Light Travels in Both Time and Space

A groundbreaking achievement by physicists from Imperial College London has brought new insights into quantum physics by recreating the famous double-slit experiment in the dimension of time. 

Led by Professor Riccardo Sapienza from the Department of Physics, this research team explored how light interacts with a material whose optical properties can change within a few femtoseconds, revealing more about the fundamental nature of light.

The original double-slit experiment, first performed in 1801 by Thomas Young, showed that light behaves as a wave. Later experiments demonstrated that light also behaves as particles, revealing its quantum nature. 

In this classic experiment, light was passed through two physical slits, creating an interference pattern that displayed light’s wave properties. This experiment became crucial in understanding not just light but also the quantum behavior of particles like electrons and atoms.     READ MORE...

Reverse Aging Process

Behind Bryan Johnson’s (pictured) $2 million anti-aging regimen is 29-year-old doctor Oliver Zolman.



Tech CEO Bryan Johnson’s rigid routine of 1,977 vegan-based calories a day, a couple dozen morning supplements, and consistent organ testing caught the attention of the masses ever since he first shared his reverse-aging protocol with Bloomberg in January. 

The 45-year-old’s quest for immortality has garnered massive criticism from longevity experts and doctors who question whether his dedication will prove anything long term, not to mention the impact it may have on his quality of life.

Pulling the strings behind Johnson’s reportedly $2 million longevity craze is a team of 30-plus doctors and health experts, led by 29-year-old Oliver Zolman—a millennial doctor obsessed with turning back the clock.

“I’m going for results that have never been achieved ever,” Zolman tells Fortune. “My bar is very high.” Zolman juggles about 10 clients at a time and reportedly charges upwards of $1,000 an hour for intensive age-related testing, according to Bloomberg’s profile. 

Zolman did not share his current rate with Fortune, but says he charges people based on their net worth.  “If they have no money, then I just don’t charge,” he says. “If they’re a billionaire, then it’s like, ‘Okay, thousands of dollars is nothing to them.’” 

Still, Zolman says most of his clients are similar to “Bryan’s demographic,” with some exceptions. But in a follow-up email, Zolman said he does not charge anyone except for Johnson and “never actually charged $1,000 an hour.”

Zolman, who lives in Cambridge, England (but also spends time in Spain and hopes to open a clinic there), introduced himself as a “professional evidence-based rejuvenation coach and clinician trainer” at a lecture during the Longevity Summit Dublin last year.

“Rejuvenation just means getting younger, or making it younger so obviously to prove that, in an evidence-based way, you have to measure the age of something,” he says, adding that he measures individual ages of organs to determine protocols for clients. “You can’t just randomly say I feel younger. That’s completely ridiculous.”

Zolman has been fascinated with longevity and regenerative medicine—modalities that aim to combat age-related changes—since he was young.  READ MORE...

Children as Young as Nine Exposed to Pornography

Children are being exposed to online pornography from as young as nine, according to a study for the children's commissioner for England.

A quarter of 16-21-year-olds first saw pornography on the internet while still at primary school, it suggests. By the age of 13, 50% had been exposed to it.

The findings have been linked to low self-esteem among young people and harmful views of sex and relationships.  Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said it was "deeply concerning".

In a nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 16-21-year-olds, 38% had found pornographic content accidentally.

Joanne Schneider's son stumbled across a pornography website, aged eight, after typing swear words he had heard at school into a search engine.

"We'd put all the normal safety features in place and had removed apps such as YouTube but didn't for one second think that my son could find himself on adult-entertainment sites within a few seconds," Ms Schneider, from London, said.

"As soon as I saw what was happening, I closed the site - but both him and I were left in shock at what he had seen. I felt so terrible about the whole thing.

"All of a sudden I was having to explain it all, including the fact that what he saw was artificial and far from what real people look like."  READ MORE...

Pipebots to Stop Leaks

Around three billion litres of water are lost through leaks across hundreds of thousands of miles of water pipe in England and Wales daily, says water industry economic regulator Ofwat.  Engineers have now developed miniature robots to patrol the pipe network, check for faults and prevent leaks.  They say maintaining the network will be "impossible" without robotics.  Water industry body Water UK told BBC News that companies were already "investing billions" in leakage.

But a recent Ofwat report pointed to a lack of investment by water companies. It named several that it said were "letting down customers and the environment" by not spending enough on improvements. Water UK responded saying that leakage was at "its lowest level since privatisation".

Leaks are a widespread and complicated problem: Across the UK, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of pipe - of varying age and in varying condition - supply millions of properties with water.

Colin Day from Essex and Suffolk Water said: "In [this region] alone, we look after more than 8,500km (5,282 miles) of pipe and only about half the leaks in those pipes are visible, which means it's complicated to pinpoint where [the rest] are."

Wasted water has been a particularly sensitive issue this year. According to Water UK, three companies - South East Water, South West Water, and Yorkshire Water - still have localised hosepipe bans in place following the summer drought. And, amid the cost of living crisis, Ofwat estimates 20% of customers in England and Wales struggle to pay their water bill.  In the last year, though, according to Ofwat, companies have reduced leakage by an average of about 6%.

The industry has committed to a government target of halving the amount of water lost by 2050. Water UK accepted that progress needed to "accelerate". "We're adopting the latest technology, including special in-pipe cameras; satellite imaging; thermal drone technology, high-tech probes, and artificial intelligence," it told BBC News.  READ MORE...

All About UK

United Kingdom, island country located off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe. The United Kingdom comprises the whole of the island of Great Britain—which contains England, Wales, and Scotland—as well as the northern portion of the island of Ireland. The name Britain is sometimes used to refer to the United Kingdom as a whole. 

The capital is London, which is among the world’s leading commercial, financial, and cultural centres. Other major cities include Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester in England, Belfast and Londonderry in Northern Ireland, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, and Swansea and Cardiff in Wales.

The origins of the United Kingdom can be traced to the time of the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan, who in the early 10th century CE secured the allegiance of neighbouring Celtic kingdoms and became “the first to rule what previously many kings shared between them,” in the words of a contemporary chronicle. 

Through subsequent conquest over the following centuries, kingdoms lying farther afield came under English dominion. Wales, a congeries of Celtic kingdoms lying in Great Britain’s southwest, was formally united with England by the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542. Scotland, ruled from London since 1603, formally was joined with England and Wales in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain. (The adjective “British” came into use at this time to refer to all the kingdom’s peoples.) 

Ireland came under English control during the 1600s and was formally united with Great Britain through the Act of Union of 1800. The republic of Ireland gained its independence in 1922, but six of Ulster’s nine counties remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. Relations between these constituent states and England have been marked by controversy and, at times, open rebellion and even warfare. 

These tensions relaxed somewhat during the late 20th century, when devolved assemblies were introduced in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Nonetheless, even with the establishment of a power-sharing assembly after referenda in both Northern Ireland and the Irish republic, relations between Northern Ireland’s unionists (who favour continued British sovereignty over Northern Ireland) and nationalists (who favour unification with the republic of Ireland) remained tense into the 21st century.  READ MORE...

Crystal Fragments in Prehistoric Burial Site

Hundreds of fragments of a rare transparent type of quartz called 'rock crystal' suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England, archaeologists say.

The rock crystals were likely brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, over mountainous terrain, and the crystals appear to have been carefully broken into much smaller pieces, possibly during a community gathering to watch the working of what must have seemed like a magical material.

"You can think of it as a really special event," Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, told Live Science.

"It feels like they're putting a lot of emphasis on the practice of working [the crystal] … people would have remembered it as being distinctive and different."

Overton is the lead author of a study published in July in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that describes the discovery of more than 300 of these quartz crystal fragments at a 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) south of the monument known as Arthur's Stone.

As well as being almost as transparent as water, several of the crystal fragments are prismatic, splitting white light into a visible rainbow spectrum.  READ MORE...

Stashed Inside the Pyramids

The pyramids of Giza are grand monuments, but what's inside them and the other ancient 

Egyptian pyramids? (Image credit: Ratnakorn Piyasirisorost via Getty Images)

When British archaeologist Howard Carter cracked open King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, he reported seeing "wonderful things." Tut's tomb was filled with extraordinary treasures, including the golden death mask of Tutankhamun, a golden throne and even gold sandals. But did all royal tombs in ancient Egypt have such plush grave goods?


The answer is no. While the Great Pyramid of Giza and other ancient Egyptian pyramids are incredible monuments, the burial goods inside them were likely relatively modest compared with those buried in the tombs of later pharaohs, such as Tutankhamun.


"The burials in the biggest pyramids might have looked quite simple in comparison to Tutankhamun," Wolfram Grajetzki, an honorary senior research fellow at University College London in the U.K. who has studied and written extensively about ancient Egyptian burial customs and burial goods, told Live Science in an email.

Pyramids were used as Egyptian pharaohs' tombs from the time of Djoser (reign circa 2630 B.C. to 2611 B.C.) to Ahmose I (reign circa 1550 B.C. to 1525 B.C.). Most of these pyramids were plundered centuries ago, but a few royal tombs have remained relatively intact and provide clues about their treasures, Grajetzki said.


For instance, Princess Neferuptah (who lived around 1800 B.C.) was buried in a pyramid at the site of Hawara, around 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Cairo. Her burial chamber was excavated in 1956 and "contained pottery, a set of coffins, some gilded personal adornments and a set of royal insignia that identify her with the Underworld god Osiris," Grajetzki said.


King Hor (who lived around 1750 B.C.) was buried with a similar set of objects, although he wasn't buried in a pyramid, Grajetzki said. "The body of [Hor] was wrapped in linen, the entrails placed into special containers, called canopic jars," Grajetzki said. "His face was covered with a mummy mask."  READ MORE...

Cause of Alzheimers

For the first time, researchers have used human data to quantify the speed
of different processes that lead to Alzheimer’s disease and found that it develops
in a very different way than previously thought. Their results could have
 important implications for the development of potential treatments.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that instead of starting from a single point in the brain and initiating a chain reaction that leads to the death of brain cells, Alzheimer’s disease reaches different regions of the brain early. How quickly the disease kills cells in these regions, through the production of toxic protein clusters, limits how quickly the disease progresses overall.

The researchers used post-mortem brain samples from Alzheimer’s patients, as well as PET scans from living patients, who ranged from those with mild cognitive impairment to those with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, to track the aggregation of tau, one of two key proteins implicated in the condition.

In Alzheimer’s disease, tau and another protein called amyloid-beta build up into tangles and plaques – known collectively as aggregates – causing brain cells to die and the brain to shrink. This results in memory loss, personality changes, and difficulty carrying out daily functions.

By combining five different datasets and applying them to the same mathematical model, the researchers observed that the mechanism controlling the rate of progression in Alzheimer’s disease is the replication of aggregates in individual regions of the brain, and not the spread of aggregates from one region to another.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, open up new ways of understanding the progress of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, and new ways that future treatments might be developed.

For many years, the processes within the brain which result in Alzheimer’s disease have been described using terms like ‘cascade’ and ‘chain reaction’. It is a difficult disease to study, since it develops over decades, and a definitive diagnosis can only be given after examining samples of brain tissue after death.

For years, researchers have relied largely on animal models to study the disease. Results from mice suggested that Alzheimer’s disease spreads quickly, as the toxic protein clusters colonize different parts of the brain.  READ MORE...

Hidden World - Earth's Inner Core

Earth's "solid" inner core might actually be a bit mushy, researchers now find.  For over half a century, the scientific community thought that Earth's inner core was a solid ball of compressed iron alloy surrounded by a liquid outer core. But new research, published Sept. 20 in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, suggests that the firmness of the planetary ball ranges from hard to semisoft to liquid metal.

"The more that we look at it, the more we realize it's not one boring blob of iron," Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "We're finding a whole new hidden world."

In some ways, Earth's inner core remains as mysterious as it was when Jules Verne published his fanciful "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864. Though scientists have known since the 1950s that our planet isn't hollow as Verne predicted, the planet's interior is still unexplored; the immense heat and pressure are simply too great for any human or human-made probe to travel there. "Unless something awful happens to our planet, we will never have a direct observation of Earth's core," Irving said.

Instead, geophysicists rely on seismic waves generated by earthquakes. By measuring these massive vibrations, scientists can reconstruct a picture of the planet's inner workings in a way that's "akin to a CT scan of a person," Irving said. These waves come in two main flavors: straight-line compressional waves and undulating shear waves. Each wave can speed up, slow down or bounce off of different mediums as it travels through the ground.  READ MORE...

Aztec Empire Spirit Mirror

John Dee was a mathematician, astrologer and occultist. (Image credit: Copyright Antiquity Publications Ltd./Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

The 16th-century courtier John Dee, a scientific adviser to England's Queen Elizabeth I, was also deeply involved in magic and the occult, and he tried to commune with ghosts, using a so-called spirit mirror made of polished obsidian.

Now, a new analysis of Dee's infamous mirror has finally traced its origins — not to the spirit world, but to the Aztec Empire.

Obsidian mirrors such as Dee's were known from Aztec culture, but there were no records on his mirror's origins. However, geochemical analysis enabled researchers to link the mirror's obsidian — a type of volcanic glass — to Pachuca, Mexico, a popular source of obsidian for Aztec people. This finding indicated that the artifact was Aztec and not a copy made from European obsidian, and Dee likely acquired the mirror after it was brought to Europe from Mexico, according to a new study.

Though Dee was a scientist and mathematician, his interests also swung toward the magical and mystical, and in addition to the spirit mirror, he owned other objects related to astrology, divination, alchemy and the exploration of "demonic magic," scientists reported Oct. 7 in the journal Antiquity.

Dee claimed that one of these objects, a purple crystal on a chain, was given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher's stone — the mythical alchemical marvel that promised the gift of eternal life and the ability to turn base metals into gold, according to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. Dee also possessed a Claude glass, a black glass mirror kept in a sharkskin case, which he used for "peering into the future," according to the RCP.

Dee's obsidian mirror, now in the collection of the British Museum in London, is polished on both sides and is nearly perfectly circular, measuring about 7.2 inches (18.5 centimeters) in diameter and 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick, and weighing about 31 ounces (882 grams). A perforated square tab at the top of the mirror measures about 1.3 inches (33 mm) long and may have served as a handle, according to the study.  READ MORE...

Pea and Ham Soup

Ingredients

6 - 8 servings

1 +1/2 Cups of Split yellow peas
1 lb Bacon miss shapes or 1 lb Gammon bits
4 Carrots chopped up into bite size pieces
2 Dried veg stock cubes
1/4 tsp Black pepper


Steps

1.  Soak the split peas for a couple of hours or overnight the night before cooking. Then rinse thoroughly.


2.  Add the split peas to a large pan also add 4 pints of Water bring to the boil and cook on low heat, also add the chopped bacon or Gammon, 2 veg cubes and carrots stir to mix.



3.  Add pepper, be careful with salt as the bacon misshapen maybe salty soak bacon in cold water before cooking to remove excess salt.



4.  Cook for 1 hour in pressure cooker. 2 - 3 hours on the hob simmering and stirring occasionally it will thicken as it cooks. Turn off leave it to thicken for a while then heat up when needed.



5.  When cooked the split peas turn mushy so it thickens. it is best after it cools to add to the fridge for the next day as it lays there the flavours come out better its also thicker. You can have it as soon as it cooks too, just nicer the next day.



6.  Serve hot with crusty Bread to dip in

NOTE:  

Recipe from Maureen Maureen in Liverpool, England - on September 2, 2021

I love this Cookpad Site, Recipes, friends, interesting people and outstanding recipes, and able to see and to taste food from all over the world. i have learned so much more here, spices , herbs and lovely recipes of different cultures. also experimenting mixing different herbs and spices and making my own creations

From The Graves of Children

Unearthed from the graves of children, ceramic baby bottles from thousands of years ago would look perfectly at home in nurseries today. Some have little feet, and one bottle’s spout juts from a ceramic critter’s bottom like a tail. These itty-bitty Bronze and Iron Age vessels smack of whimsy. But they, like many other everyday items used for feeding and food preparation, are providing scientists an unprecedented taste of how people ate long ago.

An examination of fatty molecules called lipids, for example, tucked into the pores of three ceramic bottles from Bavaria suggests that mothers living between 1200 BCE and 450 BCE were weaning or supplementing their kids’ diets with animal milk, Julie Dunne and her colleagues reported in 2019.

Dunne, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England, speculates that the bottles’ creators may have been inspired to amuse their children. “They make us laugh today,” she says. More importantly, studying them “gives you such a close connection to the past.”

There aren’t many ways to study the feeding of infants in ancient times, Dunne says. Ancient bones have yielded insights about when infants were weaned, but “we know very little about how mothers brought up their babies.” The same is true of the eating lives of the ancients in general — much of the evidence has been indirect.  READ MORE

Hiding Hermit King

A British cave dwelling has been identified as the refuge for an exiled Anglo-Saxon king, according to archaeologists.

Anchor Church Caves, located by the River Trent in a secluded part of the countryside in central England, was long considered to be an 18th-century "folly" — an extravagant building made solely for ornamentation or as a joke.

But a new study has revealed that the cave house is the real deal. The 1,200-year-old structure was built during the tumultuous life of the Northumbrian king Eardwulf, who was hounded from his throne to live as a hermit, and later became a saint.  

Local legend said Eardwulf, or St. Hardulph as he was later known, lived inside the cave dwelling after he was deposed and exiled for mysterious reasons in A.D. 806. A fragment from a 16th-century book states that Eardwulf ''has a cell in a cliff a little from the Trent,'' and the banished king was buried in A.D. 830 at a location just 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the cave.  READ MORE