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[spam] Obama expressed his disappointment recently when rapper Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest singer Taylor Swift's win of the "Best Female Video" trophy. Soon after, Obama himself was Swifted by critics who felt he was undeserving of his Nobel Prize win. It is obviously connected to the study of the Journal of Wine Economics that wine gold awards are given randomly http://www.wine-economics.org/journal/content/Volume4/number1/Full%20Texts/1_wine%20economics_vol%204_1_Robert%20Hodgson.pdf which also raised some controversy

July 14, 2009 NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, Mojave, CA 6 Teams [KCSP, LM, USST, NSS, McGill, U MICH] 1 km vertical raceway, laser-powered vehicles $2,000,000 Total prize purse (two levels)

"Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bri

This won the igNobel prize for economy 2022, and its indeed a fantastic paper!

Hey Guys, Is one of you has any idea about how it's coded? I mean, is it just a basic database of already-written answers or something more sophisticated? Anyway, have fun! Alex

Hi, thanks for your answer. I had a look to the different versions, that's pretty interesting to see how they have evolved over the years.

I was not at all impressed - stopped after a few questions since getting ridiculous answers or trials to change topic

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".

interesting reflections by MIT head on innovation in US

interesting, especially since in all COmmission papers US innovation is praised and changes expected are only related to China/India (for the better)... Article mixes a lot talk on innovation with numbers that I do not see necessarily connected (trade deficit, GDP growth etc.). Seems to me the real problematique behind the article is only the next planned distribution of federal funds and where they should cut...

well I understand her point. Spending cuts are only vicious short term solutions against economical downturn since growth (GDP is an interesting measure indeed) comes from innovation, research and production. Nonetheless, what she is describing is happening in EU too. So who will take the lead? I am not certain China is the one. In my view, it has not yet solved its domestic issues... and US still has more Nobel Prize than China. One thing for sure, the way it is EU is only a "wagon" of the train...

$50k prize to put documents back together

Final level will be something that has been burned to ashes which were then flushed down the toilet...

Seems as if the guy likes string theory ... Luzi won't be happy :-)

No comment!

"On March 28, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will kick of another one of its highly successful challenges this time looking for teams or individuals to develop unique algorithms to control small satellites on-board the International Space Station. " Will the ACT participate?

That would be wrong on so many levels...

Could not find out what the prize money is? Also does not seem clear to me how three cubes can catch an object "flying" in the opposite direction... But the approach is nice to see

"Cuckoos have a bad reputation as home-wreckers, taking over the nests of other birds and killing their chicks. But one species benefits its hosts by producing a smelly fluid that repels predators. "Cuckoos are not always the villains we think they are," says Ros Gloag of the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the study."

So they not only take over part of the nest, but also crap all over the place? Then again, if that is the prize to pay for safety, it might well be worth the inconvenience.. :)

Our achievement is reported on the italian government web pages .....

Grande fratello is watching...

The Earth Monitoring Competition is annually awarding prizes to innovative solutions for business and society based on Earth observation data.

In this article the authors describe an improvement of their optical microscope techniques for which some of the received a Nobel prize in the past. They achieve resolutions far beyond the optical diffraction limit which is supposed to limit detail resolution due to quantum-mechanical effects. Their techniques include structured illuminiation (producing interference patterns), switchable fluorescent markers as well as multi-frame super resolution enhancement. Authors are able to take a single image in about 0.3 seconds which allows the study of protein processes in the cell: http://spon.de/vgTb7 . Although it is hard to imagine the application of many of these techniques for telescopes (except for super resolution), I am wondering if any of this could help building telescopes with increased optical power or reduced weight. Any ideas..?

apparently warm things attract each other instead. a symbolic prize of a virtual launch vehicle based on a smeg fridge/freezer for the most amusing/shortest refutation. "A ~1068 gm hollow copper sphere hovers above a 1000 W heat element." "After power was applied to the heat element for 400 s, the means of the first and last ~6 force measures indicate that the sphere's gravitational mass increased by 1.9 % or 20 gm."

interesting...

this looks like absolute humbug to me .... reminds me of some rotating superconductors :-)

New Centennial Challenges Announced!

so any ideas from us here?! :)

btw: have been discussing something similar with Roger ... a bit less ambitious but still ...

presentations from the related nanosatellite event http://www.nestra.jp/NS_sympo/information_e.html (DLR, SSTL and european unis were there but no ESA...)

Giving the title, I think the comment is not necessary...

Haha, nice article : One of the best-known versions of non-general relativistic quantum versions of time travel comes from Wheeler, as described by Feynman in his Nobel Prize lecture [16]: 'I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass." "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "Suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron."

I suggest you this easy reading ( is on a peer-reviewed scientific journal, IF = 6.14) 'We just don't know what we're doing!!!'

I tend to agree with you but I think that you are too harsh - its still only an "essay" and one of his points of making sure that education at post graduate level is not about indoctrinating what we know already is valid ...

I think this quote by Richard Horton is relevant to the discussion: "We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." :P

the ACT should participate, a least someone in it, ...

seems as if they are lacking ideas ?? :-) and honestly: "The Grand Prize Winner will be announced 6 January and will receive $500 plus a one year, on-line subscription to the AIAA Journal of their choice. Two runner-up winners will each receive $250 and a one year, on-line subscription to the AIAA Journal of their choice." ... :-)