Posts tagged experiment

A woman with an artificial arm has been given the sense of touch following a pioneering operation to reroute some of her nerves. Claudia Mitchell, 27, lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident three years ago, but can now feel her missing hand after having nerves from her lost limb rerouted to her chest.

Now, when she touches something with her artificial hand she can feel it through a device attached to her chest.

During a four-hour operation, surgeons moved nerves from her shoulder, which normally ferry signals from the hand to the brain, and redirected them to muscles in her chest area.

Four months after surgery, a patch of skin on her chest was able to feel touch, temperature and pain sensations as if they were coming from different parts of her hand and wrist.

(Source: futurenow321)

The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos “respect the cosmic speed limit.”
Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab, presented the results Friday at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan.
“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” Bertolucci said in a statement. ast year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light would.
At the time, the physicists were stunned because such a result seemed to break Einstein’s prediction that nothing could travel faster than light. This idea is at the heart of his theory of special relativity, on which much of our modern technology and scientific understanding is based.

The OPERA researchers weren’t sure what could explain their anomalous results, having checked and rechecked their work, so they released their findings to the larger community of physicists in hopes that experts around the world could help them figure it out.
“The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments,” Bertolucci said. “That’s how science moves forward.”

(Source: futurenow321)

The question of how birds navigate using - among other signals - magnetic fields is the subject of much debate. These new “GPS neurons” seem to show how magnetic information is represented in birds’ brains. David Dickman of the Baylor College of Medicine in the US set up an experiment in which pigeons were held in place, while the magnetic field around them was varied in its strength and direction. In life, this could help the bird determine not only its heading just as a compass does, but would also reveal its approximate position. Each cell also showed a sensitivity to field strength, with the maximum sensitivity corresponding to the strength of the Earth’s natural field. And just like a compass, the neurons had opposite responses to different field “polarity” - the magnetic north and south of a field, which surprised the researchers most of all.

(Source: futurenow321)

A real-world demonstration of a thought experiment conducted at the University of Vienna, has produced a result that is somewhat befuddling to people with what the lead researcher calls a “naïve classical world view.” Two pairs of particles are either quantum-entangled or not. One person makes the decision as to whether to entangle them or not, and another pair of people measure the particles to see whether they’re entangled or not.

The head-scratcher is: the measurement is made before the decision is made, and it is accurate. “Classical correlations can be decided after they are measured,” says Xiao-song Ma, the writer of the study. Entanglement can be created “after the entangled particles have been measured and may no longer exist.”

(Source: futurenow321)