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for Tobi! nice analogy between the threat and the fast responding in human network

Yet another example of "because scientifically accurate title would sound sooo boring".

Might be interesting for Giusy...

This could become quite relevant in future control systems if the setup can be made simple to keep alive and stable. I was doing some follow-up on a story about people controlling aircraft with their brainwaves (through EEG) when I ran into this really cool story. The idea of growing the neurons in patterns is incidentally very similar to the Physarium slime-mold stuff that Dario and me were curious about a little while ago.

I think we already had a discussion on this during a wednesday meeting :P

Oh, I thought that was on the little robot that was controlled by rat neurons and bumped into EVERYTHING. The interesting thing here is that they add a surface patterning (with some kind of nutrient) to control the growth of cells. (Maybe that is not new either, though.)

Over the last 1000 years, temperature differences between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres were larger than previously thought. Using new data from the Southern Hemisphere, researchers have shown that climate model simulations overestimate the links between the climate variations across the Earth with implications for regional predictions.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

NASA validates the EmDrive (http://emdrive.com/) technology for converting electrical energy into thrust. (from the website: "Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.")

I have to join the skeptics on this one ...

"Neuroscience UCLA neurophysicists have found that space-mapping neurons in the brain react differently to virtual reality than they do to real-world environments. Their findings could be significant for people who use virtual reality for gaming, military, commercial, scientific or other purposes." I wonder if we are doing it wrong with the airplane pilot simulators...

In Interstellar, the science-fiction film out this week, Matthew McConaughey stars as an astronaut contending with a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. The film's special effects have been hailed as the most realistic depiction ever made of this type of cosmic object. But astrophysicists have now gone one better - this is a really cool visualisation done by researchers in Cornell.

Wow, impressive! Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) software, very quick merging process though 17ms.. Observable?

Mind-blowing!

Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he helped create and thinks, "Why, of course. That's what it would do." This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy. It appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it.

Software that roughly mimics the way the brain works could give smartphones new smarts-leading to more accurate and sophisticated apps for tracking everything from workouts to emotions. The software exploits an artificial-intelligence technique known as deep learning, which uses simulated neurons and synapses to process data.

A common data hub that allows the representation and comparison of data from numerous space missions. "The IMPEx portal offers tools for the visualization and analysis of datasets from different space missions. Furthermore, several computational model databases are feeding into the environment." As they say, with its massive 3D-visualization capabilities it offers the possibility of displaying spacecraft trajectories, planetary ephemerides as well as scientific representations of observational and simulation datasets.

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Awesome :) It's even got skifree!

Simulating the economic state of the Galaxy after the resistance has blown up the Death Stars. See the paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf

Love this type of friday afternoon research questions. There is also a now famous scene in the movie Clerks discussing the loss of independent contractors lives as the Death Star was being build.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA

That analysis is quite crappy and is easily demolished in the video's comments.

Papers in the video description

Procedural generation for creating space stuff!

"...the European Commission announced in 2016 that it was investing one billion euros in a research effort known as the Quantum Technology Flagship. The goal for this project is to develop four technologies: quantum communication, quantum simulation, quantum computing, and quantum sensing. After almost two years, how is it going?" arxiv link to the actual report: http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03773

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced its moves to embrace the next big thing in computing: quantum computing. Later this year, Microsoft will release a new quantum computing programming language, with full Visual Studio integration, along with a quantum computing simulator. With these, developers will be able to both develop and debug quantum programs implementing quantum algorithms.