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Tom Gheysens

Cheap battery stores energy for a rainy day : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...energy-for-a-rainy-day-1.14486

energy battery science phy nature

shared by Tom Gheysens on 16 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Tom Gheysens on 16 Jan 14
     
    Thijs interested? quinones are my field
  • Thijs Versloot on 20 Jan 14
     
    I think the major benefit of this system is the low cost of the products involved compared to standard flow batteries. However, two issues still remain, corrosion and size. I think these things need to be big right due to the volumetric storage using quinones? Nevertheless, it is interesting to see where this development will lead to. "The system is far from perfect, however: bromine and hydrobromic acid are corrosive, and could cause serious pollution if they leaked. "The bromine is, right now, the Achilles heel of this particular battery," Aziz says. The answer could be to go completely organic, he adds: "We are working on replacing the bromine with a different quinone." Are there quinones which would not be corrosive but retain good volumetric performance?
LeopoldS

Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system | Science | Th... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...er-higgs-boson-academic-system

phy physics publications

shared by LeopoldS on 08 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 08 Dec 13
     
    what an interesting personality ... very symathetic Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

    The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

    He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

    Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

    Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

    Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

    By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

    Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 7
  • Thijs Versloot on 10 Dec 13
     
    And the follow up by Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals
  • LeopoldS on 12 Dec 13
     
    interesting one - Luzi will like it :-)
LeopoldS

Crypto-Gram: October 15, 2013 - 2 views

www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1310.html

security internet

shared by LeopoldS on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
Nicholas Lan liked it
  • LeopoldS on 07 Nov 13
     
    interesting blog entry on TOR and the NSA
  • Nicholas Lan on 08 Nov 13
     
    on a somewhat related note. court document from the fbi agent that was chasing that silk road guy a friend sent me the other week. an interesting read if only because i found the content quite unexpected e.g. 2 pages of login instructions http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf
jmlloren

Exotic matter : Insight : Nature - 5 views

www.nature.com/...index.html

nan phy

shared by jmlloren on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • jmlloren on 03 Aug 10
     
    Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.
  • ...12 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 03 Aug 10
     
    Aparently very interesting, will it survive the short hype? Relevant work describing mirror charges of topological insulators and the classical boundary conditions were done by Ismo and Ari. But the two communities don't know each other and so they are never cited. Also a way to produce new things...
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    Thanks for noticing! Indeed, I had no idea that Ari (don't know Ismo) was involved in the field. Was it before Kane's proposal or more recently? What I mostly like is that semiconductors are good candidates for 3D TI, however I got lost in the quantum field jargon. Yesterday, I got a headache trying to follow the Majorana fermions, the merons, skyrnions, axions, and so on. Luzi, are all these things familiar to you?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Ismo Lindell described in the early 90's the mirror charge of what is now called topological insulator. He says that similar results were obtained already at the beginning of the 20th century... Ismo Lindell and Ari Sihvola in the recent years discussed engineering aspects of PEMCs (perfect electro-megnetic conductors,) which are more or less classical analogues of topological insulators. Fundamental aspects of PEMCs are well knwon in high-energy physics for a long time, recent works are mainly due to Friedrich Hehl and Yuri Obukhov. All these works are purely classical, so there is no charge quantisation, no considerations of electron spin etc. About Majorana fermions: yes, I spent several years of research on that topic. Axions: a topological state, of course, trivial :-) Also merons and skyrnions are topological states, but I'm less familiar with them.
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    "Non-Abelian systems1, 2 contain composite particles that are neither fermions nor bosons and have a quantum statistics that is far richer than that offered by the fermion-boson dichotomy. The presence of such quasiparticles manifests itself in two remarkable ways. First, it leads to a degeneracy of the ground state that is not based on simple symmetry considerations and is robust against perturbations and interactions with the environment. Second, an interchange of two quasiparticles does not merely multiply the wavefunction by a sign, as is the case for fermions and bosons. Rather, it takes the system from one ground state to another. If a series of interchanges is made, the final state of the system will depend on the order in which these interchanges are being carried out, in sharp contrast to what happens when similar operations are performed on identical fermions or bosons." wow, this paper by Stern reads really weired ... any of you ever looked into this?
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    C'mon Leopold, it's as trivial as the topological states, AKA axions! Regarding the question, not me!
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    just looked up the wikipedia entry on axions .... at least they have some creativity in names giving: "In supersymmetric theories the axion has both a scalar and a fermionic superpartner. The fermionic superpartner of the axion is called the axino, the scalar superpartner is called the saxion. In some models, the saxion is the dilaton. They are all bundled up in a chiral superfield. The axino has been predicted to be the lightest supersymmetric particle in such a model.[24] In part due to this property, it is considered a candidate for the composition of dark matter.[25]"
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    Thank's Leopold. Sorry Luzi for being ironic concerning the triviality of the axions. Now, Leo confirmed me that indeed is a trivial matter. I have problems with models where EVERYTHING is involved.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Well, that's the theory of everything, isn't it?? Seriously: I don't think that theoretically there is a lot of new stuff here. Topological aspects of (non-Abelian) theories became extremely popular in the context of string theory. The reason is very simple: topological theories are much simpler than "normal" and since string theory anyway is far too complicated to be solved, people just consider purely topological theories, then claiming that this has something to do with the real world, which of course is plainly wrong. So what I think is new about these topological insulators are the claims that one can actually fabricate a material which more or less accurately mimics a topological theory and that these materials are of practical use. Still, they are a little bit the poor man's version of the topological theories fundamental physicists like to look at since electrdynamics is an Abelian theory.
  • jmlloren on 04 Aug 10
     
    I have the feeling, not the knowledge, that you are right. However, I think that the implications of this light quantum field effects are great. The fact of being able to sustain two currents polarized in spin is a technological breakthrough.
  • LeopoldS on 04 Aug 10
     
    not sure how much I can contribute to your apparently educated debate here but if I remember well from my work for the master, these non-Abelian theories were all but "simple" as Luzi puts it ... and from a different perspective: to me the whole thing of being able to describe such non-Abelian systems nicely indicates that they should in one way or another also have some appearance in Nature (would be very surprised if not) - though this is of course no argument that makes string theory any better or closer to what Luzi called reality ....
  • Luzi Bergamin on 04 Aug 10
     
    Well, electrodynamics remains an Abelian theory. From the theoretical point of view this is less interesting than non-Abelian ones, since in 4D the fibre bundle of a U(1) theory is trivial (great buzz words, eh!) But in topological insulators the point of view is slightly different since one always has the insulator (topological theory), its surrounding (propagating theory) and most importantly the interface between the two. This is a new situation that people from field and string theory were not really interested in.
  • Dario Izzo on 04 Aug 10
     
    guys... how would you explain this to your gran mothers?
  • jmlloren on 05 Aug 10
  • LeopoldS on 07 Aug 10
     
    *you* tried *your* best .... ??
Francesco Biscani

Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...finding-protein-structures.ars

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Foldit takes a hybrid approach. The Rosetta algorithm is used to create some potential starting structures, but users are then given a set of controls that let them poke and prod the protein's structure in three dimensions; displays provide live feedback on the energy of a configuration. 
  • By tracing the actions of the best players, the authors were able to figure out how the humans' excellent pattern recognition abilities gave them an edge over the computer.
  • Humans turn out to be really bad at starting from a simple linear chain of proteins; they need a rough idea of what the protein might look like before they can recognize patterns to optimize. Given a set of 10 potential structures produced by Rosetta, however, the best players were very adept at picking the one closest to the optimal configuration.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The authors also note that different players tended to have different strengths. Some were better at making the big adjustments needed to get near an energy minimum, while others enjoyed the fine-scale tweaking needed to fully optimize the structure. That's where Foldit's ability to enable team competitions, where different team members could handle the parts of the task most suited to their interests and abilities, really paid off.
  • Francesco Biscani on 04 Aug 10
     
    Some interesting ideas for our crowdsourcing game in here.
Francesco Biscani

Official Google Blog: Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards - 0 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...-googles-focused-research.html

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 02 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.
  • Francesco Biscani on 02 Feb 10
     
    Might be of some interest to Christos?
Nicholas Lan

Betting on Green - 5 views

www.economist.com/18304172

technology economics innovation

shared by Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11
     
    breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    interesting guy indeed ... "Forget today's green technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and smart grids, in other words. None meets what Mr Khosla calls the "Chindia price"-the price at which people in China and India will buy them without a subsidy. "Everything's a toy until it reaches that point," he says. I also like this one since its a bit like ACT topic selection: ""I am only interested in technologies that have a 90% chance of failure but, if they do succeed, would change the infrastructure of society in some radical way," he says." should we propose SPS to him ? :-)
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    one more: ""I never compute returns. If you start forecasting cash flows, you lose innovation, you lose instinct. You average yourself down to mediocrity." "I've had many more failures than successes in my life," admits Mr Khosla. "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed."
  • Nicholas Lan on 17 Mar 11
     
    indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.
  • Ma Ru on 25 Apr 11
     
    "Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)
LeopoldS

Google Code Blog: Introducing Closure Tools - 1 views

googlecode.blogspot.com/...introducing-closure-tools.html

open source INF

shared by LeopoldS on 06 Nov 09 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 06 Nov 09
     
    new open source tool from google .... Francesco: of any interest to us?
  • Juxi Leitner on 06 Nov 09
     
    I don't think so, it is just a code optimizer for JavaScript, unless there are somewhere big JavaScript (web2.0) applications running that is not of much interest for us Other google labs systems e.g. FriendConnect could be useful for Ariadnet, maybe also the visualization and social graph API
  • Juxi Leitner on 12 Nov 09
nikolas smyrlakis

PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) - 0 views

www.parc.com

technology research innovation lab CMS

shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 03 Dec 09 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 03 Dec 09
     
    An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech
  • ...1 more comment...
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 03 Dec 09
     
    and some very ACT- like interesting internships / ideas they have Automatic summarization of related documents http://www.parc.com/job/43/automatic-summarization-of-related-documents.html (remember Kev's idea?) Bayesian diagnosis http://www.parc.com/job/34/bayesian-diagnosis---summer.html Autonomous robotics UAVs UGVs http://www.parc.com/job/36/autonomous-robotics---summer.html
  • Juxi Leitner on 03 Dec 09
     
    XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 03 Dec 09
     
    aaah its the XEROX centre, didn't know. Yep they made the mouse and then handed it over nicely to Apple after IBM thought it was useless
Isabelle Dicaire

Why Xbox Kinect didn't take off - Business Insider - 2 views

www.businessinsider.com/x-kinect-didnt-take-off-2015-9

shared by Isabelle Dicaire on 10 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 10 Sep 15
     
    Interesting read!
  • Juxi Leitner on 10 Sep 15
     
    it got some interesting viewpoitns from a game/marketing point of view but to say that Kinect2 was only a marginal improvement over the first one is only true if you think about games. For robots it is a huge step forward!
LeopoldS

Seasonality in human cognitive brain responses - 2 views

www.pnas.org/...1518129113.full.pdf

brain

shared by LeopoldS on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
jcunha liked it
  • LeopoldS on 10 Feb 16
     
    interesting study showing seasonal changes to brain functions Agata, you didn't tell us about this yet :-) "the present study provides compelling evidence for previously unappreciated annual varia- tions in the cerebral activity required to sustain ongoing cognitive processes in healthy volunteers. The data further show that this annual rhythmicity is cognitive-process-specific (i.e., the phase of the rhythm changes between cognitive tasks), speaking for a complex impact of season on human brain function. Annual var- iations in cognitive brain function may contribute to explain intraindividual cognitive changes that could emerge at specific times of year."
  • fichbio on 12 Feb 16
     
    Thank you for this interesting study. I will make a brief intro about it during our Wednesday meeting. Especially, that spring is coming...;)
ESA ACT

List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations - 1 views

wikiscanner.virgil.gr

Wiki social network technology

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations
LeopoldS

Bringing Parallelism to the Web - 1 views

goparallel.sourceforge.net/bringing-parallelism-web

INF

shared by LeopoldS on 15 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 15 Oct 12
     
    Of any interest to space as such?
LeopoldS

United States Patent Application: 0120303980 - 2 views

appft1.uspto.gov/...nph-Parser

WPT wireless power PWR POW

shared by LeopoldS on 01 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 01 Dec 12
     
    Apple apparently interested in exactly the type of wireless power transfer we were looking into with Duncan and Xurxo!
santecarloni

Students calculate what hyperspace travel would actually look like - 5 views

www.gizmag.com/...25794

PHY space

shared by santecarloni on 15 Jan 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • santecarloni on 15 Jan 13
     
    title is misleading, but the paper is interesting (and as obvious as ignored)
  • LeopoldS on 19 Jan 13
     
    sure was a fun assignment ...
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Jan 13
     
    apart from the doppler shift the perspective also changes when you look at objects while traveling close to the speed of light: http://www.spacetimetravel.org/tompkins/node1.html
LeopoldS

Giant osmotic energy conversion measured in a single transmembrane boron nitride nanotu... - 2 views

www.nature.com/...nature11876.html

energy conversion

shared by LeopoldS on 19 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 19 Mar 13
     
    interesting power source ...
LeopoldS

Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orkers-back-to-the-office.html

shared by LeopoldS on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 26 Feb 13
     
    interesting discussion on benefits and drawbacks of teleworking ...
LeopoldS

Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...aunch-quantum-computing-ai-lab

Quantum computer PHY

shared by LeopoldS on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 19 May 13
     
    any idea if what the canadians claim to sell is closer to a quantum computer than what they did 2011? (I remember Luzi's comment back then that this had nothing to do with a quantum computer) Canada being member state of ESA ... should we start getting interested?
LeopoldS

VPN Gate Overview - 4 views

www.vpngate.net/...about_overview.aspx

internet

shared by LeopoldS on 01 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 01 Jun 13
     
    interesting academic experiment by Japanese students from Tsukuka ....
  • Ma Ru on 07 Jun 13
     
    The idea seems similar to the one used by Tor (https://www.torproject.org/), which afaik is the go-to solution if you plan criminal activity over the internet.
LeopoldS

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will - And Must - Take Our Jobs | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 1 views

www.wired.com/...all

technology robots robotics

shared by LeopoldS on 08 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 08 Jan 13
     
    interesting, long article ... a bit optimistic in my view
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