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I like this work... it mixes physics, networks and biology ! Anyone heard about her ? Here's an interesting paper found on this website: http://nuweb.neu.edu/gbianconi/condensation.pdf

We worked on this with Luzi a few years back ... while the analogy is original and interesting it fails to capture the dynamics of a network, e.g. if a network has hubs that grow and shrink .... Luzi worked on an extended model to solve this issue, but, if I remember correctly, he got stuck in a computationally very hard problem .... We intended to develop and use the extended model to define relevant characteristic of the ESA network formed by mail exchanges.....

...but then the CMS YGT didn't really like the project

A new paper related to our old Ariadna on microstructured radiators.

This is actually a very nice paper in my view .... José, have a look at it!! "This study demonstrates that appropriately designed metallo-dielectric systems can serve as compact, highly directive and ultra radiative antennas. Let us emphasize that contrary to fully metallic antennas, the high directivity of this antenna does not result from a plasmonic effect, and that it is efficient over a wide range of frequencies. In consequence, the high directivity does compromise the high radiative decay rate enhancement offered by two coupled metallic particles and it is possible to exploit whispering gallery modes to further enhance the radiative decay rates. This work paves the way towards the design of compact, simple and highly efficient optical antennas."

Revised version of a 2008 paper. Pretty crazy title and perhaps crazy content...

the abstract sounds like a random generated paper...

I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:) "this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish." * If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.) * Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!

UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example. * The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting. * The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.

wow, good to know ! But for the privacy you should be aware that this is a public group, so anyone has access to our comments i think !

check your iPhone / iPod

We did look at making computation powers more efficient from the bio perspective (efficiency of computations in brain). This paper was actually the base for our discussion on a new approsach to computing http://atlas.estec.esa.int/ACTwiki/images/6/68/Sarpeshkar.pdf and led to several ACT internal studies

here is the paper I told you about, on the computational power of analog computing: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0304-3975(95)00248-0 you can also get it here: http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/95-09-079.pdf

The competition is open....

And what does one win in the end? Yet another unfeasible concept to be archived somewhere in a journal? Look at "Millis hypothetical drives"... Give me a break, for sure!!

I like the sentence "16 peer-reviewed journal articles, and an award-winning website (Warp-When), all for a total investment of less than $1.6M". This gives 100.000 dollars per peer-reviewed paper (we neglect the award-winning web-site under the assumption that is the easy part....). With these number the ACT in 2010 cashed 1.4 millions only in research papers making it an obvious good investment for the European Space Agency also in austerity times!!!

Paper Discussion Deck

despite being a consultancy paper, quite interesting ... " the success of these companies is not a matter of how much these companies spend on research and development, but rather how they spend it." could also be translated into: "you need us to tell you how to spend your R&D money" :-)

"In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" -- a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name "Tyche" for the hypothetical planet. Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)."

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00555/tyche3_555342a.pdf Icarus' paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1004/1004.4584v1.pdf

Bad Astronomy's take on the subject: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/14/no-theres-no-proof-of-a-giant-planet-in-the-outer-solar-system/

well, he kind-of falls into his own trap: confusing/discussing "evidence" with "likelihood", and "there is" with "it may". He should have made more efforts in his writing, what he says is a bit pointless! (just put the Icarus' paper)

very nice paper ... 

According to the company's wikipedia page, the computer costs $ 10 million. Can we then declare Quantum Computing has officially arrived?! quotes from elsewhere in the site: "first commercial quantum computing system on the market"; "our current superconducting 128-qubit processor chip is housed inside a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter shielded room" Link to the company's scientific publications. Interestingly, this company seems to have been running a BOINC project, AQUA@home, to "predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of hard problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. AQUA@home uses Internet-connected computers to help design and analyze quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques". List of papers coming out of it.

Sounds too super to be true, no?

> Sounds too super to be true, no? Yeah, how else may it sound, being a combination of hi-quality (I assume) research targeted at attracting funding, raised to the power of Science Daily's pop-pseudo-scientific journalists' bu****it? Original article starts with a cool sentence too: > The ultimate proof of our understanding of natural or technological systems is reflected in our ability to control them. ...a good starting point for a never-ending philosophers' debate... Now seriously, because of a big name behind the study, I'm very curious to read the original article. Although I expect the conclusion to be that in practical cases (i.e. the cases of "networks" you *would like to* "control"), you need to control all nodes or something equally impractical...

then I am looking forward to reading your conclusions here after you will have actually read the paper

here comes Sante's paper .... 

There is another very special old friend of Dario and myself, Lorenzo Iorio...

looks like a nice chap: http://digilander.libero.it/lorri/homepage_of_lorenzo_iorio.htm

error in CO2 models? Cynthia have a look at it please - effect on our paper?

Highlights of the year 2009 and 2010 of "Classical and Quantum Gravity". There's an ACT paper among them!

Congrats!

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.

fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."

It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...

link to the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2119 additional info at: http://fold.it/portal/

Stephanie Forrest awarded $3.2 million by DARPA to further develop her work on automated software repair through evolutionary computing (papers)

Learn about how Google Flu Trends uses aggregated search query data to accurately estimate current flu activity in several countries. - Lead to a Nature paper as well