Wonder if they can trigger cosmic inflation in their lab.

This is cool, it’s sort of like the hanging chain problem. Simplest solution probably uses the Lagrangian. Basically you want to minimize the potential energy, which is found by adding the gravitational potential and the spring energy as a function of where on the spring the weight is hanging. Then integrate the Euler-Lagrange equation to get the shape of the uncoiling spring.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary for info about the hanging chain. There are good online tutorials about how to solve it but a quick web search didn’t find the one I remembered.

Photo in the article shows the examiner looking into the person’s eyes with literal binoculars. Is that really how the test is done? Is the picture AI slop or what? I don’t even see any optics between the binoculars and the target a few inches away, so dunno how the image can possibly be in focus. Is it because of the eye’s lens combining with the binocular? I read someplace that the eye’s lens has around 20mm focal length so maybe it focuses the binocular on the back of the eye.

Ehh there is also nothing looking like scanning in the picture. The examiner just looks through the binocular. I think the picture is bogus.

What I had been wondering was whether the test could be done with a phone camera and an app.

They just figured this out? I thought everyone knew it already. In language classes at my school they just start talking to you in whatever language from day 1. The sounds would start to resolve into (unfamiliar) words after a while, and shortly after that you would start picking up the meanings of the words. Same thing happens when you travel to another country and start hearing the language there.

I don’t think this is literally audible sound, so a better explanation could be useful. I wonder if this can help understand superconductivity which involves charge carriers being bundled into phonons or something.

Yeah this is pretty cool. The front part of the brain develops from a different progenitor cell than the brain stem. There has been a ton of difficulty over the years trying to grow hindbrain cells from forebrain progenitors. It’s because they were using the wrong progenitors. So they may be able to make more progress treating hindbrain conditions like ALS. I have no idea why nobody tried this decades ago but there’s probably a reason.