Group items tagged

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

i knew it was the coffee making me sleepy

around 56 espressos per mile..

Scientific proof, shotgun on the red couch!

this really only works if you can fall asleep instantly. If it takes you at least 10mins to sleep the whole procedure fails miserably.

Nice topic for science coffee - see the first author :-)

Bonnie Bassler's TED talk on quorum sensing is quite interesting. Worth checking out, if you haven't done so already: http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

Basically quantum entanglement, or more accurately the dispersal and expansion of mixed quantum states, results in an apparent flow of time. Quantum information leaks out and the result is the move from a pure state (hot coffee) to a mixed state (cooled down) in which equilibrium is reached. Theoretically it is possible to get back to a pure state (coffee spontaneously heating up) but this statistical unlikelihood gives the appereance of irreversibility and hence a flow o time. I think an interesting question is then: how much useful work can you extract from this system? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2811) It should for macroscopic thermodynamic systems lead to the Carnot cycle, but on smaller scales it might be possible to formulate a more general expression. Anybody interested to look into it? Anna, Jo? :)

What you propose is called Maxwell's demon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) thermodynamics is VERY robust. I guess if you really only want to harness AND USE the energy in a microscopic system you might have some chance of beating Carnot. But any way of transferring harvested energy to a macroscopic system seems to be limited by it (AFAIK).

As far as I'm concerned, a crucial component of every life support system...

Here is the tractor beam I mentioned from fridays science coffee. At the moment its used for microscopic particles only. This could be looked into to see if it could be scaled up to deflect particles in space

As mentioned today during coffee .... we could think to link this to source localization

Really, you think they'd target such a low impact factor publication? ;-P

you will all soon be begging to publish in Acta Futura! We will be bigger than Nature.

Following up on our coffee-time discussion, here's an Evolutionary Algorithm where you are the fitness function, and evolution is guided by your subjective artistic sense. Start from scratch, or pick an existing image in the database, and start evolving. At every generation, you are presented with the individuals/images in the population. Pick the ones you like. Those will be the parents from which the next generation will be bred. Repeat, repeat... where do you get to? If you want to learn more about the science behind this, check the tutorial below by Kenneth Stanley, who is also this site's supervisor: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1830761.1830920

surprising? not really ...

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=13176056 similar info for beverages. coffee bad. particularly since i assume they're considering british coffee rather than a ristretto in rome

... which means that the quality-to-amount-of-water-used ratio is even more terrible.

A cool way of organizing a research group seminars (should we do it for the science coffee?)

Maybe this technology is useful for radmap presentation. We should add this technology to the list.

This is from Carlos, the guy who gave a science coffee talk a couple of months ago.

This looks like a list of inspiring phrases to put around Horizon.. which is your favourite? Mine's probably 'Drink ridiculous amounts of coffee.'

Coffee break material

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

An excellent science coffee topic! This is a true breakthrough in pure mathematics with plentiful applications in the lesser sciences (such as theoretical physics). People tell me quantum gravity is already practically solved by this. Conway's powerful theory of Alternative Facts can render many difficult problems tractable. Here we demonstrate the power of AF to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. We further suggest applications of AF to other challenging unsolved problems such as the zero-equals-one conjecture (which is also true) and the side-counting problem of the circle.