Group items tagged

A revolutionary new type of laser (fiber laser) is promising major advances in remote sensing of greenhouse gases.The new laser can operate (bed tuned) over a large range within the infrared light spectrum.

Reads too good to be true .... where is Isabelle when we need her ? :-)

Impressive ... Should we have a closer look at this?

How to cram in all buzzword technologies in one title. I will give it all tags we have.

Protein Folding solved by AI?

Micro RNA produced in the leaves is able to travel to the roots to regulate symbiosis with some friendly bacteria.

Brine deposits below the surface should in theory be able to hold enough oxygen to support microbial aerobic lifeforms. The quest continues.

Seems like those particles have some use...

There we go: Deep Learning predicts disruptions in plasmas. The paper related to this article is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02242

Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what's being said and faint images of what's around a corner.

The ice-cube observatory in Antarctica reveals the source of high energy cosmic neutrinos. Spoiler: its Blazars!

Hate spoliers!

Did we just solve overpopulation and climate change? With 40% more efficient crops we could easily sustain 10+ billion people on Earth. And 40% more efficient plants would absorb much more CO2 than we are emitting (currently: artificial CO2 emission ~29 GT/y, photosynthesis CO2 capture through plants ~450 GT/y) I am usually very worried about the risks of climate change, but this could be a real game changer!

I love the car animation!

A flat metalens based on the control of the diffraction pattern of individual nanoantennas can achieve NA~1 bending light at angles as high as 82º

Great engineering feat from Capasso's idea - an integrated flat lens electrically controlled enabling dynamic beam steering. Reconfigurabilility is the aim. The lens can be used microscope systems, holographic and projection imaging, LIDAR and laser printing. Besides working now on the mid-IR, visible light is the target.

Scientists anticipate the output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion.

Here, we show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the event horizon of the supermassive black hole of the background quasar, using the current generation telescopes

I'm afraid I take some issue with this rather glorious title. I've only skimmed this paper but looking at the experimental details, their 'imagined universes' comprise of a ball confined in a 2D space as well as a double pendulum. Work along this area is nothing new - it's known in the control community as Inverse Reinforcement Learning - learning dynamics of some system from demonstration trajectories. The paper title ('Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning') is more moderate so yet again the issue is how AI is reported in the media...

I tried reading the abstract and my eyes glazed over at the buzzword density. Is this hot doo doo or a meaningful result?

wow, quantum, artificial life, biomimetic, quantum supremacy .... quantum machine learning, and quantum artificial intelligence and, wait for it ...... quantum complexity. All in one abstract is this the new champion?

Some people answering the question 'What's cooler than blasting space debris with lasers...?'.

If it fires in both directions, can we align it such that it deorbits two debris with one shot?

:) the idea of having this method for debris removal is actually an ACT one from Claudio Bombardelli (ACT RF in MAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-beam_shepherd). This is just a technological device to implement it so that the system on board is simplified (i.e. instead of two engines, you get away with one and a weird nozzle) Marcus, you cannot align it to get rid of two debris as you need to keep the spacecraft close to the debris as this is a long duration acion. One of the two would drift away (can only follow one!)

Two ways of measuring the universe's expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame. See also this work based on GAIA data that, on the other hand, reinforces the discrepancy: Milky Way Cepheid Standards for Measuring Cosmic Distances and Application to Gaia DR2: Implications for the Hubble Constant https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.10655