‘It’s the golden rule of crowded escalators: Stand on one side, walk on the other. But passengers taking the escalator in one of London’s busiest tube stations were recently confronted with a weird rule: Everyone must stand. Officials claim it will make stations run more efficiently. But how?’

Source: Gizmodo

Experts Say Prove It

‘An international team of neuroscientists claims to have successfully carried out a head transplant on a monkey, along with other related experiments. But because the details haven’t been published, experts remain skeptical.

As New Scientist reports, the procedure was led by Sergio Canavero, a neuroscientist who works for the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. Canavero made headlines last year by suggesting that head transplants are about to become a reality, and that the medical technology required to perform such a seemingly radical procedure already exists. At the time, Canavero said the first human head transplant would happen in about two years. If this latest development is true, his team appears to be right on track…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Theoretical physicists have been predicting that it should be possible for knots to form in quantum fields for decades, but nobody could figure out how to accomplish this feat experimentally. Now an international team has managed to do just that, tying knots in a superfluid for the very first time by manipulating magnetic fields.

… It’s tough to visualize these exotic objects, but they are essentially particle-like rings or loops in a quantum field connected to each other exactly once. A mathematician might not consider these structures to be true knots; typically a knot is defined as a knotted circle, like a pretzel, while a rubber band would be considered an “un-knot.” Hall and Möttönen prefer to think of their structures as knotty solitons….’

Source: Gizmodo

‘We have yet to discover a single trace of alien life, despite the extremely high probability that it exists somewhere. This contradiction is popularly known as the Fermi Paradox. A new theory attempts to solve this conundrum by suggesting that habitable planets are quite common in our galaxy, but nascent life gets snuffed out very quickly.

An oft-cited solution to the Fermi Paradox—that is, the lack of observational evidence that our galaxy has been colonized by an extraterrestrial civilization—is the Great Filter hypothesis. Devised by Robin Hanson of George Mason University, this theory suggests that some kind of cosmic-wide obstacle is preventing life from developing beyond a certain stage. Trouble is, we’re not entirely sure if this Great Filter actually exists, or what it looks like.

Some astrobiologists look to our planet’s ancient past and point to the presence of three possible filter points: the emergence of reproductive molecules, simple single-celled life, or complex single-celled life. If we could prove that any one of these critical evolutionary steps are true, that would be exceptionally good news—it would imply that the Great Filter is behind us. On the other hand, some pessimistic futurists fear that the Great Filter looms ahead of us, an event that will likely come in the form of a self-inflicted existential catastrophe…’

Source: Gizmodo