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The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise",

Could it be used to measure ocean acidification? I found a study that links sound wave propagation with ocean acidity. Maybe we are able to do such measurement from space even? "Their paper, "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH," published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that fossil fuels are turning up the ocean's volume. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the overall pH of the world's oceans has dropped by about 0.1 units, with more of the changes concentrated closer to the poles. The authors found that sound absorption has decreased by 15 percent in parts of the North Atlantic and by 10 percent throughout the Atlantic and Pacific"

The last time I asked an oceanographer for the use of acoustic waves, she said it is still a bit problematic method to take into account its data, but we were referring to measuring ocean circulation. It may be more conclusive for PH measurements, though. The truth is that there is a whole underwater network with pulse emmitters/receivers covering the North Atlantic basin, remnant infrastructure for spying activities in the WW2 and in the cold war, that stays unexploited. We should look more into this idea

In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).

this gets into into interesting power ranges

By reactivating a dormant gene called Lin28a, which is active in embryonic stem cells, researchers were able to regrow hair and repair cartilage, bone, skin and other soft tissues in a mouse model.

regrow hair???!!!??? :-)

hmmm ....

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

1) it has to actively work and produce a result that's what you intended 2) the design must be robust. 3) it should be efficient 4) it should minimize unintended consequences. "But we have to establish a formal, mathematically precise mechanism to measure complexity and adaptability . . . [where] adaptability means the system elements have sufficient margin, and can serve multiple purposes." "We need to break the paradigm of long cycles from design to product" some interesting questions....

what is the outcome of the CDF study ? I think actually that optimisation is not at all the key point. As it is stressed in this news, it is robustness (points 2 and 4). This is something we should think about ...

SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS, SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS!!! :-D

wow ....

impressive! I'm sure it's connected to the black hole, at some point it must have been active. It shows how it's important to put all observations public !

this is what they speculate ... the original image looks though much less impressive ...

Personally, I have the habit of switching off keypad sounds in any device I use (mobile, camera, etc.). Now I have scientific results to back this philosophy up :) P.S. Mass-media version is here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20139-predictive-texting-alters-our-perception-of-numbers.html

A group of proteins that act as the body's built-in line of defense against invading bacteria use a molecular trick to induce bacteria to destroy themselves...

who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?

The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).

Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.

Just read about this, it looks like an interesting example of bottom-up innovation and self-organization.

Sexy space suits @ MIT

Festo - a rather conservative engineering company - tries to be advanced. Some cool ideas though.