James' World 2

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Wake up, work, relax, sleep, repeat.

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Jessica U. Meir plays sax in the Cupola. (NASA)

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At a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for signs of the boundary between wakefulness and unconsciousness. For patients who are comatose or under anesthesia, it can be all-important that physicians make that distinction correctly. Doing so is trickier than it might sound, however, because when someone is in the dreaming state of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, their brain produces the same familiar, smoothly oscillating brain waves as when they are awake.

Lendner argued, though, that the answer isn’t in the regular brain waves, but rather is an aspect of neural activity that scientists might normally ignore: the erratic background noise.

Some researchers seemed incredulous. “They said, ‘So, you’re telling me that there’s, like, information in the noise?’” said Lendner, an anesthesiology resident at the University Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany, who recently completed a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. “I said, ‘Yes. Someone’s noise is another one’s signal.’”

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Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine; noise generated by Thomas Donoghue

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In 1974, Stephen Hawking theorized that the universe’s darkest gravitational behemoths, black holes, were not the pitch-black star swallowers astronomers imagined, but they spontaneously emitted light — a phenomenon now dubbed Hawking radiation. 

The problem is, no astronomer has ever observed Hawking’s mysterious radiation, and because it is predicted to be very dim, they may never will. This is why scientists today are creating their own black holes.

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology did just that. They created a black hole analog out of a few thousand atoms. They were trying to confirm two of Hawking’s most important predictions, that Hawking radiation arises from nothing and that it does not change in intensity over time, meaning it’s stationary.

“A black hole is supposed to radiate like a black body, which is essentially a warm object that emits a constant infrared radiation,” study co-author Jeff Steinhauer, an associate professor of physics at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, told Phys.org. “Hawking suggested that black holes are just like regular stars, which radiate a certain type of radiation all the time, constantly. That’s what we wanted to confirm in our study, and we did.”

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Image credit: Aaron Horowitz via Getty Images)

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