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The strange features of quantum substances are being explored in the hope they will lead to engines more powerful and efficient than their classical counterparts. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about how the various aspects of quantum physics can help and hinder machines. A new exploration of one of quantum physics’ most distinctive features, entanglement, shows it can help boost the useful energy produced by an engine, but not the energy conversion efficiency.Like many aspects of quantum mechanics, entanglement makes little sense to humans raised in a classical world. Einstein famously mocked it as “spooky action at a distance” – yet, eventually, the evidence for its existence became too powerful to be ignored. In the last two decades, physicists have had increasing success at entangling larger numbers of subatomic particles over increasing distances. Most plans for harnessing quantum entanglement for practical purposes have involved information processing and transmission, but quantum engines and quantum batteries could have a place as well. Last year, the first quantum engine was demonstrated, using the transformation from a fermion gas to a boson condensate and back again, instead of the differences in heat used by engines since Watt’s invention. Fermions and bosons are particles distinguished by their spins. More relevantly here, bosons can clump together much more than fermions, because the Pauli exclusion principle, which prevents two fermions occupying the same quantum state at once, doesn’t apply to them. The back and forth between an expansive fermion gas and a condensed Bose-Einstein condensate of bosons was used to drive tiny pistons.That initial engine had an efficiency of 25 percent – a staggering achievement for a first go, but far less than the engines that drive our current world. So the race is on to make something better. Several papers have proposed using quantum entanglement, where each particle’s quantum state is inextricably linked to that of the others.Dr Zhou Fei was part of a team that created a quantum engine based on two calcium ions in a trap, where the extent of quantum entanglement could be varied to measure its effects. The engine works on a four-stroke cycle, starting with the absorption of photons from a red laser, an expansion phase, a side-band transition to couple the system to a quantum load and finally compression. “Our study’s highlight is the first experimental realisation of a quantum engine with entangled characteristics. [It] quantitatively verified that entanglement can serve as a type of ‘fuel’,” Fei told the South China Morning Post. “We chose the entangled states of two spinning ions as the working substance, with [their] vibrational modes acting as the load. Through precise adjustments of laser frequency, amplitude, and duration, the ions were transitioned from their initial pure states to highly entangled states,” Zhou added.The conversion efficiency, measured by the number of vibrations the engine created for each photon applied, did not improve with entanglement. However, the mechanical efficiency was higher with entanglement, meaning more useful energy was produced for the same input.Even with increased energy, quantum engines will still have quite restricted applications. So far they only operate at temperatures close to absolute zero, for example. However, with quantum computers already needing these temperatures to work, quantum engines may fill roles associated with them, although they will need to expand significantly from this proof-of-concept.The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Dyson Spheres have been a tantalising digression in the hunt for alien intelligence. Just recently seven stars have been identified as potential candidates with most of their radiation given off in the infrared wavelengths. Potentially this is the signature of heat from a matrix of spacecraft around the star but alas, a new paper has another slightly less exciting explanation; dust obscured galaxies. There are a number of ways to hunt for aliens and one of them is to look for signs of large scale projects in space. Enter the Dyson Sphere. The idea was first proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1960 to describe that an advanced civilisations would position power collectors and even habitats around a star to harness its power. A Type II civilization is one that can directly harvest the energy of its star using a Dyson Sphere or something similar. Eventually such infrastructure would likely surround the entire star and Dyson reasoned that a signature would be detectable such as an excess of infrared radiation. The findings of Project Hephaistos revealed the seven M type stars from a sample of 5 million stars detected by Gaia. The astrometric satellite has been used to map stars in the Milky Way and has been of profound benefit to many pieces of research. Data from 2MASS (the Two Micron All Sky Survey) and WISE (the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) were also used to identify the stars that seemed to display the expected Infrared excess. In the recent paper by lead author Tongtian Ren and team, they explore the findings of the project and delve into the possible nature of the candidate spheres. The team cross-matched the information from data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) and several other radio surveys of the sky. They searched for radio sources within a radius of 10 arc seconds of the Gaia positions of the candidates. Note that the full Moon is 1,860 arc seconds across. Radio sources were found for three of the candidates, those named A, B and G. The accuracy of the sources was within 4.9, 0.4 and 5 arc seconds respectively and candidate G was found in multiple radio surveys. The conclusion from the team is that the seven stars are less likely to be Dyson Spheres but instead some sort of extra galactic phenomenon. The most likely explanation is a distant galaxy obscured by dust! The presence of the dust would contaminate the Infrared energy distribution in the spectra of the two objects. The other candidate, candidate B is also thought to be a distant galaxy but one that was within very close line of sight of an M type dwarf star. Very similar to candidates A and B, candidate G has a spectrum that reveals a radio loud active galactic nuclei with superluminal jets extending out. It is likely that galaxies are distant quasars which emit enormous amounts of radiation, but the obscuring hot dust clouds obscure most radiation, except infrared. What of the other four candidates? To date, no matching radio source has been found. That does not mean the hot, dust obscured galaxy model is not an adequate explanation but just that possible higher resolution radio surveys are required. Of course it may also be that they really are spheres of technology around distant stars. As much as I would love that to be true, there is no evidence for this yet. This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article. The post There’s another, more boring explanation for Dyson Sphere candidate stars appeared first on Anomalien.com.

In a world where compassion often seems in short supply, stories of selfless acts toward animals can be a source of profound inspiration. The video titled “Woman uses her bare hands to save the starving whale” is one such story. This heartwarming tale, part of the “We Love Animals” series, demonstrates the profound impact kindness... The post Fearless woman uses her bare hands to save starving whale appeared first on Animal Channel.

Passage PublishingCategory: PublishingFounder: Jonathan Keeperman (aka Lomez)See also Align's interview with Keeperman.Founded: 2022Location: https://passage.press/Representative products: "Noticing: An Essential Reader by Steve Sailer" (Patrician Edition), "The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation by Ernst Jünger" (Translated by Basil Creighton), "Passage Prize Volume II: Rewilding" (Paperback Edition)At a glance:The company takes its name from Ernst Jünger’s "Forest Passage," which (to quote Keeperman) imagines resistance to totalizing culture and politics as "the wild, undomesticated forest where men — 'forest rebels' in Jünger's parlance — can gather the imaginative and moral courage to find their way to something new."Grew out of the Passage Prize, a literary contest Keeperman (as Lomez) first announced on Twitter in 2022. Submissions for the third Passage Prize closed in March 2024. A May 2024 Guardian article doxxing Keeperman revealed that he earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he subsequently worked as a well-regarded lecturer in the English department. In his own words (Keeperman):We are starting from the premise that people’s mental models for the world are broken or at least woefully incomplete. Their understanding of history has been purposefully constrained and intended to nudge people toward very particular conclusions about how we are supposed to think and act in the current year. People are carrying around these narratives without even realizing it. We want to disrupt that. We want to jar those closed-off spaces open and allow for a fuller picture of the world to come through.[Ernst] Jünger is one of the most brilliant and complex writers of the 20th century. "Storm of Steel" is perhaps the most profound firsthand account of the experience of war that has ever been written. Jünger’s writing on art, religion, philosophy, and the totalizing tendencies of modernity transcend the petty ideological games these people demand we play. No wonder they hate him. Anybody with a soul will take great comfort in Jünger’s writing and be elevated by him. Truthfully, it breaks my heart that people who presume to be our intellectual betters have failed so spectacularly and stooped to such bottom-feeding invective. They are unworthy of uttering Jünger’s name.The things that keep me up at night are the little things. I know of about a dozen typos and formatting errors throughout our books that I failed to catch during editing. This drives me crazy. But I’ve come to learn that the vast majority of consumers don’t see these things and trust that when we do make mistakes, we’ll fix them for the next time (and we will).

Politico recently quoted a Biden official (who insisted on anonymity) about how the present administration may have moved too far to the left. Joe Biden and his staff should admit that “well-meaning ideas have gone too far and we need a sensible approach.” One can’t blame Biden’s people for noticing the obvious about his failed policies. Our president is certainly not getting high grades in polls for his handling of the economy, surging crime, coddling left-wing rioters, or creating dangerously open borders. Biden’s catastrophic border policy has filled American cities with more than 10 million (and still counting) illegal aliens and flooded the country with fentanyl and other noxious drugs. Biden’s decision to tack left has extended his political career, even when he’s no longer capable of exercising his office. Despite these problems, Biden’s rush to the woke left may be the cleverest thing he’s done as president. It’s kept him competitive in a presidential race in which he’s being outmatched in just about every way by a more vigorous and less demented opponent. Unlike Trump, Biden cannot draw 100,000 cheering spectators to a speaking event. But then one can’t blame those who have no interest in hearing Biden mumble canned speeches over his teleprompter before stumbling down the steps of the podium. Still, things are not turning out as one might have expected, given these disparities. In a race against an adversary who was a much more successful president than his doddering successor, Biden is actually ahead by two percentage points in some reliable polls. How can that be? Has Trump’s rude behavior and his tendency to shoot from the hip kept him from opening up a lead? Why is Biden better liked than his behavior would warrant? He’s certainly made nasty remarks about Republicans, the white race, and journalists who ask him unscheduled questions. But his tactlessness and rants have done little to reduce his likeability among voters or his reputation for defending “democracy.” That brings us to the ways in which the corporate press has depicted the two candidates. Only an impassioned Democratic partisan could not have noticed how much more sympathetically the media have treated Biden than his rival. They’ve moved mountains to make Biden seem far more likeable than the Bad Orange Man. Although Joe has never been a principled or intelligent statesman, he has been a pliable party politician. He’s always done what his party has required, whether that meant palling around with Southern segregationists, voting for a crime bill that incarcerated lots of young black men, or scolding Republican judicial nominees for not endorsing abortion rights and affirmative action. In 2020, Biden’s handlers arranged for his benefit a well-designed campaign. The Democratic National Committee and its lapdog media depicted their guy as a unifier and moderate, but at the same time Biden called for open borders and a socially left-wing agenda. While the appeals to unity during the campaign and in Biden’s inaugural address were aimed at independent voters, his more radical statements were intended for the Democrats’ leftist base. That base includes all influential groups on the left, like the media, Hollywood, academia, and public administration. Biden as president has done exactly what those groups want. He pays homage to all the alphabet people and never deviates in his policy and rhetoric from the cultural left. This direction may have hurt this country socially, morally, and materially, but it has provided Biden with powerful defenders and filthy-rich donors. While Biden and his weaponized Justice Department, corrupt Democratic judges, and utterly subservient district attorneys practice the most blatant lawfare imaginable against Trump and his supporters, the legacy media have dutifully covered for them. Media loyalists both defend the administration and blacken the reputations of Biden’s opponents. They’ve also covered for Joe’s debauched criminal son, whose malodorous deals the elder Biden may well have promoted. If Biden has nominated some genuinely weird wokesters to high posts, those moves have not hurt him politically. They’ve just made him more appealing to his base. Biden’s decision to tack left has extended his political career, even when he’s no longer capable of exercising his office. He never disappoints leftist elites, who look after Biden’s public relations and fill his campaign coffers with hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s possible that some of these well-heeled and influential supporters would be assisting Biden in any case because of their hatred for Trump and his MAGA base. But Biden’s predictably leftist politics have undoubtedly sweetened this relationship. His repeated affirmation of a leftist agenda must sound like music to this base. And they’d be fools to think that Joe is about to take away their fortunes, no matter what he says about raising taxes on the rich. Biden’s administration has done all it could to reward wealthy donors with Green New Deal patronage and generous tax breaks for electronic media handmaidens. If Biden does raise corporate tax rates, his plutocratic buds won’t be inconvenienced. They’ll take that added cost out of their workers’ salaries or else pass it on to consumers. That’s how woke capitalism works.