Quantum ground states have eluded physicists for many years. Connecting the quantum and the classical has been a feat that has never been achieved in the history of quantum physics. Until a group of scientists from the University of Vienna took it upon themselves to make this science fiction, science fact. By taking the small copper qubit to one degree above zero kelvin using a small mechanical resonator, these scientists opened a previously inaccessible gate in quantum physics.

“This is groundbreaking work,” exclaimed Markus Aspelmeyer one of the chosen few scientists to work on this phenomenon , “Now the door is open. Now the fun begins.”

What exactly is fun about observing barely visible particles making themselves known to us? Not much at first glance, but now that the technology is there the opportunities are endless.

One major application not only affects the world of physics but the world of computing as well. Introducing the ability to bring the idea of Quantum Computing to fruition. In the past Quantum Computing has just existed on paper as a fantasy to those who pursued it. It plays with the idea to use qubits in place of the transistors modern computing devices used to process data. These qubits are able to not only process the usual 1s and 0s like our computers today but have the ability to use a variety of shifted states of the same data quadrupling normal processing power found in today’s machines. The only way to take advantage of these qubits power is to find a way to achieve their ground state.

“Start the resonator.” The tiny mechanical resonator began its vibrations. As the resonator’s vibrations grew more frequent the temperature of the small copper bit lowered even more. It was almost as low as they needed to be. The tension in the room grew cold and still. The scientists watched on in awe as a bridge between the quantum world and the classical world was being built before their very eyes.

The process to make these observations required a number of complicated formulas to measure frequencies and temperature. The processes for finding the quantum ground state of materials existed, it was just that the technologies to observe such an event did not.

The work-around for enabling the viewing of such phenomenon requires an object that can vibrate a large number of times per second to reduce cooling temperature. Normally any real world object wishing to achieve quantum ground state would need to be taken down to a temperature dangerously close to zero degrees kelvin, a task that is simply not possible presently. With increased vibration the object’s cooling point jumped just above one degree of kelvin turning what was once a dream into a reality.

The machine’s hum continued as the anthem for the ushering in of a new era of science. The lights flickered and flashed shining a spotlight on the copper bit as it’s temperature lowered just enough to observe the quantum ground state. Everything stood still as quiet oohs and ahs filled the room followed by a chorus of cheers. They had done it, one small step for copper bits, one giant leap for quantum physics.

So, how can we use this information? Unfortunately there isn’t much in the realm of real world applications. What can we expect? Well now that this door is open in the world of physics, we’re one tiny tuning fork away from truly bridging the gap between the quantum and the classical. With quantum computing now in the horizon these applications may increase. For now though this seems as a small step in a large and complicated process to take this science to its potential, and it is, but it is one giant small step leading us to ground-breaking science in the future.

The equipment used to begin training Craig was invented by a neuroscientist invented by Paul Bach-y-Rita, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The concept is that our senses can be interchanged, and reconfigured to serve the same purpose. I thought it was like how you build something using legos, each piece is different but can be used to build the same wall. “Clearly, there are connections to certain parts of the brain, but you can modify that,” Bach-y-Rita says. “You can do so much more with a sensory organ than what Mother Nature does with it.” The science behind it is mainly oriented around the neurons in the brain. The neurons in the brain release neurotransmitters which send messages to specific receptors. If you can reassign the destination of some if these messengers the same information is still perfieved but their course has been redirected. The device used to help aid this is still in its beginning stages of invention, and it looks quite primitive ( a giant mask similar to the one the alien wore in predator).

Even Craig is skeptical and uncertain of the technologys future and it’s application but the progress it’s made thus far is undeniable. It uses the plasticity of the brain, the youngest ability to be stimulated makes is a powerful substitution for the eyes themselves. Bach has said “Do you need visual input to see? He’ll no, if you respond to light and percieve it, then it’s sight.” of course the applicaton of all this is a little more complicated then the science supporting that it’s actually possible.

The boy picked up his bike and rode slowly home.  Each turn of the petal made him wince in pain. As he approached his house his mother saw his bloody knees and ran out to him with a wet towel.  The Neosporin tttouched his leg and he felt a sharp pain.  Immediately he could tell where the pain was.  The millions of sensory receptors under his skin are responsible for that.  The receptors allow us to feel pain and know where the pain is coming from.  Some areas are very obvious such as a cut on the knee after falling on a bike, and some are harder to distinguish.

Jimmy’s mom continued to dab his cuts with Neosporin as he opened his screwball and started to eat it.  Just as his mother finished cleaning his cuts the boy was at the end of his screwball and went to bite down on the gumball a sharp pain shot through his upper jaw.  His mother looked strangely at him, “Where does it hurt honey?” his mother asked, the boy responded almost in a whisper, “My left knee, my lower back, my left hip and, my tooth.” “Which tooth is it?” “I don’t know.”

The mouth is a strange place.  When you get a tooth ache, you can feel pain, but you can’t locate which is the source.  A recent study done by Clemens Forster of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany tested this hypothesis.  Foster and his team took willing and extremely brave patients and admitted a shock to their top and bottom canine teeth.  This shock had the pain equivalence to biting down on a piece of ice, or frozen gumball.  None of the candidates could determine any better than Jimmy which tooth in particular was the one that was hurting.

When the shock was admitted to the upper or lower canine teeth one of two paths were taken. The pain was carried by signals “from two distinct branches of a fiber called the trigeminal nerve”. As opposed to pain in other parts of your body which are carried directly from the area of impact to the brain for processing.   These nerves carry the signal to regions of the cerebral cortex where it is broken up into three sections.  Although the one section of the brain is broken up into three parts it is still one entity, thus the three locations treat tooth pain the same.  The brain has difficulty distinguishing between the locations of the pain.

A few days went by and Jimmy was back on his bike chasing ice cream trucks with just as much luck. His different responses to different injuries would be unlike any of our own. Our understanding of pain helps us to understand how our brain transforms incoming pain signals, how that process helps us understand how we tolerate, or when we do not tolerate pain.  Why is it important for us to understand how the brain transmits pain and how we react? If pain persists or worsens, it can become chronic, and chronic pain can become an illness. While we know quite a bit about how chronic pain and how it is linked to nerve damage, we know much less about other causes of chronic pain. Researchers who are investigating pain are now looking at neurological factors so that we might better understand causes of chronic pain and develop better treatment options.  Researching tooth pain may seem unimportant and useless, but every little bit more that can be discovered about pain and how it is transmitted can help us further our understanding and knowledge of how it all works.

This sort of experience sounds like a tech demo for an amazing technology due out in 2142. In reality this tech deemed MoJect is being developed as you read this. MoJect stands for Mobile Motion Projection. Which can mean a lot of things. In its case it affords the ability for most devices to project an image on any smooth surface, then the user can use a variety of motion gestures (similar to those that players of the Nintendo Wii are used to) to interact with the projected image in a variety of ways.  The Image is projected from a device called a Pico Projector.  The Pico projector is a miniaturize projector that can attach to a plethora of devices and show the image from the device onto the nearest surface.  It does this by shrinking the components of normal projectors.  With a combination or lasers and mirrors the Pico shoots a crystal clear image from your device to your wall.

Since MoJect is still in it’s early days of development and testing a lot of those ways haven’t begun to flesh themselves out yet. The early tech demos are very brilliant on their own however.

Suddenly the battlefield turns into the vast abyss of space. The man is flying a small ship through an asteroid field. As he zooms and dives past the massive rocks planets start appearing far into the horizon. With a simple touch he blasts a small asteroid with his lasers. He begins traveling along the rest of his wall when a laser emerges from the asteroid field and hits the right wing of his ship. They must have followed me. He thinks as he begins dodging enemy laser fire.

MoJect does a lot of great things that most mobile projectors can’t do yet. Unfortunately this tech isn’t available for the everyday consumer. When it does the development process will surely take off and what you can do with the MoJect will also reach new heights. A future where your mobile phone or remote control can change your home into a real-time battlefield isn’t too far away with MoJect.

So, what do you eat, truant?

Your hand passes over the cereal – no time – and the doughnut. No, put down that energy bar, go for the next item. Yes, the carrot. No, don’t back talk, just humor me. Now, get going!

You run out into the sunny, cloudless day, rev up the car, and shove the carrot around in your mouth like a toothbrush in a half-asleep daze. Then you start munching on it.

Great, you’re on campus, stomach growling. Run across the parking lot. You’re out in the sun, now. Well, go on, do it.

Photosynthesize! C’mon, breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

… What, you can’t? Hey, it’s not my fault. Guess you should have been a green sea slug. Now get to class.

And no, I’m not crazy, you heard me right. Photosynthesizing slugs. No, it’s not a creature from Harry Potter (okay, maybe it is, but I haven’t read the books.) No, this fellow is the real deal. So, if you want to read more about this tantalizing creature, put down the tire-iron and sit back.

It's actually quite easy being green.

Looking like something of a plant leaf itself, the green sea slug performs a feat typically attributed only to plants: it can take the sun’s light and turn it into nourishment. But how? Well, as it turns out, the slug is something of a thief, to boot. Roaming the Atlantic seaboard for algae, these foliaceous critters steal the chloroplasts from their plant prey, and incorporate them into their own body. The chlorophyll is distributed equally among the cells of its digestive system.

But, see, if it were as simple as that, you’d have been happily munching away on sunlight.

Mary Rumpho of the University of Maine dissected the genome of both the sea slug and its woeful victim, algae Vaucheria litorea, and discovered that the slug not only uses its chloroplasts, but also its very genes!

At some point in the past, Rumphos and her colleagues conjecture, this symbiotic relationship culminated when genes somehow got from the plant and into the slug’s own DNA. This sort of occurrence – referred to as Horizontal Gene Transfer, to distinguish it from the typical familial, or Vertical, gene transfer – isn’t nearly as uncommon as one might think. In fact, you there are just as guilty as this sluggish thief!

Take, for instance, mitochondria. An organelle, or machine, in your own body’s cells, the mitochondria weren’t always there. At some point in the past, it is theorized by scientists, the mitochondria was an independent organism, much like any bacteria. Theory states it was subsumed by another bacteria – your great-great-great-great grand ancestor of a bacteria – and survived, becoming a permanent fixture. Mitochondria and your bacteria got along well enough: mitochondria provided energy in the form of ATP, and your host cells provide locomotion.

In retrospect, perhaps you’re the victim of breaking and entering. Can’t get a break today, can you?

After experimentation, the researchers found that the chloroplasts are sustained in the sea slug for up to nearly a year. Holding one sea slug in confinement, they found it was able to photosynthesize for eight months without eating any algae. It was a little yellow by the time the experiment ended, but was still doing quite swimmingly.

This partnership between slug and algae leads to many interesting ideas and curiosities. For instance, can the slug itself be considered a plant? Is it on its way to permanently acquiring photosynthesis somewhere down the evolutionary line? Is this acquisition of chloroplasts just one of a number of other hidden tricks up its sleeves? Could it have taken another route and absorbed elements from another living creature? Regardless, it certainly blurs the boundaries between the two species, and raises many other interesting points, too. Just as the Elysian sea slug houses other creatures within itself, so do you, what with all those bacteria in your gut, without which you’d most certainly perish. It reveals that the distinction between species isn’t always clear-cut, contrary to the popular perception of evolution and nature as a dog-eat-dog world.

… Or maybe it proves that it is a dog-eat-dog world, but one where both dogs can co-exist happily, one inside the other. Like Matryoshka dolls…

Add a little rhythm and a few centuries of brain research . . .

The latest neuroscience research indicates that some memory functions are rhythmic.
Memory is created by neurons, which make synaptic connections to other neurons. A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology and two Los Angeles area research hospitals has found that memory formation is identified with the activity of neurons and the rate of their stimulus.

This study found that the ability for a neuron to store its share of memory may also depend upon the precise timing at which the neuron spiked against the background of the brain-wave-rhythms. While brain-wave-rhythms appear in many parts of the brain, these rhythms seem to play a particular valuable role in memory storage.

I saw a lot of people on my drive to work this morning. I was stopped by a   guard in front of a line of a school bus. A quiet moment in rush hour traffic. He seemed to be a kindly man, but with a grim, perhaps fiercely official face. Of all the people I passed, including the bicyclist I traveled with and the woman in the wheel chair I waited for to cross the street, I remember this man. I don’t know why.

Much of this can be explained by the function of timing and readiness for the stimuli. Were neurons fired with their neighboring neurons at a prime frequency in maximal rhythm?

Memory must have rhythm?

And those of us without?

Perhaps such a phenomenon will eventually be explained by this kind of neuroscience research into memory. According to the study, it may be that a given stimulus causes neurons to make connections depending upon when, in relation to brain rhythms, the stimulus arrives.

Somewhere between Willis’s black and white illustrations to this paper’s almost musical figures in every color, there is the secret of memory. For patients with learning disabilities or other brain disorders that influence memory, the hope in everything we’ve learned is that by locating memory, and identifying its function, we can successfully alter memory formation and storage.

Willis have memory by thinking in rhythm––or not intentionally. But then, who would expect we could add a beat, a spike, or an oscillation and modulate memory behavior?

I can remember that growing up in a divorced household with no dad as a kid was probably one of the worst experiences I could have gone through.  There was a sense of sadness that resonated around the idea of fatherly love and interaction.  The word dad had a heavy affect on my life throughout the years.  Just hearing it could instill me with a variety of emotions that my young mind couldn’t really handle.  So, when I read this research I was intrigued to  find out exactly how those feelings came about my fragile mind.

A team of researchers from the Friedrich Schiller University Medical School in Jena, Germany took on the task of finding out whether words can really cause pain, or if the pain comes from the idea of the word or stimuli associated with the word.  Previous studies have already proven that certain pain is often related to painful images and environmental cues that could make people revisit painful places or ideas in their life.

Now that I am older the whole dad thing became a thing of the past.  In some ways I have always felt that the idea of not having a dad during my life was more painful than the word itself.  As I made my way through the research it seems that the word would have been the stimuli to activate the idea of my father.  Without the word the idea wouldn’t have necessarily came into my mind, because I would have had to be thinking about it to initiate that thought.

Trying to figure out where our thoughts originate and how they affect us can be complicated.  Luckily the German neuro-scienctists did all of the hard work for us.  The participants in the test(there were 16 in total) each participated in two different experiments.  While being scanned with a functional MRI the participants were tasked with imagining a situation associated with one of the words the scientists presented to them.  The words were chosen to represent both good and bad things such as cuddling or disgusting things, as well as neutral words.

In the end it was proven that specific words caused pain within the participants.  Not only the idea of that word or the imagining of a situation related, but the word itself.  When compared with words of a positive nature the “painful” words generated specific patterns from the brain closely associated with pain.

This researched proved more to me about the power of words than I had previously thought.  When my dad died 2 years ago that feeling the comes from the word dad came back.  This research only proves that the pain brought with that word had meaning, and helps me remember him for what he was.  My dad.

Stop fighting it. Just succumb.

So, floating, silent, I let go…

Then I get my first cup of coffee for the day.

With that, my theta waves are going, and things start looking up.

I’m sure you’ve had one of those days. It’s like swimming through murk; seeing without seeing, mind utterly blank. Memory completely shot, you can’t seem to remember what you had for breakfast earlier that day, much less what you did yesterday.

With some probing and digging, researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the California Institute of Technology have some suggestions as to what contributes to the formation of memories, and it all has to do with theta waves.

The brain functions much like an electrical device, producing electrical fields, generated by flowing currents of electricity. As these ebb and flow, they produce distinct patterns, or waves. These waves fall under a number of different categories: Delta, Alpha, Theta, Beta and Gamma. Like the tides of the ocean, each has peaks and troughs, and these patterns fluctuate from day to day. Moreover, like the seasonal tides might encourage flora and fauna to flourish, each brain wave is associated with different states of mind. And one of the least well understood of these are the Theta waves.

While easily detected and studied in different animals, such as rabbits and rodents, they’re harder to detect in primates, like humans. The hippocampus – where memories are rumored to gain substance – originates the theta waves, but by the time these reach the scalp they become too weak for scalp electrodes to detect. Unfortunately, unlike the random rat, humans aren’t as keen on having their head cut open –

– Except when they are.

Scientists finally got the chance to study the theta waves of nine individuals, each having had electrodes placed in their brains – adjacent to hippocampus, where memories are rumored to gain substance – in preparation to undergo surgery for epilepsy. After testing these individuals, they were able to monitor their theta wave patterns.

From the information, they were able to ascertain that the creation of short- and long-term memories was strongly tied to theta waves. Moreover, the closer together individual neurons in the brain fired off like synchronized swimmers, the stronger the memories became.

Further research and study has revealed that increased Theta wave production is conducive to quicker learning. There are several catches, however. First of all, these periods of synchronization are brief and sporadic, so it can be a lot like trying to win an ultra-high-speed game of whac-a-mole. Finally, while certain substances can boost Theta waves, such as coffee, don’t over do it. Theta waves are also closely linked with a calm state of mind, so don’t expect to zoom straight to class and absorb everything like an academic sponge while hyped up on three espressos.

It's kind of like that.