Group items tagged

In the past 12 months Americans have searched for Python on Google more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star. The number of queries has trebled since 2010, while those for other major programming languages have been flat or declining.

Likely this is correlated with the increased interest in machine learning in the past decade - all the popular DL libraries are Python-based after all...

bit 'popular science' but fun and maybe good for presentations

Long time no post for me ! But this kind of popular science-engineering-basic neuroscience-bicycle-amsterdam related video seemed it could be a bit interesting for the group !

this is fantastic!!!

Did you know it exists? You can also check http://flickriver.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/popular-interesting/ for their shots sorted by popularity. Is ESA already on Facebook too? ;-)

A popular article about a real paper.

Is there such a law for the technology used in satellites ?

perfect gift for ACT children ?

Apparently it's becoming a more and more popular hobby in US... Wonder when we'll start seeing airplanes going down because of some wannabe meteorologists...

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.

bio-robotics anybody?

WIRING Poke the left silver wire about one millimeter into the roach's thorax, under a wing just behind its head, and secure it with superglue. Cut each antenna to expose a neuron-lined tube. Insert the middle wire one millimeter into the left tube, and the right wire into the right tube. Superglue both wires into place. CONNECT AND COMMAND Hot-glue the circuit board onto the roach's back and plug it into the head connector. After the roach wakes up, press the remote's left button to urge it right, and the right button to move it left. The cyborg will ignore commands after a few minutes. Peel off the circuit board and clip all wires to ensure a long retirement.

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?

to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".

An incresingly popular scientific enome re-writting tool. Might prevent future generations from being born with some types of disorders or disabilities! Also, for fun, can be looked at one step closer to having a real wolverine..

"Chinese team uses CRISPR to genetically modify human embryo" http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-chinese-team-crispr-genetically-human.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter

That is about € 14e9 - enough to pay more than a million YGTs for half a year. Could we use maybe just half a million YGTs for half a year to build a similar platform and keep the remaining € 7e9 for ourselves? Keep in mind that WhatsApp only has 45 employees (according to AllThingsD: http://goo.gl/NtJcSj ). So we would have an advantage > 10000:1. On the other hand does this mean that every employee at WhatsApp gets enough money now to survive comfortably for ~5000 years or will the inevitable social inequality strike and most people get next to nothing while a few get money to live comfortably for ~1000000 years? Also: Does Facebook think about these numbers before they pay them? Or is it just a case of "That looks tasty - lets have it"? Also (2): As far as I can see all these internet companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Twitter...) seem to make most of their income from advertising. For all these companies together that must be a lot of advertising money (turns out that in 2013 the world spent about $ 500 billion on advertising: http://goo.gl/vYog15 ). For that money you could of course have 20 million YGTs roaming the Earth and advertising stuff door-to-door... ... ...

The whole valuation of those internet companies is a bit scary. Things like the Facebook and Twitter ipo numbers seem just ridiculous.

Facebook is not really so much buying into a potential good business deal as much as it's buying out risky competition. Popular trends need to be killed fast before they take off the ground too much. Also the amount of personal data that WhatsApp is amassing is staggering. I have never seen an app requesting so many phone rights in my life.

What he found was that wind turbines "could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79%."

It seems the topic is getting more and more popular and is no longer considered fringe research, as this is a paper from nature climate change!

Team leader Professor Steven Tingay, Director of the MWA at Curtin University and Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) said the MWA will be able to detect the space junk by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations including popular youth network Triple J.

some interesting recommendations part of a current discussion between the commission and some member states in a general, and apparently popular with all parties, drive to reduce bureaucracy to, among other things, stimulate innovation. Firms face a challenge. They produce superb products, offer world-class services and benefit from being able to sell to a European market of 500 million customers. But they are often encumbered by problematic, poorly-understood and burdensome European rules. The impact is clear: fewer inventions are patented, fewer sales are made, fewer goods are produced and fewer jobs are created.

what hypocrites ... "As businesspeople, we are convinced that these and many other problems must be addressed if British and European firms are to compete in the global marketplace. We need regulation to operate in a pan-European market. We are not against regulation per se. But we need regulation that is pro-growth and pro-innovation." sure ....

I doubt that Shnoll is really the first one making such experiments, but perhaps they are more complete than any others done before. Similar things are very popular in the context of Psychology and more exotic fields. If I remember correctly someone ran long experiments with random number generators... Mostly the stories died after a short time, since the experiments are not reproducable. Anyway, why do these guys always have to claim that their work is somehow fundamentally changing our view of physics, notoriously referring to Einstein-Bohr debates and this stuff. That's nonsense! If these effects exist the first explanation is always much simpler. There is somewhere something that influences physics on Earth in a defined way. But this influence depends on the relative position or whatever of the Earth to that whatever-it-is. No problem with absolute time and all that sh...

Two years ago, nearly unnoticed in the West, the Russian biophysicist S.E. Shnoll published a paper in the prominent Russian physics journal Uspekhi Fisicheskikh Nauk ..... ah then ...

You are right, Leo, they are mostly Russians that publish in some unspellable Journals nobody knows.... or then they are supported by Templeton Foundation.

Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.

I will try my best. In a nutshell: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100714/full/466310a.html

*you* tried *your* best .... ??

outcome of a brainstorming, or an example of thinking out of the box ... :)

should we try to help them :-) ?

we should propose fractionned servers with CubeSats ...

a simple but innovative idea ...