Thursday Things: Year End Edition

28 December 2023. Vol 5 No 52. By Dan McGirt. #229

Welcome to Thursday Things! And an early Happy New Year, because it will be 2024 before we meet again! If you enjoy this final edition of 2023, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.

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New year, new day. Photo by Sergey Shmidt on Unsplash

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Top 5 Thursday Things Editions of 2023

As a quick and easy Thursday Things “year in review” let’s review the Top 5 editions of 2023, as ranked by whatever mysterious algorithm Substack uses.

It’s actually not that mysterious — the ranking is based on how many readers click the heart at the top of each issue, share, or comment.

I’m happy to see that four of the top five were editions published in November and December, which at least suggests that Thursday Things got better during the year. Or that more Happy Subscribers clicked the heart. So if you missed any of these editions, here’s your chance to catch up with the issues Thursday Things readers liked best.

1 November 2 Boogeyman Boogie Edition

Scary Appalachian folk tales, the boogeyman around the world, and grammar nightmares. We’ll feature the pretty version of the link because it’s the #1 edition of the year!

2 November 16 Science Strangeness Edition

The opposite of déjà vu is "jamais vu", making black holes in the lab, and Japan gets a new island.

3 December 21 Last Minute Edition

This was last week’s edition! Thermoregulated clothing, minimalist ideas for simplifying your life in 2024, and the end of paper boarding passes.

4 November 9 Horse Don’t Care Edition

Race horses neither know nor care that they’re in a race. And billionaires love blimps.

5 March 9 Lost and Found Edition

Lost islands, lost books, and lost stories. And again, here’s the pretty version, because this was all the way back in March!

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Shake it out

Just because 2023 is winding down doesn’t mean there aren’t exciting new developments in science and medicine happening. For example, apparently someone decided that instead of treating cancer with radiation and chemotherapy we should try just shaking cancer cells to death:

Scientists Destroy 99% of Cancer Cells in The Lab Using Vibrating Molecules

Scientists have discovered a new way to destroy cancer cells. Stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light caused them to vibrate in sync, enough to break apart the membranes of cancer cells.

"It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers," says chemist James Tour from Rice University.

"They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light."

The use of near-infrared light is important because it enables scientists to get deeper into the body. Cancer in bones and organs could potentially be treated without needing surgery to get to the cancer growth.

In tests on cultured, lab-grown cancer cells, the molecular jackhammer method scored a 99 percent hit rate at destroying the cells. The approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors, and half the animals became cancer-free.

As usual, mice get all the good stuff first. This, as with most medical medical news, multiple steps and multiple years away from helping human patients. But if it proves out, it would be awesome. This is almost Star Trek level medicine.

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Messing with time

It seems that the more advanced our phones get — and the higher the price tag — the worse the battery life becomes. My phone would pretty will hit 0% charge by the end of the day if I didn’t keep it plugged in. We’ve got phone cameras that can detect the Crab Nebula, sound in 4-D stereo, and apps for everything, but battery technology has not kept up with the rest of the kit.

Never fear! Scientists are working on a solution.

Quantum Batteries Could Provide a New Kind of Energy Storage by Messing With Time

Messing with time? What could go wrong?

In a typical battery, charged ions zip one way through a sea of other particles as the battery recharges, before racing back in the other direction to release the stored energy on cue.

Back and forth the ions go, some getting diverted along the way, until the capacity of the battery is drained, and it loses energy too quickly to be of any use.

That, indeed, is the problem. But what is the answer?

But physicists, good on them, are imagining new ways of storing energy in handy portable devices by drawing on a strange quantum phenomenon that twists time, amongst other unusual happenings.

"Current batteries for low-power devices, such as smartphones or sensors, typically use chemicals such as lithium to store charge, whereas a quantum battery uses microscopic particles like arrays of atoms," explains Yuanbo Chen, a physics graduate student at the University of Tokyo.

That seems like a safe thing to carry around in my pocket.

"While chemical batteries are governed by classical laws of physics, microscopic particles are quantum in nature, so we have a chance to explore ways of using them that bend or even break our intuitive notions of what takes place at small scales," Chen says.

Look, I don’t care about breaking the laws of physics. Can you keep my phone charged or not?

Let’s go to the press release: Quantum batteries break causality

Batteries that exploit quantum phenomena to gain, distribute and store power promise to surpass the abilities and usefulness of conventional chemical batteries in certain low-power applications. For the first time, researchers including those from the University of Tokyo take advantage of an unintuitive quantum process that disregards the conventional notion of causality to improve the performance of so-called quantum batteries, bringing this future technology a little closer to reality.

What I’m hearing is that if you’re willing to forgo normal causality and potentially wreck the space-time continuum then a quantum battery might keep your phone charged longer. Sure, you’ll get random calls from your future self, might get caught in a time loop, and could potentially trigger a vortex to a parallel universe if your phone gets wet, but that’s a small price to pay. The important question is when will the quantum phone be available?

I think I dialed a wrong number. Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

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Thank you for reading!

Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!