Group items tagged

Probably old news by now, but this thing sounds so awesome it warrants an entry

Looks like fun! Note though, I'm always slightly annoyed when people use holography only because it sounds cool. because clearly this is not a hologram! Definition: a three-dimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source. I am sure this is not what is happening in these goggles.

I think they suspect that "hologram" would sell better than "yet-another-augmented-reality-goggle"

Ever wondered what radiation looks like? If you have, I bet you didn't think it would look as cool as this. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission....

Once I saw a DIY spark chamber in LIP (CERN associated laboratory). It was the work of a bunch of BSc students, they made it all from scratch, so it seemed to be not that difficult to have one at home. Yet another project for the future 'Experimental Physics' stagiare maybe :)

Told you so...

Responding to calls from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), a working group of the American Statistical Association has developed a whitepaper detailing how statisticians and computer scientists can contribute to administration research initiatives and priorities. The whitepaper includes a lot of topics central to machine learning and data mining, so please take a look.

I guess Norvig is trumping Chomsky big time if this is the attitude of the NSF :)))

An exhaustive overview of all possible advanced rocket concepts, eg.. "As an example, consider a photon rocket with its launching mass, say, 1000 ton moving with a constant acceleration a =0.1 g=0.98 m/s2. The flux of photons with E γ=0.5 MeV needed to produce this acceleration is ~1027/s, which corresponds to the efflux power of 1014 W and the rate of annihilation events N'a~5×1026 s−1 [47]. This annihilation rate in ambiplasma l -l ann corresponds to the value of current ~108 A and linear density N ~2×1018 m−1 thus any hope for non-relativistic relative velocity of electrons and positrons in ambiplasma is groundless." And also, even if it would work, then one of the major issues is going to be heat dispersal: "For example, if the temperature of radiator is chosen T=1500 K, the emitting area should be not less than 1000 m2 for Pb=1 GW, not less than 1 km2 for Pb=1 TW, and ~100 km2 for Pb=100 TW, assuming ε=0.5 and δ=0.2. Lower temperature would require even larger radiator area to maintain the outer temperature of the engine section stable for a given thermal power of the reactor."

The problem is not achieving a high energy density, that we can already do with nuclear fission, the question however is how to confine or harness this power with relatively high efficiency, low waste heat and at not too crazy specific mass. I see magnetic confinement as a possibility, yet still decades away and also an all-or-nothing method as we cannot easily scale this up from a test experiment to a full-scale system. It might be possible to extract power from such a plasma, but definitely well below breakeven so an additional power supply is needed. The fission fragments circumvent these issues by a more brute force approach, thereby wasting a lot of energy for sure but at the end probably providing more ISP and thrust.

Sure. However, the annihilation based photon rocket concept unifies almost all relevant drawbacks if we speak about solar system scales, making itself obsolete...it is just an academic testcase.

Anyone's going to apply? Just so that I know my competition... ;-)

damn!! they look for someone with the "greatest personal integrity" -- I am out

I'm game :)) I'll pay for everyone's beers with my limitless paycheck after I get it!

Another Appathon with the aim to allow access to vast amounts of 'space data' and then play around.. In other words, a neural network's guy wet dream, so Paul, what are you waiting for?

I'm not really an app developer :P But I'll think about it

Its in italian sorry ... but its worth trying to understand ..basically its how an important italian news channel (TG4) gave the rosetta news ... WOW ... middle ages Basically they say ESA spoilt the magic of comets (jesus birth and similar stuff) revealing to the world that it is just a rock and nothing more spending 100 Meuros in the process.

A pearl of the italian national news channels. A comet is nothing more than a dusty rock. Wow, brilliant, such level of understanding of what is happening! Can we use the typhoon control or some other project to get rid of them? They're so confused and ignorant that it's not even clear what their point is, apart from "spoiling the magic of comets", which is not the case.

For future reference... At the same time, a crowdsourced article: "We began the crowdsourcing by collecting a list of possible rules for the article via a git-controlled repository" SVN would be so 2000-ish...

Taking images through opaque, light-scattering layers is a vital capability and essential diagnostic tool in many applications. The research group of Prof. Mosk of U. Twente have started doing experiments shooting optical lasers into opaque materials in 2007, and for surprise of everyone, it turn out the light intensity after the opaque material in their experiments was orders of magnitude bigger than expected. Following these results they succeeded in taking non-invasive sharp pictures of objects hidden behind a screen of opaqueness, the so referred Super Vision in this Nature overview article.

very nice!!!

NASA Releases Tool Enabling Citizen Scientists to Examine Asteroid Vesta Vesta Trek is a free, web-based application that provides detailed visualizations of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. Data gathered from multiple instruments aboard Dawn have been compiled into Vesta Trek's user-friendly set of tools, enabling citizen scientists and students to study the asteroid's features. The application includes: -- Interactive maps with the ability to overlay a growing range of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements and geology, as well as analysis tools for measuring the diameters, heights and depths of surface features and more. -- 3-D printer-exportable topography so users can print physical models of Vesta's surface. -- Standard keyboard gaming controls to manoever a first-person visualization of "flying" across the surface of the asteroid. "There's nothing like seeing something with your own eyes, but these types of detailed data-visualizations are the next best thing," said Kristen Erickson, Director, Science Engagement and Partnerships at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC.

Researchers have proposed a new "acoustic topological insulator" that could help alleviate sound scattering problems by transmitting sound in certain directions without any backscattering.

If I understood correctly the triangular structure would channel the incident sound wave to a unique direction between two options, according to the rotation direction of the cylinders included in its mesh. So, one (possibly two) directions left to detect the hypothetical submarines? Very interesting though, I hope no oceanographers take measurements simultaneously to the signals as climate models will get even more wrong...!

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

There is actually a windows program called flux, that changes the temperature on your screen to match normal light cycles. When the sun sets it switches to a "warmer" more reddish tint on your screen to promote sleepiness. The typically bright blue/neon white settings of most pc settings is quite "awakening" and keeps your brain running for longer. This impacts your sleeping patterns and all the consequences of that. Amazingly, this flux thing does have an effect. That being said, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it all on PC/artificial lighting time. Sedentary lifestyles, etc can very well place one in a position of long term pc/phone usage so it's quite hard to draw a causal link.

nice - also exists for MAC btw: https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/mac/

So basically we can photograph light now. Not just detect photons but photograph LIGHT WAVES. Really clever setup BTW.

Anna will rule the world!!!!

So... start preparing to be required to attach your brain scan along with your job application...

very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."

any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?

"Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Awesome :) It's even got skifree!

So we need lasers. Big lasers. :)

anybody want's to have a closer look at this?

After a series of rapid developments, the researchers claim their fluid can now hold 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is double the the energy capacity of Tesla's Powerwall batteries, according to the NBC.

Interesting research. Bit hyped in the article though. The actual paper says the promising stuff is in the 83-160Wh range. So maybe not double Tesla's Powerwall batteries?

How many people to we actually need put on that ship?

We should invite these people to the AF special issue

sounds really interesting. their simulations don't account for biological issues (mutation, migration, selection, drift, founder effect) though, so the numbers are very low. this paper (https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0094576513004669/1-s2.0-S0094576513004669-main.pdf?_tid=6bec2a5c-f05f-4024-b4de-af78ab06fd42&acdnat=1531827379_d4f0be1b193873890d6e5b4574e82f2e) takes those effects and their implications on genetic composition of populations into account, but the numbers are enormous. do you have an idea why they (marin and beluffi) wouldn't put those effects into the simulations?