Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 21, 2019

Suspended animation moves from science fiction to reality; A new hologram model for black holes may explain the paradox between quantum physics and Hawking Radiation; Automated trash talk can distract human gamers - even when they know the trash talk is automated; A bipedal robot that balances and juggles at the same time; and a Steem post describing the history and structures of the universe

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1. Human patient put in suspended animation for the first time - Suspended animation is a long time staple of science fiction novels, and a similar phenomenon has previously been reported in cold-water drownings. Normally, brain cells start to die off after 5 minutes with no oxygen, but when the body is in extremely cold conditions, it slows the chemical reactions so that the cells can last longer without oxygen. Now, this phenomenon has been utilized in actual surgeries. The technique is formally called, emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), and according to New Scientist, it is being tested at the University of Maryland. The technique cools the patient's body rapidly by replacing the blood with ice cold saline, which causes the heart - and almost all other bodily activity - to pause. This may extend the 5 minute window up to 2 hours, buying surgeons more time to perform emergency procedures. After the physical injuries are repaired, the patient is warmed up and the heart is restarted. The full results of the testing are expected to be announced during 2020.


2. Hologram Within a Hologram Hints at Fate of Black Holes - In a recent paper, Princeton's Ahmed Almheiri and UCB's Raphael Bousso grapple with the black hole information paradox, which is the apparent conflict between laws of quantum physics, which mandate that information about the past cannot be lost, and the phenomenon of Hawking Radiation, which suggests that information is randomly lost from a black hole until nothing remains of it. By observing a black hole from a higher dimension, the pair think that they have sketched an outline of the process by which the information might escape from the black hole without being lost. This technique of observing the black hole from a higher dimension is a form of holography. The familiar view of a black hole is a volume of space that is so dense that it warps space-time so strongly that not even light can escape. In contrast, these researchers make use of a technique that has been known since 1997 and views a black hole as "as a holographic projection from a flat system of quantum particles that remains gravity-free." Their new contribution is to separate the matter and gravity within the black hole and view them as two separate flat holograms. By doing this, they created a "hologram within a hologram" and the inside hologram had geometric links to the external world. This means that although the information that's released by Hawking Radiation may appear to be random to a nearby observer, rigorous study could actually connect it to the information inside the black hole. While this work provides a mechanism that can bridge between the inside and outside of the black hole, no encoding scheme has yet been discovered. MIT's Netta Engelhardt - who also worked on the project - is quoted as saying, "This is the beginning of a theoretical understanding of what’s going on in terms of radiation, but it’s not an operational description for how to extract the information.". Another collaborator, Don Marolf praises the work, but adds that other holographic constructions might produce conflicting results, so the ideal solution would dispense with the requirement for a higher-order dimension. h/t RealClear Science


3. Trash Talk From a Robot Can Distract Players, Study Says - In A Robot's Expressive Language Affects Human Strategy and Perceptions in a Competitive Game, lead author Aaron M. Roth and team report on their research that exposed 40 study participants to trash talk from a robot during online game play. The participants were fully aware that the commentary was coming from an automaton, but the players who received robotic criticism improved more slowly with practice than players who went uncriticized. Future work might focus on non-verbal communication between humans and robots. Other team members "included Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science; Samantha Reig, a Ph.D. student in the HCII; Umang Bhatt, who recently completed a joint bachelor's-master's degree program in electrical and computer engineering; Jonathan Shulgach, a master's student in biomedical engineering; and Tamara Amin, who recently finished her master's degree in civil and environmental engineering." This is one of the first human computer interaction (HCI) studies to focus on adversarial relationships between humans and machines. Another was covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 30, 2019.


4. Bipedal Robot Cassie Cal Learns to Juggle - Cassie the bipedal robot can juggle a single ball. Juggling is a common challenge for robotocists because, although it has no practical use, it is fun and because it requires careful coordination of computing, sensing, and actuation. The unique challenge here is for the robot to be able to balance and juggle at the same time. The juggling is assisted by an external tracking system. The robot cannot yet juggle while walking, and it cannot continue juggling indefinitely because certain errors are irrecoverable, such as a foot that slips or if the ball strikes the edge of the paddle and bounces off at an awkward angle. Although juggling isn't a particularly useful capability, the models used can be generalized to other tasks that involve contact between objects.
   
   Here is a video:
   

STEEM Let's talk About the Universe - In this post, @anomalogy provides a brief overview of the universe and its history. The post starts with a general overview of the universe and a history from the big bang through the first billion years, with the formation of the structures that we observe today. After describing this history, it then moves on to brief descriptions of stars, planets, satellites (moons), star systems, galaxies, and galaxy groups or clusters. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @anomalogy.)

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