• Carrolade@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    This new generation of MEG lifts limitations that have historically confined scanners to universities, paving the way for mobile systems that can be taken directly to those who will benefit most

    Mobile means smaller, so you can move it around. Did you even read the article? They don’t imply they invented something new anywhere, you just made that up.

    Nor did they just add “quantum”. The word is featured in the links I provided above about MEG, from the NIH and Yale. Did you even look at those?

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      20 hours ago

      No, see I kept reading. I searched the keywords and went from there. It’s opm-meg, not meg… That’s the big ass machine vs the silly hat

      These people aren’t the vanguard. They’re not the ones pushing the limits of the technology… They’re just another group using it

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        No, OPM-MEG is still done with a large machine, where do you think all the wires coming out of the silly hat go? I don’t think you read much at all.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          20 hours ago

          They go to the fucking lasers. They’re fiber optic cables. The big machine was a device your head was strapped into, and you couldn’t move or you’d disrupt the readings

          See? This is what I mean by dishonest. My research took me to other groups who built this tech. If they miniaturized it, it was incremental improvement on the big advancement someone else made

          • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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            20 hours ago

            Well of course it’s an incremental improvement. Nobody but you is claiming anyone invented anything new.

            The wearable headset as it sits is still not portable, making it portable would be an excellent, and incremental, yes, advancement.

            From a different article:

            Although the wearable MEG system is housed inside a magnetically shielded room, it is still essential to cancel out the remnant Earth’s field. To do this, the team constructed a set of bi-planar electromagnetic coils that generate fields equal and opposite to the remnant Earth’s field. The coils – designed on two 1.6 m2 planes, placed either side of the subject – achieved a 15-fold reduction in the remnant field.

            Making this portable if possible would be very useful.

            • theneverfox@pawb.social
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              8 hours ago

              See? Now that’s reasonable. If the article was about that, it’d be respectable

              But instead, it was about quantum brain imaging. It took two science enthusiasts doing adversarial research to get to what the team was actually doing, which is cancelling out the impact of Earth’s magnetic field so opm-meg can be used outside

              Do you still think this is good for public engagement?

              • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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                6 hours ago

                Yea I kinda still do.

                Communicating to the public about science advances is about using marketing techniques, not education techniques. It’s business stuff, not science stuff. We have journal articles for the real science. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the reality with anti-intellectual attitudes running so rampant, where real science makes most people tune out.

                Btw, the quantum refers to how the tiny magnetic field is actually detected. The laser shines into some helium, and the helium is set to all have one specific quantum spin. This allows the strength of the field to be consistently measured based on how much the laser gets deflected. Without the ability to manipulate quantum spin, this technology would be unavailable. (I did some more reading on it yesterday. lol) So it is actually pretty quantum stuff apparently.

                • theneverfox@pawb.social
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                  5 hours ago

                  But the article doesn’t even explain how they’re advancing the technology - it makes it sound like they invented it for this purpose, and mentions nothing about using it outside. How does that help them?

                  Also, the link I sent you all the way at the beginning describes how the process works… Yes, it’s quantum in that it takes advantage of things happening at the quantum scale. Like polarized lenses

                  The article I sent you, which l picked because it actually described how the technology works, doesn’t use the word quantum once. It uses the word laser a lot… Which is probably why it’s named optically pumped magnometers

                  I still think the fact that it took this long and this much further reading for us to understand what the team is actually doing makes it terrible science communication

                  • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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                    4 hours ago

                    OP’s article (which seems like a press release) says several times that they’re trying to make the device portable. I don’t know what is so hard to understand about that.

                    Regardless of what your article said, I explained to you the quantum aspects. They are being technically accurate in how they describe the device and what they are attempting to do.

                    I think you and I arguing is just you being intransigent and mistaken on the original article’s claims. For better or for worse, I am also a very stubborn person, so here we are.