The UK regulator says the vaccine is safe and effective and the benefits outweigh risks in this age group.
UK approves Pfizer jab for 12 to 15-year-olds
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Category Archives: Mind Building
UK ‘most trusting’ country on Covid vaccines
A survey of 15 countries finds the lowest level of trust in jabs is in Japan.
Covid: Indian variant ‘now dominant’ in the UK
Confirmed cases of the Indian variant have risen to 12,431 in the UK, according to new data from Public Health England
Enthusiastic Consent
When you invite someone to have a shared experience together, professionally or personally, and consent is given grudgingly, this tells you that the invitation isn’t very aligned. Even if you’re ostensibly getting a yes, there are probably some unresolved objections behind that yes, so you’re getting a compromised version of a yes.
This in itself is another layer of invitation for you to unpack. Do you want to move forward with the consent you received, or do you want to go for a more aligned form of consent?
This isn’t a trick question. Sometimes you may be fine with the consent you received, especially if the invitation is fairly simple. It may not be worth the effort to aim for a more aligned version, especially if the consequences are minor either way. A grudging yes may be good enough in some situations.
Sometimes, however, you may not want to settle for a compromised yes. You may want to aim for a higher standard and go for a true win-win, such as by changing the offer or by addressing and resolving objections. And if you can’t reach win-win, then you may prefer to declare “no deal” and withdraw the offer,
One nice indicator that you have a real yes from the other person is that consent is given not plainly but enthusiastically. This is a pretty good sign that the other person likes your invitation. Such a response or the lack thereof is not, however, a reflection on the quality or overall generosity of your offer. It’s just a reflection of the other person’s emotional alignment with your offer.
Some people aren’t very emotionally expressive, so the lack of expressed enthusiasm isn’t necessarily a sign that your invitation isn’t landing well. But the presence of an enthusiastic response is generally a good sign.
Enthusiasm as a Minimum Standard
Consider where it might be useful to look for enthusiastic consent as your minimum standard when it comes to following through with action in some areas. Consider where you might want to interpret resistant consent as a no.
You can apply this standard both to invitations you give, so you’re looking to see if other people respond enthusiastically, and to invitations you receive, so you’re gauging your own level of enthusiasm.
If you or someone else says yes to an invitation but without much enthusiasm, you’re probably looking at a partial match situation. While partial matches may provide some secondary gains now and then, they can also clutter your life and block full matches from coming through.
Are there any areas of life where it may be worthwhile to consider enthusiasm as a minimum standard rather than a nice-to-have?
One area is creative work. It’s easier to flow into action when the enthusiasm is there. If I get a creative idea, such as for a new article or course, but I’m not feeling much enthusiasm for it, I’m inclined to dismiss it as a partial match idea. The idea may still be good, but it’s not necessarily good for me at that time. I often get ideas that I reject due to a lack of personal enthusiasm, and this keeps the door open for more aligned ideas to come through. I find it better to keep my energy free and unattached instead of occupying it with partial matches.
Another area is doing anything romantic, playful, sexual, or adventurous with another person. Enthusiastic consent is a worthwhile standard to aim for, especially since the quality of the experience will probably depend on some mutual enthusiasm. You may even want to look for 4D consent, so there’s a positive response from the body, mind, heart, and spirit.
I’ve noticed that even if I’m initially enthusiastic about an invitation, but the other person clearly isn’t, their response effectively takes the wind out of my sails. Then I often feel it’s best to invite someone else, to make a different invitation, to invite something similar but at a later time, or to let the idea go.
Crafting Better Offers
If you raise your standard for the type of response you want to see, this challenges you to get better at crafting offers. This usually requires getting better at understanding people and making the offer more aligned for them.
One area where I see a lot of people fall flat is when they’re looking for a job. This is a form of invitation. You’re offering your services to a potential employer. Many people bemoan the unenthusiastic responses they receive, both as potential employers and employees. And many are willing to accept a grudging yes. Could that willingness to accept a grudging yes be part of the problem?
Consider that if you’ve already decided that a grudging yes is good enough, you probably won’t put as much effort into crafting a quality offer. But this also lowers your chances of getting any kind of yes.
Imagine how much better your offers might be if you held yourself to the standard of “enthusiastic consent or no deal.” Would you be more likely to land a good job if this is your minimum standard? I’d say yes.
I have received a lot of crappy and misaligned offers over the years, both personally and professionally, and I think one reason is that these offers have come from people who are willing to accept any kind of yes, even a very grudging or resistant yes. They aren’t even trying to meet the standard of win-win. If they were, they’d seek to craft a more personalized offer.
Personalizing Your Invitations
One of the best ways to aim for the higher standard of enthusiastic consent is to make less generic and more personalized invitations. Learn what would create a win for the other person before you think about crafting an invitation or offer.
For instance, before you show up for a job interview, do you already have a pretty good idea of what kind of candidate would receive an enthusiastic yes? Do you feel that what you’re able to offer has a decent likelihood of being met with enthusiastic consent? If not, then why are you wasting their time by showing up with a weak offer? At best you’ll get a partial match. Is that really what you want? Won’t it be easier to get hired if you aim for the standard of enthusiastic consent?
Enthusiastic consent may seem like a higher standard to meet, but it’s also an easier standard in a way. Aiming for this standard helps you elevate the quality of your offers and invitations, so you’re more likely to get an aligned yes in response. This standard helps you steer clear of the energy-sucking swamp of partial matches. It helps you craft better offers.
How quantum dots can ‘talk’ to each other
So-called quantum dots are a new class of materials with many applications. Quantum dots are realized by tiny semiconductor crystals with dimensions in the nanometre range. The optical and electrical properties can be controlled through the size of these crystals. As QLEDs, they are already on the market in the latest generations of TV flat screens, where they ensure particularly brilliant and high-resolution colour reproduction. However, quantum dots are not only used as “dyes,” they are also used in solar cells or as semiconductor devices, right up to computational building blocks, the qubits, of a quantum computer.
Now, a team led by Dr. Annika Bande at HZB has extended the understanding of the interaction between several quantum dots with an atomistic view in a theoretical publication.
Annika Bande heads the “Theory of Electron Dynamics and Spectroscopy” group at HZB and is particularly interested in the origins of quantum physical phenomena. Although quantum dots are extremely tiny nanocrystals, they consist of thousands of atoms with, in turn, multiples of electrons. Even with supercomputers, the electronic structure of such a semiconductor crystal could hardly be calculated, emphasises the theoretical chemist, who recently completed her habilitation at Freie Universität. “But we are developing methods that describe the problem approximately,” Bande explains. “In this case, we worked with scaled-down quantum dot versions of only about a hundred atoms, which nonetheless feature the characteristic properties of real nanocrystals.”
With this approach, after a year and a half of development and in collaboration with Prof. Jean Christophe Tremblay from the CNRS-Université de Lorraine in Metz, we succeeded in simulating the interaction of two quantum dots, each made of hundreds of atoms, which exchange energy with each other. Specifically, we have investigated how these two quantum dots can absorb, exchange and permanently store the energy controlled by light. A first light pulse is used for excitation, while the second light pulse induces the storage.
In total, we investigated three different pairs of quantum dots to capture the effect of size and geometry. We calculated the electronic structure with highest precision and simulated the electronic motion in real time at femtosecond resolution (10-15 s).
The results are also very useful for experimental research and development in many fields of application, for example for the development of qubits or to support photocatalysis, to produce green hydrogen gas by sunlight. “We are constantly working on extending our models towards even more realistic descriptions of quantum dots,” says Bande, “e.g. to capture the influence of temperature and environment.”
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Materials provided by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Five million years of climate change preserved in one place
Paleo researcher Charlotte Prud’homme, who until recently worked at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and is now a researcher at the Université Lausanne, explains: “The 80-meter-thick sedimentary sequence we found at Charyn Canyon in southeast Kazakhstan provides us with a virtually continuous record of five million years of climate change. This is a very rare occurrence on land!” The alternating dust and soil layers provide the first reliable evidence, in one place, of long-term interactions between major climate systems on the Eurasian continent. “Over the past five million years, the land surfaces of Eurasia appear to have more actively contributed to the land-atmosphere-ocean water-cycle than previously acknowledged. The sediments preserved at Charyn Canyon acted as a litmus test for the influx of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean, stimulating the transport of moist air masses from the North Atlantic back onto land via westerly air flows,” corresponding author Prud’homme says. The results of the research have now been published in the scientific journal Communications Earth and Environment.
The researchers focused their investigation on the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods. The Pliocene, five to 2.6 million years ago, represents the best analogue for the climatic conditions of the Anthropocene: this geologic time period was the last time concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was comparable to today, around 400 parts per million (ppm). “That’s why our insights from the Charyn Canyon sediments are so essential for understanding future climate,” Prud’homme says.
Until now, little has been known about the role Central Asia plays in global climate evolution past and present. Earth’s climate evolution over the past five million years has been understood mainly from the perspective of marine mechanisms. In contrast, the significance of climate feedbacks that originated on land — rather than in the oceans, lakes or ice cores — has remained largely unexplored. The international research team has filled this gap with their field research in Charyn Canyon.
Interactions between mid- and high-latitude climatic systems
The geographical location of the study site in the middle of Central Asia was of key importance to the team: “We needed to find a place that was inland and as far away from the ocean as possible,” Kathryn Fitzsimmons, Group Leader of the Terrestrial Paleoclimate Reconstruction Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, explains. “We could hardly find a more continental situation than at Charyn Canyon in southeastern Kazakhstan.” The semi-arid climate of the canyon, and its landscape, was shaped by the interaction between the mid-latitude westerlies and the high-latitude polar fronts, and by sediment transported from the nearby Tien Shan mountains. Charyn Canyon is ideal, according to Kathryn Fitzsimmons, for studying long-term land-climate feedback mechanisms.
The researchers examined the 80-meter-thick sedimentary succession and sampled by abseil to ensure continuous coverage of the record. By measuring the relative concentrations of isotopes within soil carbonates, they reconstructed the changing availability of moisture in the soil through time. A combination of paleomagnetic analyses and absolute uranium-lead dating of soil carbonates established the age and accumulation rates of the sediment record. The soil samples revealed a region characterized by ever-increasing aridity over the last five million years. In the early Pliocene, the soil was significantly wetter than in subsequent epochs or than today’s climate. This process of aridification was not linear, however; it was interrupted by short-term climate fluctuations which provide insights into the interaction between the mid-latitude westerly winds and the Siberian high-pressure system.
Interaction between the Siberian high and rain-bringing westerlies
The research at Charyn Canyon enabled the scientists to investigate the long-term interaction of the Siberian high with the rain-bringing westerlies. Kathryn Fitzsimmons says: “We’re confident that the changes in soil moisture we found at our site can also be used as a proxy for Siberian river activity further north.” The hydroclimate at Charyn Canyon reflects that of the steppe to the north, from where a number of large Siberian rivers, such as the Irtysh and Ob, flow, she says. These are similarly influenced by the dynamics of the Siberian high and westerly air masses. One particular phase where this link is important stands out: a sustained period of wet conditions at Charyn Canyon just prior to the first major global glaciation around 3.3 million years ago. It is likely that these wet conditions extended to the Siberian rivers to the north, whose outflow of fresh water to the Arctic ocean may have breached a tipping point for widespread increased sea ice formation.
The information from this most complete terrestrial climate archive for the past five million years provides a very valuable basis for future climate models. Charlotte Prud’homme literally says, “We have opened a door.”
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Materials provided by Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Scientists found a new and promising qubit at a place where there is nothing
Quantum computers with their promises of creating new materials and solving intractable mathematical problems are a dream of many physicists. Now, they are slowly approaching viable realizations in many laboratories all over the world. But there are still enormous challenges to master. A central one is the construction of stable quantum bits — the fundamental unit of quantum computation called qubit for short — that can be networked together.
In a study published in Nature Materials and led by Daniel Jirovec from the Katsaros group at IST Austria in close collaboration with researchers from the L-NESS Inter-university Centre in Como, Italy, scientists now have created a new and promising candidate system for reliable qubits.
Spinning Absence
The researchers created the qubit using the spin of so-called holes. Each hole is just the absence of an electron in a solid material. Amazingly, a missing negatively charged particle can physically be treated as if it were a positively charged particle. It can even move around in the solid when a neighboring electron fills the hole. Thus, effectively the hole described as positively charged particle is moving forward.
These holes even carry the quantum-mechanical property of spin and can interact if they come close to each other. “Our colleagues at L-NESS layered several different mixtures of silicon and germanium just a few nanometers thick on top of each other. That allows us to confine the holes to the germanium-rich layer in the middle,” Jirovec explains. “On top, we added tiny electrical wires — so-called gates — to control the movement of holes by applying voltage to them. The electrically positively charged holes react to the voltage and can be extremely precisely moved around within their layer.”
Using this nano-scale control, the scientists moved two holes close to each other to create a qubit out of their interacting spins. But to make this work, they needed to apply a magnetic field to the whole setup. Here, their innovative approach comes into play.
Linking Qubits
In their setup, Jirovec and his colleagues cannot only move holes around but also alter their properties. By engineering different hole properties, they created the qubit out of the two interacting hole spins using less than ten millitesla of magnetic field strength. This is a weak magnetic field compared to other similar qubit setups, which employ at least ten times stronger fields.
But why is that relevant? “By using our layered germanium setup we can reduce the required magnetic field strength and therefore allow the combination of our qubit with superconductors, usually inhibited by strong magnetic fields,” Jirovec says. Superconductors — materials without any electrical resistance — support the linking of several qubits due to their quantum-mechanical nature. This could enable scientists to build new kinds of quantum computers combining semiconductors and superconductors.
In addition to the new technical possibilities, these hole spin qubits look promising because of their processing speed. With up to one hundred million operations per second as well as their long lifetime of up to 150 microseconds they seem particularly viable for quantum computing. Usually, there is a tradeoff between these properties, but this new design brings both advantages together.
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Materials provided by Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
NHS blunder sees wrong woman given invasive procedure
The 39-year-old was waiting for a fertility appointment, but mistaken for another patient, a report says.
Self-harm in over-65s ‘needs post-pandemic focus’
Loneliness, bereavement and reluctance to access GPs can all lead to self-harm among older adults.
Spiders can sniff out and avoid killer ants
Spiders avoid building webs near European fire ants, their natural predators, by sensing the chemicals they give off in the environment, Simon Fraser University researchers have found.
The findings, published recently in Royal Society Open Science, give us a peek inside the enduring struggle between spiders and ants, and could lead to the development of natural repellents for homeowners worried about unwanted eight-legged guests.
Many ants prey on spiders, suggesting that web-building spiders may avoid locations near ant colonies or frequented by foraging ants. The research team, led by SFU biological sciences PhD candidate Andreas Fischer, hypothesized that spiders instinctively know to avoid building webs in these danger areas by sensing chemical cues left behind by predatory ants.
Researchers tested the theory by exposing filter paper to several species of ants and placing it in a multi-chambered habitat of four different species of spiders. Filter papers without ant semiochemicals were put in another chamber to see which area the spiders would prefer.
They found that the chemical deposits of European fire ants specifically, which are known to be aggressive omnivorous scavengers and prey on many invertebrates, had a deterrent effect on all tested spider species. The spiders chose to stay in the chamber that had no chemical trace of ants nearby.
Given how much time and energy spiders put into building their webs, Fischer said it makes sense that spiders in the wild would pick locations that have fewer threats to their survival.
Meanwhile, people’s fear of spiders has led to the development of many insecticides and other chemical products that claim to repel spiders. But most of them have proven largely ineffective because spiders are able to abandon their webs and rebuild elsewhere. Harnessing the natural chemicals given off by their natural predators could help create more effective repellents for homeowners. Researchers warn against using European fire ants, an invasive species, themselves as pest control.
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Materials provided by Simon Fraser University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
