Category: Chaos and Order
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Demons. Computers. A world of chaos. Death by order.
Physicists have employed a version of Maxwell’s demon to reduce entropy in a three-dimensional lattice of super-cooled, laser-trapped atoms – a process that could help speed progress toward creating quantum computers. (1) A cosmos full of chaos. We struggle into increasing order in the universe. At the end we will succeed. And the cosmos will…
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Father. Mother. Cosmos…
It was long thought that during an embryo’s first cell division, one spindle is responsible for segregating the embryo’s chromosomes into two cells. Scientists now show that there are actually two spindles, one for each set of parental chromosomes, meaning that the genetic information from each parent is kept apart throughout the first division. (1)…
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Instability… Randomness… Out of design…
A study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited stochastic Turing patterns: a…
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Causality debunked.
Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences develop a new theoretical framework to describe how causal structures in quantum mechanics transform. They analyze under which conditions quantum mechanics allows the causal structure of the world to become “fuzzy.” In this case, a fixed order of events is not possible. The…
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Rivers. Complex deltas. Order out of chaos.
River deltas, with their intricate networks of waterways, coastal barrier islands, wetlands and estuaries, often appear to have been formed by random processes, but scientists at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions see order in the apparent chaos. Through field studies and mathematical modeling, they have concluded that deltas “self-organize” to increase the…
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