Welcome to the ClickBank Blog!
Posted by: Kristen M., marketing Communications Manager As part of our ongoing efforts to expand our communication with our clients, I am proud to announce the launch of the ClickBank Blog. It is our hope that the ClickBank Blog will provide clients with meaningful information both about ClickBank specifically and about the larger marketplace. To that end, […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Welcome to the ClickBank Blog!”, url: “http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2008/04/03/welcome-to-the-clickbank-blog/” });
World s Oldest Living Tree Discovered In Sweden
The world’s oldest recorded tree is a 9,550 year old spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden. The spruce tree has shown to be a tenacious survivor that has endured by growing between erect trees and smaller bushes in pace with the dramatic climate changes over time. For many years the spruce tree has been regarded as a relative newcomer in the Swedish mountain region. “Our results have shown the complete opposite, that the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range,” says Leif Kullman, Professor of Physical Geography at Umea University. A fascinating discovery was made under the crown of a spruce in Fulu Mountain in Dalarna. Scientists found four “generations” of spruce remains in the form of cones and wood produced from the highest grounds. The discovery showed trees of 375, 5,660, 9,000 and 9,550 years old and everything displayed clear signs that they have the same genetic makeup as the trees above them. Since spruce trees can multiply with root penetrating braches, they can produce exact copies, or clones. The tree now growing above the finding place and the wood pieces dating 9,550 years have the same genetic material. The actual has been tested by carbon-14 dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, USA. Previously, pine trees in North America have been cited as the oldest at 4,000 to 5,000 years old. In the Swedish mountains, from Lapland in the North to Dalarna in the South, scientists have found a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old. Although summers have been colder over the past 10,000 years, these trees have survived harsh weather conditions due to their ability to push out another trunk as the other one died. “The average increase in temperature during the summers over the past hundred years has risen one degree in the mountain areas,” explains Leif Kullman. Therefore, we can now see that these spruces have begun to straighten themselves out. There is also evidence that spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change. The ability of spruces to survive harsh conditions also presents other questions for researchers. Have the spruces actually migrated here during the Ice Age as seeds from the east 1,000 kilometres over the inland ice that that then covered Scandinavia? Do they really originate from the east, as taught in schools? “My research indicates that spruces have spent winters in places west or southwest of Norway where the climate was not as harsh in order to later quickly spread northerly along the ice-free coastal strip,” says Leif Kullman. “In some way they have also successfully found their way to the Swedish mountains.” [Karin Wikman @ Swedish Research Council]
What Happens When You Pop A Quantum Balloon?
When a tiny, quantum-scale, hypothetical balloon is popped in a vacuum, do the particles inside spread out all over the place as predicted by classical mechanics” The question is deceptively complex, since quantum particles do not look or act like air molecules in a real balloon. Matter at the infinitesimally small quantum scale is both a wave and a particle, and its location cannot be fixed precisely because measurement alters the system. Now, theoretical physicists at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Boston have proven a long-standing hypothesis that quantum-scale chaos exists… sort of. Writing in the April 17 edition of Nature, senior author Maxim Olshanii reported that when an observer attempts to measure the energies of particles coming out of a quantum balloon, the interference caused by the attempt throws the system into a final, “relaxed” state analogous to the chaotic scattering of air molecules. The result is the same for any starting arrangement of particles, Olshanii added, since the act of measuring wipes out the differences between varying initial states. “It’s enough to know the properties of a single stationary state of definite energy of the system to predict the properties of the thermal equilibrium (the end state),” Olshanii said. The measurement — which must involve interaction between observer and observed, such as light traveling between the two — disrupts the “coherent” state of the system, Olshanii said. In mathematical terms, the resulting interference reveals the final state, which had been hidden in the equations describing the initial state of the system. “The thermal equilibrium is already encoded in an initial state,” Olshanii said. “You can see some signatures for the future equilibrium. They were already there but more masked by quantum coherences.” The finding holds implications for the emerging fields of quantum computing and quantum information theory, said Paolo Zanardi, an associate professor of physics studying quantum information at USC. In Zanardi’s world, researchers want to prevent coherent systems from falling into the chaos of thermal equilibrium. “Finding such ‘unthermalizable’ states of matter and manipulating them is exactly one of those things that quantum information/computation folks like me would love to do,” Zanardi wrote. “Such states would be immune from ‘decoherence’ (loss of quantum coherence induced by the coupling with environment) that’s still the most serious, both conceptually and practically, obstacle between us and viable quantum information processing.” Zanardi and a collaborator introduced the notion of “decoherence-free” quantum states in 1997. Researchers such as Zanardi and Daniel Lidar, associate professor of chemistry, among others, have helped make USC a major center for the study of quantum computing. [Carl Marziali @ University of Southern California]
