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This Week in Science (Nov. 15 – 22)

This is a collection of the 10 best and most popular stories from science and technology over the past 7 days. Click the individual images below to read the stories and follow the This Week in Science on wakelet (here) to get these weekly updates straight to your inbox every Sunday.

Editorial: The Limits of Knowledge

The power of words is a wonder, and language perhaps our greatest skill. Yet the gap between the sound of a bell and its description is huge. Are the limits to language so profound that the big questions of science and philosophy are beyond us? Or can everything be said if we try hard enough? In this issue of IAI News we interrogate the limits of knowledge. All human knowledge is conceived and expressed through language, argues author Joanna Kavenna. But language is radically limited. We can never simply step outside the limits of language. The realm of eternal truths is ultimately beyond us. Given the radical contingency of linguistic truth, how can we understand and effect changes in the world? Can we hope to diagnose illness accurately or is all knowledge fantasy? Consultant psychiatrist Mark Salter outlines his new theory of psychiatry after postmodernism. Elsewhere in this issue, we explore three very different limits: the limits of science, the limits of leadership, and the limi...

Bill Nye On Climate Change, The Next Generation, And Space Exploration

Space





Photo credit:

F. Scott Shafer / The Planetary Society

Bill Nye is all about harnessing power these days: the power of the Sun, the power of human exploration, the power of climate change, and the power of the people. 

“Science is the best idea humans have ever had,” said Mr. Nye. A bold claim but not an entirely unexpected one from Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”

Rare Footage Of Blue Whales Feeding Captured

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

David Reichart/SilverbackFilms/BBC

Picture a blue whale in your head. Whatever your imagination has come up with, it’s probably wildly wrong. They’re iconic animals, the biggest to have ever lived on the planet, yet we know so little about them. Despite exhaustive efforts, these camera-shy gentle giants have remained a frustrating enigma to us, until now.

Two-Legged Puppy Walks Again Thanks To 3D Printing

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Crystal Richmond/Facebook

Meet Tumbles. Thanks to the use of 3D-printing, this very lucky little puppy is able to walk again.

The puppy was taken to the Friends of the Shelter Dogs (FOSD) in Athens, Ohio, when he was just 2 weeks old. The 0.7-kilogram (1.5-pound) terrier mix was born without his front legs. His disability left him struggling to compete for milk from his mother, so staff at the shelter had to provide him with extra care and bottle-feed him.

Yeast Hybrids Can Control Fruitiness Of Chocolate

Editor's Blog





Photo credit:

Different yeast hybrids were found to release different combinations of esters while fermenting cocoa, generating unique fruity flavors. www.BillionPhotos.com/Shutterstock

Oompa-Loompas may soon find themselves out of a job thanks to a team of Belgian microbiologists and chocolatiers, who have managed to develop a series of yeast hybrids capable of manipulating the flavor and quality of chocolate. Publishing their findings in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the researchers claim that the hybrids could provide a superior and more economical method of producing boutique chocolate than those currently employed.

Psychiatry After Postmodernism

Language separates humans from all the other animals on this planet. Birds may have their songs, bees may wobble their bottoms, but none of them can match us when it comes to describing the difference between a coffee cup, a runny nose and the theory of relativity. We have evolved language, a wonderfully complex system for manipulating, storing, retrieving and sharing meaningful symbols. Human language has given birth to human civilisation and all that we have achieved as a species, for better or for worse, over the past 50,000 years.  
Naming things, abstract or concrete, is a form of categorisation, but it is important to remember that our categories say more about the categoriser than the categorised. This need not be problematic if the difference is trivial. The philosopher Wittgenstein showed how words are fundamentally and necessarily imprecise; every effort to use a word to describe something and communicate it to another, is in some senses doomed to failure, because it can only...

The Word and the World

Is language limited? We might answer the question with reference to a tragi-comic empirical precept: everything is limited, in the end, in one sense or another. We are mortal; we exist in an unknowable and strange universe, of which we understand very little. Each one of us is limited, by finitude, by vantage point; our species is limited, and, we might reasonably assume, will one day become extinct. Furthermore, these words I am deploying – ‘the universe,’ ‘time’ – are linguistic concepts, not perpetual realities. The word is not the thing. Moreover, the thing is most likely not the thing as we understand it; it is completely possible we have not grasped the meaning of it at all. Despite this, we eagerly apply words to the formlessness around us, and our anointed experts deliver new taxonomies in language, which rise to prominence and then fade, to be replaced by other taxonomies in turn. Meanwhile, another species, with another language and another mode of being-in-the-world, might...

Science, Magic, and the Inexplicable

In our scientific age, magic has been reduced to conjurers and wands. Yet, Newton and Wittgenstein saw the accounts of science as ultimately inexplicable. Should we see our theories as limited and, in a sense, magical or would this undermine all knowledge? In our recent IAI TV debate on this subject, mathematician George Ellis argued that, while to the everyday user science and magic may appear similar, the two are not the same. Science not only works; it offers explanations for why it works. Ellis made his name focusing on some of the big questions of cosmology and relativity. Along with Stephen Hawking, he co-authored 1973’s The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, which attempted to describe the very foundations of space itself. More recently, Ellis has been focusing on top-down causation. Ellis is also an active Quaker and was a vocal opponent of apartheid during the 1970s and ‘80s. Here he speaks to the IAI about the danger so of magic, the importance of mystery, and the line that...

Quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature in semiconductor wafers

Entanglement is one of the strangest phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics, the theory that underlies most of modern physics. It says that two particles can be so inextricably connected that the state of one particle can instantly influence the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are.

Just one century ago, entanglement was at the center of intense theoretical debate, leaving scientists like Albert Einstein baffled. Today, however, entanglement is accepted as a fact of nature and is actively being explored as a resource for future technologies including quantum computers, quantum communication networks, and high-precision quantum sensors.

Entanglement is also one of nature’s most elusive phenomena. Producing entanglement between particles requires that they start out in a highly ordered state, which is disfavored by thermodynamics, the process that governs the interactions between heat and other forms of energy. This poses a particularly formidable challenge when trying to realize entanglement at the macroscopic scale, among huge numbers of particles.

“The macroscopic world that we are used to seems very tidy, but it is completely disordered at the atomic scale. The laws of thermodynamics generally prevent us from observing quantum phenomena in macroscopic objects,” said Paul Klimov, a graduate student in the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and lead author of new research on quantum entanglement. The institute is a partnership between UChicago and Argonne National Laboratory.

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