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Google Books measurements of word frequencies on 15 million books (12% of all the books ever published). More about it in:  - Google Opens Books to New Cultural Studies - John Bohannon, Science 2010-12-17 - Slashdot: Google Books Makes a Word Cloud of Human History - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info

Recently, many competitions in the computer vision domain have been won by huge convolutional networks. In the image net competition, the convolutional network approach halves the error from ~30% to ~15%! Key changes that make this happen: weight-sharing to reduce the search space, and training with a massive GPU approach. (See also the work at IDSIA: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/vision.html) This should please Francisco :)

...mmmmm... they use 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons on a task that one can somehow consider easier than (say) predicting a financial crisis ... still they get 15% of errors .... reminds me of a comic we saw once ... cat http://www.sarjis.info/stripit/abstruse-goose/496/the_singularity_is_way_over_there.png

I think the ultimate solution is still to put a human brain in a jar and use it for pattern recognition. Maybe we should get a stagiaire for this..?

CubeSats + 3D printing... for space. I'm surprised this isn't an ACT project :) more info: SpiderFab: Process for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures

$100,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to hammer out a design and figure out whether spacecraft self-construction makes business sense .... I can answer for 0$ ..... NO Infact the question is just stupid: a) spacecraft self-construction exist: then it is a no brainer to decide wether it makes business sense b) it does not: then there is no business

hmm, is there info on the size of the "rubbish"?

I cannot find more info, but maybe they are just making a lot of fuss of it because it is from the Chinese exploded spacecraft. However, it seems to be a catalogued debris, so it is likely to be in the cm range or more

and some more info (in German) http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,701186/Neuer-DKRZ-Supercomputer-Blizzard-berechnet-Klimamodelle-fuer-Kopenhagener-Weltklimakonferenz/CPU/News/

Sorry for the German, but there is a link to the english paper as well: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000278 Following up on Martin's talk, I found that on the Austrian National Broadcaster website, well not really the top source for sound science news but anyway :)

nice!!! got the info from Claudio ...

if you ever wanted to get into the brain of Francesco ... here is how ...

This journal publishes failed scientific attempts, experiments, theories. There seems to be a peer review process behind it.

OK more to the fun side, but I often think it is not a bad idea to publish "failed" research

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

Just forward your travel confirmation emails to: plans@tripit.com and this site sends you an email with a summary of your trip and more info etc. Looks like it's worth trying

additional info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people#Exceptional_color_perception

Yeah that's interesting stuff... We have one prof in the lab who used to do some research related exactly to this (http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/socce/staff/tonybelpaeme/research.html). Similar question (i.e. if/how language is involved in the formation of a concept) is also valid for numbers, see for instance this recent story: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20095-without-language-numbers-make-no-sense.html

More info on dark matter ...

if you liked the stratos jump you will like this one :-) (apparently it costed them 1100€ to realise)

There can only be one answer to that... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGGxHs02zSs&feature=related [Edit] P.S. No info on how much the production costed...

Another great piece from "Ten Simple Rules" series by PLOSCB

Follow the link to PLoS and watch the video.

the link to the videos : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0058509#ack

And thats why we do what we do :) Enjoy!!

and to poison the waters of an amazing performance, here's the relevant(?) copyright law: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-12?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/how_does_copyright_work_in_space_

And in case you wonder, this is *not* the most expensive music video ever made. Also, launching his guitar to the orbit was still far cheaper than the cost of some guitars sold on earth. Where else can this info come from if not http://what-if.xkcd.com/45/

Galactic Cosmic Radiation consisting of high-energy, high-charged (HZE) particles poses a significant threat to future astronauts in deep space. Aside from cancer, concerns have been raised about late degenerative risks, including effects on the brain. In this study we examined the effects of 56Fe particle irradiation in an APP/PS1 mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We demonstrated 6 months after exposure to 10 and 100 cGy 56Fe radiation at 1 GeV/µ, that APP/PS1 mice show decreased cognitive abilities measured by contextual fear conditioning and novel object recognition tests. Furthermore, in male mice we saw acceleration of Aβ plaque pathology using Congo red and 6E10 staining, which was further confirmed by ELISA measures of Aβ isoforms. Increases were not due to higher levels of amyloid precursor protein (APP) or increased cleavage as measured by levels of the β C-terminal fragment of APP. Additionally, we saw no change in microglial activation levels judging by CD68 and Iba-1 immunoreactivities in and around Aβ plaques or insulin degrading enzyme, which has been shown to degrade Aβ. However, immunohistochemical analysis of ICAM-1 showed evidence of endothelial activation after 100 cGy irradiation in male mice, suggesting possible alterations in Aβ trafficking through the blood brain barrier as a possible cause of plaque increase. Overall, our results show for the first time that HZE particle radiation can increase Aβ plaque pathology in an APP/PS1 mouse model of AD.

Time to clean the dust off your museumkaarts...

Nice article on how bumblebees optimize their path from flower to flower.