Archives for September 2014

I’ve written before about the plight of bees. They’re dying off by the millions and then some of them come back from the dead. Yes, Virginia, there are zom-bees. And I’m sure you’ve heard the old trope that if the bees disappear then all life will perish in four years. Sadly, unlike other old tropes, that one’s true. Without bees pollinating the flowers that grow plants our little planet will go fallow. With no food for anyone to eat we’ll all die. It’s really that simple. As Safa Motesharrei, of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, pointed out in March of this year, at our current rate of environmental destruction we only have a few decades left before we cross the tipping point. That was before science noticed that those gaping holes erupting all over the arctic circle are methane factories of doom that could shorten that timeline to something around 2035 or so. Most of you reading this will long enough to die horrible deaths.

I’m just a font of fun, aren’t I?

The thing is that it’s all correctable and could reap huge benefits for all of us if we got our heads out of our asses …. well, if the anti-vaccers and science deniers got their heads out of their asses. My head has no brown rim. In fact it even smells good too.

I don’t want this to go on forever or go off the rails so I’ll focus on one simple thing. Scientists have known for millenia that honey has medicinal effects that cause healing. It’s been used on open wounds since before the second dynasty of Egypt.

And, guess what? It helps you heal.

Now, before you run out and buy gallons of that stuff that comes in the cute bottles at your local Wal-Mart, be advised that there are some restrictions.

Lisa Winter, over at I Fucking Love Science, has the whole story.

With antibiotic resistance on the rise, alternative methods for fighting pathogens are in high demand, even if it means going back to basics. Honey has been used to treat wounds for thousands of years, long before microorganisms had been discovered. Recently, researchers have identified 13 lactic acid bacteria (LAB) found within raw honey from different bee species that have effectively treated some of the most antimicrobial-resistant pathogens afflicting humans today. The research was led by Tobias Olofsson of Lund University and the paper was published in the International Wound Journal.

Honey that is sold commercially has typically been exposed to heat, pasteurization, and processing in order to kill any yeast and prevent fermentation. While this treatment that makes the honey safer and more shelf-stable, it also gets rid of the honey’s benefits, including antimicrobial and antihistamine properties. Raw, unrefined honey that has the most benefits will come directly from beekeepers, though some specialty shops may have it available.

Olofsson’s team tested raw honey’s mettle against antimicrobial-resistant pathogens including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE). They discovered that while the 13 LAB work individually, they also produced additional antibacterial compounds when combined. The LAB mixture was able to curb all 14 bacterial strains used in the study.

In addition to killing pathogens in the lab, the team also used the LAB mixture on horses who had experienced chronic wounds that have not responded to conventional treatments. All ten horses who received the mixture topically experienced wound healing.

“Antibiotics are mostly one active substance, effective against only a narrow spectrum of bacteria,” commented Olofsson in a statement. “When used alive, these 13 lactic acid bacteria produce the right kind of antimicrobial compounds as needed, depending on the threat. It seems to have worked well for millions of years of protecting bees’ health and honey against other harmful microorganisms. However, since store-bought honey doesn’t contain the living lactic acid bacteria, many of its unique properties have been lost in recent times.”

The researchers will continue to study raw honey, in hopes of identifying all of the possible clinical uses for the antibacterial properties. Fresh honey can be found pretty much all over the world, which would be a fantastic option for those living in developed or remote areas where healthcare is minimally available. Additionally, this approach could potentially be integrated into medical facilities as a treatment for those facing drug-resistant pathogens.

So there you have it. To make honey more profitable we have removed all the beneficial effects from it. Well, except for the easily digestible sugars. So, go ahead and sweeten your tea accordingly. Your pancreas will thank you.

But aside from that the crap you buy at Whole Foods, or Wal-Mart, is essentially worthless.

So here’s the deal. If we are ever to combat our growing problems with antibiotics and wean people off of the man-made alternatives we need to save the bees.

That means no transgenic seeds (bye Monsanto!), no pesticides that leak into the soil, no plants that are designed to kill insects.

Just FYI, for those of you new to reality, bees are insects too.

Bee Eyes – Double Sunrise (Official) from BEE EYES on Vimeo.

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There have been so many movies and books about time travel you could be forgiven for thinking it was a real thing. It’s not, in case you slept through science class. There are a lot of reasons it’s not, too. The energy required would be one draw back. Simply put you’d need to harness the sun just to even begin thinking about it. After all, you’re planning on bending all dimensional space/time to your will. That’s not easy. And, then, even if you did it, you’d still have to deal wit the grandfather paradox. Basically, what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather? Are you then not born? That would seem logical.

Lee Billings at Scientific American says, not so fast. Some very smart people have given the idea some serious thought and they seem to have a working model or two that might allow it to happen.

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d’oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, “a welcome reception for future time travelers,” a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible.

But Hawking may be on the wrong side of history. Recent experiments offer tentative support for time travel’s feasibility—at least from a mathematical perspective. The study cuts to the core of our understanding of the universe, and the resolution of the possibility of time travel, far from being a topic worthy only of science fiction, would have profound implications for fundamental physics as well as for practical applications such as quantum cryptography and computing.

Closed timelike curves
The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a “closed timelike curve,” or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time.

Hawking and many other physicists find CTCs abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down. In a model proposed by the theorist David Deutsch in 1991, however, the paradoxes created by CTCs could be avoided at the quantum scale because of the behavior of fundamental particles, which follow only the fuzzy rules of probability rather than strict determinism. “It’s intriguing that you’ve got general relativity predicting these paradoxes, but then you consider them in quantum mechanical terms and the paradoxes go away,” says University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph. “It makes you wonder whether this is important in terms of formulating a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics.”

Experimenting with a curve
Recently Ralph and his PhD student Martin Ringbauer led a team that experimentally simulated Deutsch’s model of CTCs for the very first time, testing and confirming many aspects of the two-decades-old theory. Their findings are published in Nature Communications. Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch’s model deals with the “grandfather paradox,” a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Deutsch’s quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:

Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle—the particle—back into the CTC; if the switch isn’t flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle’s emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch’s insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands—good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch’s model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. “We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first,” Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past.

By measuring the polarization states of the second photon after its interaction with the first, across multiple trials the team successfully demonstrated Deutsch’s self-consistency in action. “The state we got at our output, the second photon at the simulated exit of the CTC, was the same as that of our input, the first encoded photon at the CTC entrance,” Ralph says. “Of course, we’re not really sending anything back in time but [the simulation] allows us to study weird evolutions normally not allowed in quantum mechanics.”

Those “weird evolutions” enabled by a CTC, Ringbauer notes, would have remarkable practical applications, such as breaking quantum-based cryptography through the cloning of the quantum states of fundamental particles. “If you can clone quantum states,” he says, “you can violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” which comes in handy in quantum cryptography because the principle forbids simultaneously accurate measurements of certain kinds of paired variables, such as position and momentum. “But if you clone that system, you can measure one quantity in the first and the other quantity in the second, allowing you to decrypt an encoded message.”

“In the presence of CTCs, quantum mechanics allows one to perform very powerful information-processing tasks, much more than we believe classical or even normal quantum computers could do,” says Todd Brun, a physicist at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the team’s experiment. “If the Deutsch model is correct, then this experiment faithfully simulates what could be done with an actual CTC. But this experiment cannot test the Deutsch model itself; that could only be done with access to an actual CTC.”

Alternative reasoning
Deutsch’s model isn’t the only one around, however. In 2009 Seth Lloyd, a theorist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed an alternative, less radical model of CTCs that resolves the grandfather paradox using quantum teleportation and a technique called post-selection, rather than Deutsch’s quantum self-consistency. With Canadian collaborators, Lloyd went on to perform successful laboratory simulations of his model in 2011. “Deutsch’s theory has a weird effect of destroying correlations,” Lloyd says. “That is, a time traveler who emerges from a Deutschian CTC enters a universe that has nothing to do with the one she exited in the future. By contrast, post-selected CTCs preserve correlations, so that the time traveler returns to the same universe that she remembers in the past.”

This property of Lloyd’s model would make CTCs much less powerful for information processing, although still far superior to what computers could achieve in typical regions of spacetime. “The classes of problems our CTCs could help solve are roughly equivalent to finding needles in haystacks,” Lloyd says. “But a computer in a Deutschian CTC could solve why haystacks exist in the first place.”

Lloyd, though, readily admits the speculative nature of CTCs. “I have no idea which model is really right. Probably both of them are wrong,” he says. Of course, he adds, the other possibility is that Hawking is correct, “that CTCs simply don’t and cannot exist.” Time-travel party planners should save the champagne for themselves—their hoped-for future guests seem unlikely to arrive.

And yet ….

The models work. I’m not talking those Revell models you built as a kid but mathematical models that allow scientists to simulate possible versions of reality. There are some scientists who think that it may require a melding of the two models to make one cohesive theory. But the fact remains, the models work.

Almost every discovery in quantum physics has come from modeling, and much like chaos theory and faster than light travel, it has had to go through some revisions before things started to make sense.

That’s how science works. They don’t issue absolutes until they are proven facts.

Right now all of this is in the hunch stage. But it is a very exciting and enticing hunch.

And, like I said, those models work.

Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra “Do It With a Rockstar” (FULL UNCENSORED – NSFW) from Amanda Palmer on Vimeo.

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