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Watch out the Rolling Stones...

Robotics scientists at TED unleash co-ordinated drones that mimic bird behavior to play the James Bond theme song At TED2012, the University of Pennsylvania's deputy dean for education Vijay Kuma showed off his latest accomplishment in robotics: a co-ordinated rendition of the James Bond theme song.

In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn't come bigger than this. In the world of bathroom tiling - I bet they're interested too. If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane. Also only mathematicians can put the words "Pentagon", "attack", and "plane" in the same sentence...

I especially love this part of the story: "The hunt to find and classify the pentagons that can tile the plane has been a century-long mathematical quest, begun by the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt, who in 1918 discovered five types of pentagon that do tile the plane. (To clarify, he did not find five single pentagons. He discovered five classes of pentagon that can each be described by an equation. For the curious, the equations are here. And for further clarification, we are talking about convex pentagons, which are most people's understanding of a pentagon in that every corner sticks out.) Most people assumed Reinhardt had the complete list until half a century later in 1968 when R. B. Kershner found three more. Richard James brought the number of types of pentagonal tile up to nine in 1975. That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James' discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. In 1985 Rolf Stein found a fourteenth. Way to go!"

ACT cinema? a bit long article but interesting

- Smart Tractors?!?!? - "Guidance systems are enablers," said Mr James. "Farmers buy them with one job in mind and then realise they can use it for lots more."

James bond compatible (without the music after the middle)

Photo credit: The glass has a number of interesting innovations. Ballentine's. A liquor company has created a " Space Glass" that they say can work in the microgravity environment of space. The Open Space Agency's James Parr was commissioned to create the product, and the results are actually quite interesting.

Makes sense specially after seeing very good japanese whiskey arriving at the ISS :-) http://phys.org/news/2015-08-japanese-whisky-international-space-station.html

Funny :) But the guy does not mention Logo...

The effect of gravity on virtual electron-positron pairs as they propagate through space could lead to a violation of Einstein's equivalence principle, according to calculations by James Franson at the University of Maryland. While the effect would be too tiny to be measured directly using current experimental techniques, it could explain a puzzling anomaly observed during the famous SN1987 supernova of 1987.

A new study from Harvard reveals that open plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration.

I vote for a silent booth for everyone in ACT

Great study! If something goes wrong Leo and Dario could always blame the "open office".

A nice look back into how JWST came to be and what it's all about. :)