Does practice really makes the man perfect?

Hours of practice isn't guaranteed to turn you into an expert. Sorry to bust your dreams here, scientists have debunked the myth once and for all, and shown that, while some people can become an expert with 10,000 hours of practice - or less - many can't, and there's a whole lot more involved than just hard work.

The researchers came to this conclusion after analysing data taken across six previous studies of chess competitions (1,082 subjects in total) and eight studies of musicians (628 subjects), and looking for any kind of correlation between practice and success. What they found was that, well, there kinda wasn't one, and there were huge variations in how much of a role practice seemed to have played in success.

"One chess player, for example, had taken 26 years to reach a level that another reached in a mere two years. Clearly, there's more at work than just the sheer volume of hours practiced, the study argues."

Is time an illusion?

Einstein baffles us asserting "time" is not running at the same rate everywhere. Einstein mathematics show that the time given by a clock depends on that clock relative motion with respect to an observer. This phenomenon called "time dilation" amounts to the alteration of "time" with motion. There is also gravity-time-dilation. Einstein's prediction made in the early 20th century has been verified experimentally by Hafele and Keating in 1971 and confirmed over and over since. The experiments consisted of identical atomic clocks, some flying in planes around the globe and a reference clock left on the ground playing the role of the observer; the time differences coincided precisely to Einstein's calculations!

Are we alone in the universe?

While it's true that life arose quickly on Earth (within the planet's first few hundred million years), the researchers point out that if it hadn't done so, there may not have been enough time for intelligent life — humans — to have evolved. So, in effect, we're biased. It took at least 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth, and the only reason we're able to contemplate the likelihood of life today is that its evolution happened to get started early. This requisite good luck is independent of the actual probability of life emerging on a habitable planet.

On the other hand, if life arose simply by the accumulation of many specific chemical accidents in one place, it is easy to imagine that only one in, say, a trillion trillion habitable planets would ever host such a dream run. Set against a number that big — and once you decide a series of unlikely accidents is behind the creation of life, you get enormous odds very easily — it is irrelevant whether the Milky Way contains 40 billion habitable planets or just a handful. Forty billion makes hardly a dent in a trillion trillion.

Let's see what your statistics say after viewing this video.

Are there parallel universes?

The researchers proposed that such universes really exist and they interact with each instead of evolving independently. They also claimed that these universes influence each other by a subtle repulsive force, which could explain some of the irregularities in quantum mechanics that have puzzled scientists for a long time.

Wiseman and colleagues posit that the universe that we know of is just one of many worlds, some of which are nearly identical to ours and most very different from our world, which makes it possible that in some universes, the asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs may have missed Earth or you could have been born in a different country.

The researchers also proposed that these worlds existed side by side from the beginning of time and that the universal force of repulsion between nearby worlds gives rise to all quantum phenomena that tend to make these worlds more dissimilar.

Are we made of stars?

Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generation of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. Because humans and every other animal as well as most of the matter on Earth contain these elements, we are literally made of star stuff, said Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

This reaction continues in stars today as lighter elements are converted into heavier ones. Relatively young stars like our Sun convert hydrogen to produce helium, just like the first stars of our universe. Once they run out of hydrogen, they begin to transform helium into beryllium and carbon. As these heavier nuclei are produced, they too are burnt inside stars to synthesise heavier and heavier elements. Different sized stars play host to different fusion reactions, eventually forming everything from oxygen to iron. Eventually at iron, there is no energy released at all. And for elements beyond iron more energy is need for fusion than gravitational pressure can provide.

Is Teleportation possible?

A team of international researchers have successfully teleported a quantum bit (qubit) over a record distance of 143 kilometers (89 miles), between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. This distance is significant, as it is roughly the same distance to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites — meaning it is now theoretically possible to build a satellite-based quantum communication network.

Now, before you get too excited, quantum teleportation isn’t the same as the teleporters found in Star Trek or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the concept is similar. Basically, the scientists entangled some photons in La Palma, and then used a high-powered laser to fire one of those photons across the sea to a receiving station in Tenerife. Then, when the quantum state of one photon is altered, the quantum state of the second photon — despite being 90 miles away — is immediately altered, faster than the speed of light, without even the smallest of delays. In essence, we’re talking about quantum stateteleportation — rather than the teleportation of actual matter.

La Palma and Tenerife are two island located in Spain.

In the long term, though, a quantum network could form the backbone of an internet populated by quantum computers. In theory, each quantum processor/computer connected to the quantum network could be instantly linked to every other computer via an entangled pair of photons.

The next step, then, is to launch a satellite capable of sending and receiving teleported qubits. This is no easy task, and probably unlikely to happen for at least a few years. We’re moving quickly, though: Just two years ago, the record distance for quantum teleportation was 16km, set by a Chinese research team. Earlier this year, they broke their own record and teleported photons over 97km — and now, a few months later, we’re at 143km.

Metamaterials

This is what metamaterials theoretically can do: They guide light around an object, rather than reflect or refract the light. So to the light waves -- and the human eye that perceives them -- the object might as well not even be there. If the light waves can be guided by the metamaterials around the object and back to its original course, the object wouldn't cast a shadow, either. This is another goal of using metamaterials to create cloaking devices.

To simplify it, Duke University's David R. Smith suggests this: Imagine a fabric woven of thread. In this fabric, light is only allowed to flow over the threads (meaning it can't travel into the nooks and crannies between the threads). If you punch a hole in the fabric with a pin, light will go around the hole and resume its original course of travel, since light can only travel over the thread. So to the light waves, the hole doesn't exist. If you put an object in the hole, the light waves would go around the object too, effectively rendering the object invisible.

For one thing, we don't currently have the technology to manufacture materials on the small scale required to manipulate light waves. Light wavelengths are measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter), and the metamaterials needed to block light must be even smaller than that. Another challenge is that a metamaterial cloaking device would have to be arranged to manipulate light on the entire visible spectrum, because different colors exist on different wavelengths. And lastly, a cloaking device would plunge a person on the inside into darkness, as the light that would normally reach him or her would be diverted around the cloaking device. One demand of the DARPA project is that it be asymmetrical . This means that the wearer on the inside should be able to see out, but he or she would be invisible to anyone outside the suit. Once these problems are worked out, the army of the future may be very hard to spot.