for a powerful antidepressant

Computer Science
Biology
Archaeology
Physics
Engineering

Example:

Reversible computing

still heavily in research, promises much higher density and more efficient circuits

The von Neumann-Landauer principle fundamentally limits the possible density of processors and logic gates because of the fundamental entropy change in non-reversible bit operations. Reversible logic does not need power on a fundamental level.

keywords:

  • Fredkin Gates
  • physical reversability
  • adiabatic circuits

Footnote:

Please only post new interesting topics, research fields, concepts, … here. You can discuss and chat about these topics in the discussion thread (the intention is to keep this thread easily browsable for people who are only interested in the topics):

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/post-any-interesting-sciency-stuff-discussion-thread/133639

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This thread was in a probability space and now it’s real… Good thread… :+1:

To begin with… I found this fascinating… watch till the end and you’ll be surprised…

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I have abook that I read every once in a while that is quite interesting.

30-Second Quantum Theory https://www.amazon.com/dp/1848316666/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_-UtVBbF6GCPRD

If you are interested in physics, it is a great read. Quantum physics is really some mind blowing stuff.

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Here is another interesting topic. Something that I have linked here before:

Ultimate physical limits to computation

This paper discusses the extreme limits ( from a physics standpoint ) to how fast and how dense computers can become. (There are a couple of assumptions made, this does not apply in the same way to reversible logic that I mentioned in the op.)

Spoiler (funny quote):
“Nonetheless, although we do not know the exact number of bits that can be registered by a one kilogram computer confined to a volume of a liter, we do know the exact number of bits that can be registered by a one kilogram computer that has been compressed to form a black hole. … The amount of information that can be stored by the 1 kilogram computer in the black-hole limit is 3.826x10^16 bits. Note that this number is independent of the physics of the standard model, and relies only on the physics of quantum Fields on curved spacetime. The black-hole computer can perform 2.7129x10^50 operations per second, the same as the 1 liter computer.”

@Cobra92fs I have not seen that book before, thanks for the link!

To increase the critical mass, here are two further topics. I would really like to see some posts from the computer science guys in this forum or even better, interesting stuff all you everyday programmers stumbled upon.

.

A Fully-Integrated Flexible Photonic Platform for
Chip-to-Chip Optical Interconnects


This is an older paper, however there are some amazingly streight forward ideas in there and a lot of interesting keywords to google.

My personal recommendation, beeing a Astrophysics nerd:

.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory

Two must reads:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.221101

I rememper two years ago when they detected their first significant signal ever, a probable black hole merger. Just think about that, we can detect waves of spacetime itself! :open_mouth:

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If you are interested in the safety of Artificial Intelligence systems, you have to follow this guy on youtube:


Especially the series
Concrete Problems in AI Safety

Keep in mind, that he mostly discusses the higher level problems of AI and skips the immideate, more obvious, near term implications.

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This is good one…

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Unikernels
Single adress space, minimalistic OSs. Advantages are low overhead in VMs, fast reboot and switching of running code, low latency.

surface level talk about IncludeOS (service orinted unikernel):


I know very little about operating systems and the technology around it, but I found some of the points made very intriguing. I’d like to know more from those people who know more about the pros and cons of Unikernels over here.
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Wow id like this peer reviewed. Comments are not on. It’s making me think. logarithmic numbers are insane.

On the topic of particials in the universe. We are seeing now the most of the universe we ever will and if we dont capture / record it. It will be lost.

The universe is expanding and accelerating. So whole galaxies we see today on the edge will cross over the visible light boundy to us and be lost forever.

So breed fast before we lose too many particles.

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Visualization is a great way to develop the intuition of complex things… This video is a good example and also lot of fun to get started with quantum physics…

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Post any interesting sciency stuff? Count me in. Just published a few weeks ago, out of CIT.


“Synthetic protein-level circuits could enable engineering of powerful new cellular behaviors.”

The paper is pretty dense (as are pretty much all papers from Science) and there’s 30 pages of supplemental material, but this is an idea I’ve had kicking around for a long time. There’s some good and some less good in the article though. Basically, they were able to program cell death based on semisynthetic logic circuits. One cool thing is that they used multiple logic gates, with each dependant on the result of the prior, which as far as I can tell is a first.

This is a big deal because it could potentially lead to protein complexes or circuitry that can make intelligent, autonomous decisions about drug delivery, or adopt conformations or fluorescence intelligently to relay information to scientists and doctors about the state of a cell. For instance, we can kill cancer cells fairly easily. The problem is killing only the cancer cells. There’s often not one clear biological indicator that something is a cancer cell - it’s usually determined by a series of information. We could theoretically design proteins that could examine multiple aspects of a cell, do some basic math, and if the cell scores high enough, kill it. That would be an incredible change in cancer therapy.

The downside to this is that it’s semisynthetic, like most of the novel protein design today, it isn’t truly novel. We know a lot about how proteins fold but still don’t have a clear model that works with a high enough success rate to think about designing proteins from scratch. Until we get that, the most we can do is adapt existing proteins and make mutations to those, which has a whole host of limitations.

Ultimately this is a computing problem. Once we crack the folding code (most likely to be done by brute force since it’s tough to get a clear picture of what’s happening on an atomic level when proteins are folding) it’ll be possible to design de novo proteins that are super-capable and super-efficient for our purposes.

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Implementing black holes as an efficient power plant



Black holes are surprisingly the most efficient method of extracting energy from mass.
Here is a video for the short and easy explanation:

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Nice blog post about nature of spacetime and few abstract ideas…
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-really/

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China has mated same sex mice too see if it would work. Female worked, as it should because a woman is XX chromosomes. Male died a few days after birth. Males are XY chromosomes. They made a YY mice.

https://singularityhub.com/2018/10/16/healthy-mice-born-from-same-sex-parents-for-the-first-time/

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Light Transistors of the future - thread
Thanks to @Radio_God for the OP. There are interesting links in that thread. I am just linking the thread here for reference.

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The Antikythera Mechanism
Most of you will probably know about this amazing piece of ancient Greek machinery. I am following this video series for a while now and I have learned a lot in the process. Also production quality is through the roof on this one:

also, here is a series on

Ancient Tool technology

It does not mean that this is exactly how machine work was done but it shows some of the viable options.

And if you didn’t know about the Anthikythera mechanism I would suggest to start here:

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Photons tend to go whereever they want…

Electrons are more cooperative (or at least we understand how to guide their movement better right now).

Leakage of electrons is a big issue in transistors and many decades of refinement has gone into address containment of and efficiency of movement of (lowering resistance) electrons in semiconductors.

Then there is manufacture… you’d need a scalable/cheap per unit process to lay down complex switching networks that scaled to billions of gates… I saw a fair amount of work 20 years ago go into “photonic switching networks”, but they were not trying to handle a lot of “logic”, but rather forestall the conversion to electrons as long as possible in a router to allow light to bend/redirect/shift mechanically to accomplish “most” of the routing logic.

Now try to scale that to registers, ALUs, caches, etc… materials have to change their game…

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Peryton radiation
Came across this article by Wendy Wippel called “Dude whats that sound”
https://www.raptureforums.com/wendy-wippel/dude-whats-sound/
I edited out some. The Abstract and her conclusion is almost cringworthy

“The telescope at this point has long been operated by scientists working remotely, with only a small support staff onsite. In 1998, the physicists that manned the Parkes Radio Telescope began to notice random interference in the normal signals from space, interference that seemed to be—possibly– relayed from deep space. Interference described as fleeting bursts of radio signals. Though not a predictable regular occurance, these anomalies persisted. Finally, convinced they had made an actual discovery of a new form of radio wave, they named their discovery after a mythical chimera half stag and half bird: the Peryton. It was high up at the time of scientific mysteries.”

“And then—finally, they with a little bit of earthbound research—found exactly where the mysterious perytons were coming from.
And like every good scientist does, they wrote their findings up for inclusion in a scientific journal.”

“Perytons are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma. In fact, their similarity to FRB 010724 had previously cast a shadow over the interpretation of fast radio bursts, which otherwise appear to be of extragalactic origin. Until now, the physical origin of the dispersion-mimicking perytons had remained a mystery. We have identified strong out-of-band emission at 2.3(2.5 GHz) associated with several peryton events. Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals.”

It was the microwaves at the Parkes radio telescope facility. Every time one of the few staff members there grabbed their hot pocket before the timer went off.

The peryton was actually, all these 17 years, was actually a microwave."

Secular links to this story:
https://phys.org/news/2015-04-mystery-peryton-reception-australian-observatory.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04/10/rogue-microwave-ovens-are-the-culprits-behind-mysterious-radio-signals/?user.testname=none
I am sure some choice words were used :slight_smile:

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Anisotropic conductive film (or paste)

ACF is an adhesive electrical interconnect that electrically connects opposing surfaces but does not conduct electricity parallel to said surfaces. This technology is commonly used in LCD manufacturing to connect electronic components to contacts on the display. To me this seems incredibly useful for hobby electronics projects to connect very small scale pads to each other.

Links


Simple explanation:


Footnote
I just now learned about this, I had now idea this existed and it is such a simple concept. Credit to the youtube channel Strange Parts for mentioning and explaining this simple but very useful technology that seems to be widely used in the electronics manufacturing industry.

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This looks interesting…

Biofilm Lithography enables high-resolution cell patterning

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/03/19/making-intricate-images-bacterial-communities/0

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Active Interposers and multi die architectures

Interposers traditionally have been various substrates that include metal traces for additional signal routing space for CPUs, FPGAs or other highly integrated logic circuits. HBM2 and GPU dies for example are connected via a silicon interposer. Active interposers, meaning silicon interposers with logic on the die, can improve signal routing capability and add other functionality to save space on the compute dies.

Links:

related Video:

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