Reading comprehension; revisiting tardigrade orthodoxy; restoring universal symmetry

This week, physicists suggested that quantum entanglement may be really, really fast rather than instantaneous, and could be measured at an attosecond scale. Paleontologists discovered a fossilized mammal in Colorado that may have lived alongside dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous. And scientists with the U.S. Geologic Survey reported that up to 95 million people may be relying on drinking water contaminated with PFAS chemicals.

Additionally, researchers say that reading is so easy a brain can do it, everything we know about tardigrades may be wrong, and the universe could be a lot simpler than Leonard Susskind thinks.

Text easy

Linguistics and psychology researchers at New York University report that when a brief sentence is flashed on a screen, human brains can detect its basic linguistic structure extremely rapidly—within 150 milliseconds, according to their study.

The researchers recruited participants who read word lists with brief grammatical sentences (e.g., dogs like bacon) or simple lists of nouns (e.g., dog hat bacon). The researchers measured brain activity of the subjects using magnetoencephalography and report that the left temporal cortex, which governs language comprehension, rapidly distinguishes between sentences and simple lists of nouns as quickly as within 130 milliseconds.

“This speed suggests that at-a-glance sentence comprehension may resemble the rapid perception of a visual scene rather than the slower, step-by-step process we associate with spoken language,” says linguistics Professor Liina Pylkkänen. “In the amount of time that it takes one to hear one syllable, the brain can actually detect the structure of a three-word sentence.”

Corpus wrong

Researchers at the State University of Campinas say that tardigrades, the cuddliest possible microscopic invertebrates, are more diverse and not as cosmopolitan as previously believed. Scientists have famously reported that tardigrades can live in nearly any environment, from the poles to low Earth orbit.

However, the Brazilian researchers found that the earliest reported tardigrades, which were found in the Northern hemisphere, comprise a unique species for which similar, but distinct, species discovered elsewhere were mistaken. Therefore, individual species of tardigrades native to particular ecologies are unlikely to be as adaptable to foreign ecologies or to changing climate conditions as previously believed.

In the 20th century, when many of these species were discovered, researchers lacked the molecular tools used by researchers today for analyzing DNA. If enough similar traits between specimens were observed, they were considered to be undifferentiated and members of the same species. Additionally, because specimens collected in the 20th century are so degraded, reanalysis is not possible, and the Brazilian researchers argue that most decades-old tardigrade records should be ignored.

“There must be many more ‘indigenous’ species than are known today throughout the continent. The same may be true of the rest of the world. We expect many more species to be found in future, provided we collect many more specimens, especially in high-altitude environments, which are known to favor tardigrade diversity,” says biologist Pedro Danel de Souza Ugarte, first author of the article.

Expansion symmetrical

String theory and cosmic inflation together suggest that the universe should be highly complex at tiny scales and chaotic at large scales. However, neither astronomy nor particle physics have revealed the new physics that could serve to validate the predictions of cosmic expansion or string theory.

Faced with the growing body of observations that are simpler and more minimal than suggested by those theories, physicists Latham Boyle and Neil Turok suggest a new approach: following the expansion of the universe backward in time.

Using Einstein’s theory of gravity and the laws of physics, space shrinks down to a single point; the principle of conformal symmetry means that it’s possible to follow light and particles all the way to the beginning, to what the researchers describe as a “mirror,” a reflecting boundary in which time moves forward on one side and backward on the other.

Turok writes, “Picturing the big bang as a mirror neatly explains many features of the universe which might otherwise appear to conflict with the most basic laws of physics. For example, for every physical process, quantum theory allows a ‘mirror’ process in which space is inverted, time is reversed and every particle is replaced with its anti-particle (a particle similar to it in almost all respects, but with the opposite electric charge)… One of the most basic puzzles about the universe is that it appears to [violate CPT symmetry] because time always runs forward and there are more particles than anti-particles. Our mirror hypothesis restores the symmetry of the universe.”

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