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Behind the scenes story of this whole Starshot thing

"The Atomki group has produced three previous papers on their beryllium-8 experiments - conference proceedings in 2008, 2012 and 2015. The first paper claimed evidence of a new boson of mass 12 MeV, and the second described an anomaly corresponding to a 13.45-MeV boson. (The third was a preliminary version of the Physical Review Letters paper.) The first two bumps have disappeared in the latest data, collected with an improved experimental setup. "The new claim now is [a] boson with a mass of 16.7 MeV," Naviliat-Cuncic said. "But they don't say anything about what went wrong in their previous claims and why we should not take those claims seriously." One naturally wonders, he said, "Is this value that they quote now going to change in the next four years?""

Physicists from MIT explain why deep learning is that much successful using physics.

In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

Maybe of interest for the ever lasting discussion around the coffee machines of our meeting room... :) paper at http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/15M1036658

Ants found in the Pacific islands of Fiji behave as miniature farmers, carefully sowing and fertilising the seeds of at least six types of plant, a study said Monday.

In Israel, a new way to hack by turning speakers into microphones.

Sterilizing food with solar wind??

An intermediate level discussion of those results by Scott Manley (Physicist, Kerbal Space Program YouTuber): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcvxg7jJTs

The ALPHA collaboration reports the first ever measurement on the optical spectrum of an antimatter hydrogen atom. Optical transitions shown to be the same as for normal hydrogen. Paper at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaap/ncurrent/full/nature21040.html#affil-auth

Quantum mechanics PSA

A good electrical conductor is normally a good heat conductor. Vanadium dioxide however seems to not be so, by being a good electrical conductor and a poor thermal conductor. Paper at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/371

Another story about the search for extra dimensions through modifications to gravity on small scales.

This simulation showx that the signal measured in LIGO could come from a gravaster (objects which are believed to have their insides made of dark energy) or even a wormhole as sources of gravitacional waves. Published in PRL by friends of Jai

There has been much recent interest in accelerating materials discovery. High-throughput calculations and combinatorial experiments have been the approaches of choice to narrow the search space. The emphasis has largely been on feature or descriptor selection or the use of regression tools, such as least squares, to predict properties. The regression studies have been hampered by small data sets, large model or prediction uncertainties and extrapolation to a vast unexplored chemical space with little or no experimental feedback to validate the predictions. Thus, they are prone to be suboptimal. Here an adaptive design approach is used that provides a robust, guided basis for the selection of the next material for experimental measurements by using uncertainties and maximizing the 'expected improvement' from the best-so-far material in an iterative loop with feedback from experiments. It balances the goal of searching materials likely to have the best property (exploitation) with the need to explore parts of the search space with fewer sampling points and greater uncertainty.

Can AI create the next wonder material? http://www.nature.com/news/can-artificial-intelligence-create-the-next-wonder-material-1.19850?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160505&spMailingID=51301208&spUserID=MTEzODM0NjYzMzgS1&spJobID=920498312&spReportId=OTIwNDk4MzEyS0