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Would You Kill Baby Hitler?
Would you kill a baby if you knew he would grow up to be Hitler? Psychologist and author Kevin Dutton explores the mindset of psychopaths as a window into this fascinating ethical question.
Why do cold-hearted psychopaths make good surgeons and world leaders?
According to Kevin Dutton, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, psychopaths are well-equipped to deal with all kinds of nasty crises. Sending thousands of troops to war, for instance, is not something that many people can easily carry on their conscience, Dutton points out. Psychopaths tend to simply "be people who are able to get the job done, who are less morally squeamish."
So how does this apply to the moral conundrums of daily life?
Dutton explains the so-called trolley problem, a test in which the responses of psychopaths differ greatly from that of normal people.
If psychopaths are utilitarians at heart, how doers that affect their judgment in other scenarios. To answer that question, Dutton presents a number of variations on the trolley problem in the video below.
For instance, imagine that you are a transplant surgeon who had the ability to save many lives by taking one. Or, for that matter, would you kill a baby if you knew he would grow up to be Hitler? Dutton lays out these scenarios here:
How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
14 January, 2021
Credit: Getty Images
Sponsored by Northwell Health
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
<p>One of the most devastating aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been unpredictability. The nation's health systems—especially those in hard-hit areas like New York City—have had to adapt to sudden surges of COVID-19 cases, all while dealing with limited resources, existing patients, and a novel virus that's still not fully understood.</p><p>But what if health systems were able to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks before they occur? Northwell Health, the largest health care system in New York state, recently deployed a predictive tool that does just that.</p><p>Northwell Health's <a href="https://www.northwell.edu/northwell-website-patterns-predict-covid-19-cases" target="_blank">surveillance dashboard</a> is able to predict COVID-19 hospitalizations by using insights from machine learning. In March, Northwell Health's Customer Insights Group developed an algorithm that's been mining data from online traffic to the Northwell.edu website, which has received more than 20 million hits since March.<strong></strong></p><p>The algorithm collects data through 15 different indicators, each of which reflects the online behavior of the website's visitors. For example, the tool analyzes metrics such as the length of time users spend on certain pages, searches for emergency department wait times, and specific symptoms users search for. Combined, this information translates into something like the "public mood" of the website on any given day.</p>
<blockquote>Since Northwell Health began using the predictive tool in September, it's predicted COVID-19 hospitalizations with an accuracy of about 80 percent.</blockquote>
<p>To understand how this mood relates to future COVID-19 cases, Northwell Health began comparing its data with a timeline of COVID-19 hospitalizations across 23 hospitals and nearly 800 outpatient facilities and in the metro New York area. This enabled the Customer Insights Group to see patterns of online activity that precede future increases or decreases in hospitalizations.</p><p>Since Northwell Health began using the predictive tool in September, it's predicted COVID-19 hospitalizations with an accuracy of about 80 percent.</p><p>"This is really the first tool that I've been exposed to that gives me a sort of guestimate of what two weeks from now may look like," said Dr. <a href="https://www.northwell.edu/find-care/find-a-doctor/emergency-medicine/dr-eric-scott-cruzen-md-mba-11346068" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Eric Cruzen, </a>chief medical informatics officer of Northwell's emergency medicine services and chair of the emergency department at Lenox Health Greenwich Village in Manhattan.</p><p>"Even if the data can provide an idea of whether to expect an increase, decrease, or stasis, that's valuable. Because every day we're working to estimate what tomorrow's going to bring. Any tool that's going to shed light on that is a good tool in my book."</p>
The value of forecasting
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTA0Njk2OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMzM2NDQzOH0.rid9regiDaKczCCKBsu7wrHkNQ64Vz_XcOEZIzAhzgM/img.jpg?width=980" id="2bb93" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="31345afbdf2bd408fd3e9f31520c445a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="1546" data-height="1056" />Northwell emergency departments use the dashboard to monitor in real time.
Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>
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3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
27 August, 2020
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
Surprising Science
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
<p>David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt <a href="https://news.stlpublicradio.org/health-science-environment/2020-08-17/i-was-in-denial-missouri-paleontologist-unearths-rare-triceratops-skull" target="_blank">told</a> St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"</p><p>After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July <a href="https://news.westminster-mo.edu/news-releases/westminster-college-undergraduate-researchers-discover-triceratops-during-annual-dig/" target="_blank">excavating the skull.</a></p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU4NjYyNS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjQ1NjAzMn0.Nv-LpbJE-xFAC0tAa-QyR9jUup4_sUuyi0F9AVGfidY/img.png?width=980" id="dedeb" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="df2f41447c6d68e0ef5974c6808ba0b0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="924" data-height="694" />
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU4NjYyNi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODUyNTA3Mn0.rmWU3OpDzvftP-zgbn9OfM_-egS0v7caR7beocVqRPo/img.png?width=980" id="8a77c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="bea4f4ea98159e3088dc98dd213a98e4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="916" data-height="682" />
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU4NjgwNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNTA5MTY2Nn0.xiKXQPeyJ2T22TbLx0MQP4xqZ_TCc07OpiskZSiukzQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="28717" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9f3bb64b6f252de63b6aa7a955b3f116" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Morrison Formation" data-width="1024" data-height="591" />
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU4NjYyOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NzIwMTk0NH0.udr3vBzsNQ3_gPBTBLnUVxCyqfDcVFK7D94meBFUkSM/img.jpg?width=980" id="245ad" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="39022ce235d663c4d54f571fe96c23c6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="\u200bTriceratops illustration" data-width="800" data-height="376" />
<p>As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.</p><p>Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "<a href="https://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/david-h-koch-hall-fossils-deep-time" target="_blank">deep time</a>" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."</p>
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
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World's oldest work of art found in a hidden Indonesian valley
Archaeologists discover a cave painting of a wild pig that is now the world's oldest dated work of representational art.
15 January, 2021
Pig painting at Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia, made at 45,500 years ago.
Credit: Maxime Aubert
Surprising Science
- Archaeologists find a cave painting of a wild pig that is at least 45,500 years old.
- The painting is the earliest known work of representational art.
- The discovery was made in a remote valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
<p>A recently-found picture of a wild pig that was made over 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest known cave painting, according to archaeologists. The painting, which may also be the world's oldest representational or figurative artwork, was discovered on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, hidden away in a remote <span style="background-color: initial;">Leang Tedongnge cave.</span></p><p>If you're wondering, the now-second world's oldest dated painting of 43,900 years of age was previously found in the same Sulawesi area by the same team. That one pictured a group of part-human, part-animal hybrid figures on the hunt. The scientists also point out that these dates are minimum ages, determined from analyzing buildups of mineral deposits on the cave art. The paintings could be as old as 60,000 to 65,000 years. By comparison, the cave paintings in the <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Lascaux_Cave/" target="_blank">Lascaux cave</a> complex in France are "just" 17,000 years old. </p>
<p><span style="background-color: initial;">The discovery was made inside the </span><span style="background-color: initial;">Leang Tedongnge cave </span><span style="background-color: initial;">by the archaeologist Basran Burhan, a doctoral student and co-author of the study. He's part of a team which involves researchers from </span><span style="background-color: initial;">Griffith University in Australia and </span><span style="background-color: initial;">Indonesia's leading archaeological research centre, Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (ARKENAS).</span></p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years," <a href="https://news.griffith.edu.au/2021/01/14/worlds-oldest-cave-art-discovered-in-indonesia/" target="_blank">said Burhan</a>, adding "These pigs were the most commonly portrayed animal in the ice age rock art of the island, suggesting they have long been valued both as food and a focus of creative thinking and artistic expression".</p><p>The Sulawesi warty pig was painted using dark red ochre pigment and is about 53 by 21 inches in size. It features some upright hair and horn-like warts on the face that the adults of this species are known for. Another two partially-preserved pigs face the main animal.</p>
Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9734e306f0914bfdcbe79a1e317a7f0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>Two hand prints, most probably left by Homo sapiens rather than other human ancestors like the Denisovans, can be seen by the pig's hindquarters. The scientists are looking to extract DNA samples from the prints.</p><p>The cave with the painting is in a valley of limestone cliffs, an hour's walk away from any road. You can only access it during dry season because of flooding during the rainy season. Previously it was only known to members of the isolated Bugis community.</p><p>The site has the oldest evidence of human presence on the islands of Indonesia, known as "Wallacea," and is likely linked to the group of people who were migrating to Australia. </p><p>Read the new study in <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/3/eabd4648" target="_blank">Science Advances. </a></p>
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What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
15 January, 2021
Photo by Andrew Spencer on Unsplash
Mind & Brain
Philosophers of the Islamic world enjoyed thought experiments.
<p>If the heavens vanished, they wondered, would time continue to pass? If existence were distinct from essence, would that mean that existence itself must exist? Can God turn your household servant into a horse, so that you come back home to find it has urinated all over your books?</p><p>But the most famous is the so-called 'flying man' thought experiment, devised by the most influential philosopher of the Islamic world, Avicenna (in Arabic, <em>Ibn Sīnā</em>, who lived from 980 to 1037 CE). Imagine, he says, that a person is created by God in mid-air, in good condition but with his sight veiled and his limbs outstretched so that he is touching nothing, not even his own body. This person has no memories, having only just been created. Will his mind be a blank, devoid as it is of past or present sensory experience? No, says Avicenna. He will be aware of his own existence.</p><p>Three questions immediately arise. First, when Douglas Adams, the author of <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em> (1978), imagined a whale popping into existence in mid-air above an alien planet, had he been reading Avicenna? I have no idea, but I like to think so.</p><p>Second, is Avicenna right that the 'flying man' would be self-aware? Well, it's important to realise that Avicenna does not attempt to <em>argue</em> that the flying man would know that he exists. Rather, he takes it as obvious. In one version, he even tells readers that we should imagine ourselves being so created. If we put ourselves in the flying man's dangling shoes, we should just see that we would be self-aware. Indeed, this turns out to be a fundamental idea in Avicenna's philosophy. He thinks that we are all always self-aware, even when we're asleep or focusing hard on something other than ourselves. Paradoxically, we're often not <em>aware</em> of being self-aware: it is the non-interruptive background music of human psychology, something we notice only when our attention is called to it, a pre-reflective awareness of self. The flying man thought experiment is itself one way to call attention to this self-awareness: Avicenna calls it a <em>tanbīh</em>, meaning a 'pointer' to something.</p>
<p>Our self-awareness is a foundation for our first-person perspective on things. It's a sign of this that when I see, imagine or think something, I can immediately apprehend that I am seeing, imagining or thinking about that thing. Any other form of cognition – any awareness of other things – presupposes awareness of oneself.</p><p>Incidentally, you might object that the flying man would have certain forms of bodily awareness despite his lack of vision, hearing and so on. Wouldn't he at least sense the location of his limbs by another form of sensation, namely proprioception? Imagine you are in total darkness and your arm is not resting on anything: proprioception is the sense that tells you where it is. This is indeed a problem for the thought experiment as Avicenna sets it up, but it isn't really philosophically decisive. One can just modify the scenario by adding that God blocks the man's ability to use proprioception, or that the flying man's proprioceptive faculty happens to be defective. Avicenna's claim will then be that, even under these circumstances, the flying man would be aware of himself.</p><p>Now for the third, and hardest, question: what does the flying man thought experiment prove? Avicenna draws a surprising conclusion: it shows that we are not identical with our bodies. Just consider. The flying man is aware of himself; he knows that he exists. But he is not aware of his body; he doesn't know that his body exists, nor indeed that any body exists. And if I am aware of one thing but not another, how can those two things be identical?</p>
<p>This sounds pretty persuasive, until you reflect that one can be conscious of a thing without being conscious of everything about it. You, for example, have been aware of reading this article for the past few minutes, but you haven't been aware of reading something written while Dixieland jazz was playing. It would be a mistake to conclude from this that the article is not something written with Dixieland jazz playing. In fact, that is exactly what it is. To put it another way, the flying man could be aware of his self without realising that his self is a body. Contemporary philosophers would say that Avicenna is mistakenly moving from a 'transparent' to an 'opaque' context, which is basically a fancy way of saying what I just said.</p><p><a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/MARAFM" target="_blank">Efforts</a> have been made to spare Avicenna from this mistake. One possible way to rescue the argument would go like this. Avicenna is trying to criticise another way of thinking about the soul, one that goes back to Aristotle. According to the theory he rejects, the soul is so closely associated with the body that it can only be understood as an aspect or organising principle of the body, which Aristotle called the body's 'form'. The thought experiment is designed to show that this is wrong. It does so by calling to our attention that we have a means of access to our souls apart from bodily sensation, namely self-awareness.</p><p>How would this refute Aristotle? Well, consider again just why it is that the flying man is not aware of his body. It is because he is not currently using his senses and has never done so (he only just started existing, remember), and sense perception is, Avicenna assumes, the <em>only</em> way to become aware of any body. If this is right, then anything that the flying man grasps without using sense perception is not a body, not material. Since he does grasp his soul without using sense perception, his soul is therefore not a body.</p><p>On this reading, Avicenna would be helping himself to a pretty big assumption, which is that bodies can be discovered only by the senses. You can see, hear, touch, taste or smell them, but otherwise you can never so much as know that they exist. Since for Aristotle the soul was a form of the body, if you couldn't experience the body, you would not, on his account, have access to the soul; and yet, Avicenna claims, the falling man <em>would</em> have access to his soul.</p><p>I suspect this is (at least in part) what he had in mind in creating this thought experiment. But that's not to say that I'm convinced. All Avicenna has really done is to throw down a challenge to his materialist opponents: show me how a body could be aware of itself without using sensation to do so.</p><p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-in-the-islamic-world-9780199577491?cc=au&lang=en&" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Philosophy in the Islamic World</em></a><em> by Peter Adamson is out now through Oxford University Press.</em><img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/99e82cab-61e0-4404-a510-3e190ab2802e.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Peter Adamson</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/what-can-avicenna-teach-us-about-the-mind-body-problem" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
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