Lifeboat Foundation

In quantum electrodynamics, the choice of gauge (i.e. specific mathematical formalism used to regulate degrees of freedom) can greatly influence the form of light-matter interactions. Interestingly, however, the “gauge invariance” principle implies that all physical results should be independent from a researcher’s choice of gauge. The quantum Rabi model, which is often used to describe light-matter interactions in cavity-QED, has been found to violate this principle in the presence of ultrastrong light-matter coupling, and past studies have attributed this failure to the finite-level truncation of the matter system.

A team of researchers at RIKEN (Japan), Università di Messina (Italy) and the University of Michigan (U.S.) have recently carried out a study investigating this topic further. In their paper, published in Nature Physics, they identified the source of this gauge violation and provided a method to derive light-matter Hamiltonians in truncated Hilbert spaces, which can produce gauge-invariant physical results even in extreme light-matter interaction regimes.

“Ultrastrong coupling between light and matter has, in the past decade, transitioned from a theoretical idea to an experimental reality,” Salvatore Savasta, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “It is a new regime of quantum light-matter interaction, which goes beyond weak and strong coupling to make the coupling strength comparable to the transition frequencies in the system. These regimes, besides enabling intriguing new physical effects, as well as many potential applications, represents an opportunity to deepen our understanding subtle aspects of the interaction of light and matter.”

Mechanics study boosts our understanding tumour evolution.

This theory combines wave and particle aspects in quantum mechanics be postulating that the motion of a particle is choreographed by the wave function.

By reconstructing the Bohmian trajectories of single photons, the team experimentally obtained the distribution of velocity change.

“In the experiment, the velocity disturbance happens gradually, up to five metres away from where the which-slit measurement was performed,” Prof Wiseman said.

Vaccination against rotavirus is associated with a reduced incidence of type 1 diabetes in children, according to an analysis of U.S. insurance data.

“I am committed to the notion that the past predicts the present,” Larsen tells Inverse, “and we need to understand that past to understand the world we live in now.”

Larsen has had a longstanding interest in the health and lifestyle of early farmers — those who were working around the Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to farming. So when Ian Hodder, Ph.D., an archeologist who leads the Çatalhöyük Research Project, invited him to join the project in 2004, he quickly accepted the opportunity.

This new study is based on 25 years of findings linked to the human remains found in Çatalhöyük. Dating of remains shows that the population there grew to its peak in the period from 6,700 to 6,500 B.C. and then declined rapidly. That decline is likely linked to the evidence of disease and malnutrition Larsen and colleagues found in the remains.

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party features this article by Nicola Bagalà and Michael Nuschke of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), originally published on the LEAF site on May 15th, 2019. The article brings attention to and responds to concerns related to the impacts of increased longevity on pension systems, a possible result of our mission of ending age-related diseases, which the U.S. Transhumanist Party supports as part of our policy goals.

~ Brent Reitze, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, June 15th, 2019

If you work in social security, it’s possible that your nightmares are full of undying elderly people who keep knocking on your door for pensions that you have no way of paying out. Tossing and turning in your bed, you beg for mercy, explaining that there’s just too many old people who need pensions and not enough young people who could cover for it with their contributions; the money’s just not there to sustain a social security system that, when it was conceived in the mid-1930s, didn’t expect that many people would ever make it into their 80s and 90s. Your oneiric persecutors won’t listen: they gave the country the best years of their lives, and now it’s time for the country to pay them their due.

A team of UK scientists have identified the mechanism behind hardening of the arteries, and shown in animal studies that a generic medication normally used to treat acne could be an effective treatment for the condition.

The team, led by the University of Cambridge and King’s College London, found that a molecule once thought only to exist inside cells for the purpose of repairing DNA is also responsible for hardening of the arteries, which is associated with dementia, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke.

There is no current treatment for hardening of the arteries, which is caused by build-up of bone-like calcium deposits, stiffening the arteries and restricting blood flow to organs and tissues.

Steven Finkel tells the story of a close family member who had a discomforting health issue—the kind you don’t discuss at the dinner table.

“She went and chose a bunch of yogurts with active culture,” he says. The first yogurt—call it Yogurt A—made her constipated, and Yogurt B gave her diarrhea. “It’s like Goldilocks,” he adds, before concluding her tale of woe with a happy ending: “Yogurt C made her feel great.”

Hoping to understand how three versions of one food could cause such dissimilar reactions, the relative contacted Finkel, who is professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife and an expert on bacterial physiology, genetics and evolution.

Fox Business adds:

Facebook’s new cryptocurrency platform could provide the embattled social media giant with a new revenue stream of historic proportions as it contends with a possible federal antitrust probe and continued scrutiny over its data privacy practices.

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