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Create a tuned server appliance, containing your application and just enough operating system components

Something for our new Earth Systems Science position to look at

Jarifa (a.k.a OGM) is a system for grid computing on organizational resources, using BOINC.

Useful journal for the upcoming Earth Systems Science. For geoengineering, check out this: http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/2559/2009/acpd-9-2559-2009.pdf (currently first on the list of this bookmark)

Next astronaut suit: Electronic systems that offer elastic mechanical responses to high-strain deformations are of growing interest because of their ability to enable new biomedical devices and other applications whose requirements are impossible to satis

An operative system where instead of local applications one finds links to internet applications. Light and easy to use.

another energy conversion system... could be very interesting for nuclear power sources and other fields. more details in a few days

Intrinsic 3-d effect are enabling for effective virtual reality systems......

[MR] Semantic bookmarking system. Kevin, maybe You could have a look if it's worth trying?

The Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz will be hosting a StarCraft competition: This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust commercial RTS environment. The final matches will be held live with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.

"And according to his calculations, improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today's ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. "

Dejan please have a look at this also ...

while the nuclear reaction seems to be sound at first view, I am not so sure how this would work: "Electromagnetic forces push the target and the alpha particles in the opposite directions, and the particles exit the spacecraft through a nozzle, providing the vehicle's thrust. "

For more than a century scientists have relied on the "ergodic theorem" to explain diffusive processes such as the movement of molecules in a liquid. However, they had not been able to confirm experimentally a central tenet of the theorem - that the average of repeated measurements of the random motion of an individual molecule is the same as the random motion of the entire ensemble of those molecules. Now, however, researchers in Germany have measured both parameters in the same system - making them the first to confirm experimentally that the ergodic theorem applies to diffusion.

I have no access to the pdf, but abstract sounds interesting.

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed. The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.

Good news for fundamental physics and Earth system science, femtosecond lasers are now about to achieve space qualification thanks to fibre optics!  Applications include high resolution spectroscopy, absolute laser ranging, mapping of the geo-potential and testing of the theory of general relativity to name a few!

nice paper by the Koreans, did not know that they had already such a laser in orbit for a year. How much would this type be upscalable for our needs? in case we have not, we should reference it

Big data analytic systems are reputed to be capable of finding a needle in a universe of haystacks without having to know what a needle looks like. The very best ways to sort large databases of unstructured text is to use a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Unfortunately, LDA is also inaccurate enough at some tasks that the results of any topic model created with it are essentially meaningless, according to Luis Amaral, a physicist whose specialty is the mathematical analysis of complex systems and networks in the real world and one of the senior researchers on the multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University that wrote the paper. Even for an easy case, big data analysis is proving to be far more complicated than many of the companies selling analysis software want people to believe.

Most of those companies are using outdated algorithms like this LDA and just apply them like retards on those huge datasets. Of course they're going to come out with bad solutions. No amount of data can make up for bad algorithms.