Conjunto de prédios situado na Avenida Independência foi avaliado por perito contratado pela ABSM em R$ 49,1 milhõesJefferson Botega / Agencia RBS
Um dos mais antigos e tradicionais hospitais de Porto Alegre, o Beneficência Portuguesa está sendo vendido para quitar dívidas trabalhistas que se arrastam há 27 anos. A determinação judicial para a negociação do patrimônio ocorreu porque a atual gestora da casa de saúde, a Associação Beneficente São Miguel (ABSM), deixou de fazer pagamentos perante a Justiça do Trabalho.
A venda deve beneficiar 489 credores que têm a receber cerca de R$ 35 milhões.
Layered rocks in Western Australia are some of Earth's earliest known life, according to a new study.
The fossils in question are stromatolites, layered rocks that are formed by the excretions of photosynthetic microbes. The oldest stromatolites that scientists agree were made by living organisms date back 3.43 billion years, but there are older specimens, too. In the Dresser Formation of Western Australia, stromatolites dating back 3.48 billion years have been found.
Restrictions put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19 markedly blunted the spread of other respiratory illnesses. Now, in the Northern Hemisphere, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is surging, and the hospitalization rate for influenza in the United States is higher for the time of year than it has been since 2010. “These viruses are coming back, and they’re coming back with a vengeance,” says immunologist Scott Hensley. Why are these surges happening now? And what’s in store for future winters? Researchers weigh in with their thoughts, from infants not being exposed at a young age to waning immunity in older children and the timing of COVID-19 restrictions lifting.
An energy-efficient chip called NeuRRAM fixes an old design flaw to run large-scale AI algorithms on smaller devices, reaching the same accuracy as wasteful digital computers.
How Supergenes Fuel Evolution Despite Harmful Mutations
By CARRIE ARNOLD
Supergenes that lock inherited traits together are widespread in nature. Recent work shows that their blend of benefits and risks for species can be complex.
The confounding qualities of Dragonfly 44, a galaxy consisting of a faint skeleton of elderly stars, have made it a flashpoint in the debate around dark matter.
A Problems Problem Some math problems are easy to solve. Others seem hard, but their solutions are easy to check. Computer scientists want to know if the first class, called P, is truly different from the second, called NP. Siobhan Roberts explains the problem for MIT Technology Review. “P v NP” is the biggest unsolved problem in computer science. In May, Mordechai Rorvig wrote for Quanta about progress made on a related problem: A subset of the complexity class VNP was shown to be too hard to solve efficiently.
Galactic Neutrino Factory Astronomers detected a stream of high-energy neutrinos blasting from the core of the nearby galaxy M77, reports Stephanie Pappas for Live Science. The news adds to a growing body of evidence that active galactic cores are common factories for high-energy neutrinos. In 2018 Katia Moskvitch wrote for Quanta about the discovery of the first such source.
An international team of researchers are suggesting that our understanding of the origins of our universe may need some updates.
As detailed in a new paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they say the universe may have begun with a "Big Bounce" rather than a Big Bang.
In other words, the cosmos may have been born following of the end of a previous cosmological phase — a bounce — and not the result of space-time inflating exponentially into existence.
"Inflation was theorized to explain various fine-tuning challenges of the so-called hot Big Bang model," said first author Sunny Vagnozzi, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, in statement. "It also explains the origin of structure in our Universe as a result of quantum fluctuations."
But, as Vagnozzi argues, there's still a chance we can prove the theory wrong, despite being able to rule out "individual inflationary models."
The paper argues we should probe even deeper into the cosmic microwave background (CMB), some of the electromagnetic remnants dating back to the earliest stages of the universe.
The European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft began measuring the CMB back in 2013 — and the results immediately sounded a little suspect to the researchers.
"When the results from the Planck satellite were announced, they were held up as a confirmation of cosmic inflation," Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, who also worked on the paper, said in the statement. "However, some of us argued that the results might be showing just the opposite."
But until we see the universe at it was right after the supposed Big Bang, we won't know for sure.
"The actual edge of the observable universe is at the distance that any signal could have travelled at the speed-of-light limit over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the birth of the Universe," Loeb said. "As a result of the expansion of the universe, this edge is currently located 46.5 billion light years away."
"The spherical volume within this boundary is like an archaeological dig centered on us: the deeper we probe into it, the earlier is the layer of cosmic history that we uncover, all the way back to the Big Bang which represents our ultimate horizon," he added. "What lies beyond the horizon is unknown."
In short, we have to dig deeper to study the nature of the universe right after its creation.
But even if we did get a glimpse, we'd have a hard time predicting what came before it.
"A proper understanding of what came before that requires a predictive theory of quantum gravity, which we do not possess," Loeb said.
But that reality hasn't put off the researchers. They suggest we should be looking for the cosmic graviton background, which is made up of freely traveling gravitons, hypothetical elementary particles that could explain gravitational interactions.
The researchers suggest that the CGB could have existed right around the creation of the universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the CGB would have been diluted to the point of no longer being detectable.
Therefore, if the researchers were to detect it, they could possibly rule out the Big Bang as a theory altogether.
However, detecting the CGB would require extremely sophisticated technology that simply doesn't exist yet — but that hasn't stopped them from thinking several steps ahead.
Em 1928 foi realizada a primeira Romaria Diocesana pedindo a intercessão de Nossa Senhora Medianeira de Todas às Graças, em torno de 1000 pessoas fizeram a caminhada. Em 1935, Dom Antônio Reis, o “Bispo da Medianeira” dava início à construção do Santuário, lançando a pedra fundamental.
Em fevereiro de 1928, chega à Santa Maria -RS, o grande incentivador e iniciador da DEVOÇÃO À MEDIANEIRA, Fráter Ignácio Rafael Valle. O Fráter nasceu em Nova Trento - SC, em 22/09/1902 e faleceu em 28/05/1982, na cidade de Porto Alegre - RS. Chegou em Santa Maria com apenas 26 anos e embora ainda não fosse padre, veio para fazer o seu estágio como professor e prefeito dos alunos no Seminário São José.
Foi em 1951 que comecei a namorar a Valderês. Ela havia se formado no curso normal em Cruz Alta, na escola onde lecionava Irmã Ida Steffani, autora do quadro representando a Medianeira. Foi Pe Valle que consegu9iu um santinho com a imagem e o passou para a freira que pintou a tela original. Ela foi professora de desenho da Valderês.
Tenho uma foto em que ela aparece na frente da Catedral que pode ser na saída da romaria daquele ano 51, onde ela está com Maria José, onde aparece minha irmã Maria Helena e a Ester Grossi.
Tenho também uma foto no ponto de atendimento dos escoteiros em que eu apareço com o João Ignácio Xavier e estava também o Luiz Pillar. Lembro de ter flado para eles que eu havia conhecido a Valderês e estava de olho nela. Lembro que o Pillar largou uma tirada gauchesca como era de costume: "Mas então o compadre vai meter os beiços no cardo quente!..." e terminou acontecendo, durando setenta anos.
An artist’s concept of quantum entanglement (ThoughtCo)
You know the feeling. You see all the clues adding up like weights on your side of Archimedes’ lever, and you know that soon it will, it must tip in your favor; only when it comes to quantum physics, it won’t be the Earth that is moved, but our understanding of the universe itself.
This isn’t like the hunt for endless cheap and clean fusion energy, perpetually thirty years away despite the best efforts of humanity’s best and brightest. No, that search is the province of bleeding-edge engineering. Instead, this is the world of theoretical physics so esoteric that it blurs the boundaries between science and philosophy. Here’s what we know so far:
Wildly different macroscopic objects can be entangled
In 2020, a team of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, were able to entangle two very different objects: a vibrating dielectric membrane and a cloud of atoms. The possibility was obvious from the first time a massless photon was entangled with a much-larger atom, a process that can now be accomplished on demand. This achievement, while notable, shouldn’t be too surprising since matter really is just frozen light, something long theorized but not experimentally proven until last year at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Learning to entangle atoms at room temperature (Pinterest)
There seems to be no limit on how many objects can be entangled
In 2015, physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade successfully entangledthree thousand atoms using only a single photon. According to Prof. Vladan Vuletic:
“You can make the argument that a single photon cannot possibly change the state of 3,000 atoms, but this one photon does — it builds up correlations that you didn’t have before…. We have basically opened up a new class of entangled states we can make, but there are many more new classes to be explored.”
What’s more, earlier this year physicists at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany produced a chain of fourteen entangled photons, one after the other, using the same atom.
Entanglement can last indefinitely and across time
There appears to be no limit to how long an entangled system may remain in that state, so long as it does not interact with anything else. Even more surprisingly, entanglement has been shown to occur across time, between photons that never coexisted, and — apparently — to even show properties of entanglement after the link itself is broken.
Quantum biological mechanics is a leading contender to explain the murmurations of starlings (ScienceNews.org)
We experience quantum processes and entanglement every day
Quantum biology is a thing, having been identified in photosynthesis, bird navigation, and even our olfactory senses. If one thinks about it, since we already know that entanglement occurs from the quark scale to the barely-visible scale, and between very different materials, how could it not be part and parcel of the biology of every living thing? Even living bacteria have been entangled with quantized light. This also means that quantum entanglement occurs naturally, among living organisms as well as between non-living objects.
Look at any particular star in the sky — photons from that star are striking your eyeballs, and if one of those photons is still entangled with one or more photons inside its parent star, a cell in your eyeball may well become entangled with photons in that star, if only for a moment. “Stargazing” just took on a whole different meaning, didn’t it?
Quantum physics and consciousness
On a more personal note, my wife and I cared for an elderly woman with dementia for several years. Only once in all that time did she become agitated. One morning at about 4 A.M. she became frantic, calling for help. It turns out that her sister had died at that time, about eight miles away. I can’t help but suspect that instead of ascribing the experience to debunked and discredited theories like Extrasensory Perception, quantum biology may provide a viable explanation for the mechanics not only behind her reaction that morning, but even for irrational human behaviors such as “mob psychology”.
In fact, in an experiment conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, researchers found quantum processes significantly correlated with cognitive and conscious brain functions. Correlation of course does not imply causation, but just as smoke may not indicate the location of a fire, it can give one an excellent clue where to start looking. According to lead physicist Dr. Christian Kerskens:
“If entanglement is the only possible explanation here then that would mean that brain processes must have interacted with the nuclear spins, mediating the entanglement between the nuclear spins. As a result, we can deduce that those brain functions must be quantum. Because these brain functions were also correlated to short-term memory performance and conscious awareness, it is likely that those quantum processes are an important part of our cognitive and conscious brain functions.”
Objective reasoning that leads unerringly to absurdity?
Scientists are taught to rely not upon intuition, to not allow their pride or assumptions to hinder their objectivity. To this point, Richard Feynman, one of the giants of the physics community, had this to say:
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does. Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is — absurd.
And so, as has often been the case for secularists throughout human history, we look to philosophy to provide guidance where science (as we know it) cannot go.
Quo Vadim Vadis?
Then where do we go from here? In this retired sailor’s wholly-unqualified opinion — and as I have hoped to show above — we are gradually finding that the effects of quantum mechanics are present everywhere around us and inside of us. This does not mean that — as Feynman implied — we can ever truly understand it any more than we could understand more than three of the nine (or ten) non-temporal dimensions of string theory. But in any case, the totality of research seems (at least to me) to be coalescing around the sheer ubiquity of quantum mechanics.
But I am confident that soon (hopefully while I’m still alive), one or more brilliant physicists will have the same kind of inspirational brainstorm that led Einstein to develop his theory of relativity. One can only hope that when this happens, any subsequent analogue to the Manhattan Project will not be used not for war, but for the benefit of all.
Coordinator of the list AMICOR. Friends and colleagues, mostly from Brazil.
The AMICOR list is where I use to post relevant scientific material I find surfing in the INTERNET. Also references sent by other member of the list.
