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About "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x. "Overall, our results deepen understanding of the evolution of knowledge and may guide career planning and science policy. To promote disruptive science and technology, scholars may be encouraged to read widely and given time to keep up with the rapidly expanding knowledge frontier. Universities may forgo the focus on quantity, and more strongly reward research quality56, and perhaps more fully subsidize year-long sabbaticals. Federal agencies may invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects57, giving scholars the gift of time needed to step outside the fray, inoculate themselves from the publish or perish culture, and produce truly consequential work. Understanding the decline in disruptive science and technology more fully permits a much-needed rethinking of strategies for organizing the production of science and technology in the future."

The human brain both stores and processes information at the same time. Now computer scientists say they can do the same thing The human brain is an extraordinary computing machine. Nobody understands exactly how it works its magic but part of the trick is the ability to store and process information at the same time.

The mantles of Earth and other rocky planets are rich in magnesium and oxygen. Due to its simplicity, the mineral magnesium oxide is a good model for studying the nature of planetary interiors. New work studied how magnesium oxide behaves under the extreme conditions deep within planets and found evidence that alters our understanding of planetary evolution.

So they think they found a way for beta decay to produce both lighter (Ni->Cu) AND heavier (C->N) nuclei? ...

just another attempt to revive cold fusion from the dead ... and all with dubious experimental setups; read the last phrase ""From my perspective, this is still a physics experiment," Zawodny said. "I'm interested in understanding whether the phenomenon is real, what it's all about. Then the next step is to develop the rules for engineering. Once you have that, I'm going to let the engineers have all the fun." He went on to say that, " All we really need is that one bit of irrefutable, reproducible proof that we have a system that works. As soon as you have that, everybody is going to throw their assets at it. And then I want to buy one of these things and put it in my house."

any thoughts?

I don't understand what kind of point the author is trying to make. Boost is not an STL implementation (and you can't actually use Boost if you don't have an underlying STL). So again, what's the conclusion?

ESA Science & Technology: A leap forward in probing magnetic reconnection in space: Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process in the Universe, playing a major role in various phenomena such as star formation or solar explosions, but also preventing plasma confinement in fusion reactors on Earth. However, a lack of precise measurements at the heart of this physical process prevents a full understanding of this phenomenon.

So... who is in?

nice comment Johannes ... if you add a bit of Kleopatre, e.g. why bathing in milk helped her fool Marcus Antonius, your comment would be fully interdisciplinary :-)

you mean it would include History or Psychology? I would understand why Marcus Antonius might get fooled by a bathing beauty - but milk? DONKEY MILK?!? That's just wrong... :-[

Latest update: the European Space Agency says their experts "confirm there is no link between the meteor incidents in Russia and asteroid 2012DA14 flyby tonight". How did they find this? As they did not see this one coming, how could they come to that conclusion that early!

yes, now i get my 100% certainty with the reconstructed orbits nothing else (http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Watch%20the%20Skies/posts/post_1361037562855.html) ... I still think that esa anouncemement was highly premature but with a high probability of being right...

Some more results on the topic (link to an arxiv article inside): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21579422

A nice read. IBM Watson wowed the tech industry with a 2011 win against two of television show Jeopardy greatest champions. Using something that seemed like a sort of tree search for me IBM DeepQA algorithm managed to ingest sparse data (clues), process it getting one answer, understand what that answer means and come up with the question that leads to that answer. Now, IBM tells us that the same system can tackle medical diagnosis and financial risk problems.

DARPA funded the development of a new computer chip that's hardwired to make simple mistakes but can help computers understand the world. Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing. So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly.

The whole concept boils down to approximate computing it seems to me. In a presentation I attended once I prospected if the same kind of philosophy could be used as a radiation hardness design approach, the short conclusion being that surely will depend on the functionality intended.

... each act member should have one, together with the mug... :) Se also http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y3sHTKrGdKI

I want one too! On a side note, his story about transformers is a nice illustration that being able to express something in a mathematical equation is not equivalent to understanding something.

NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program provides funding to study a small number of highly advanced spaceflight concepts, with the goal of understanding the technological possibilities which will guide the development of future space missions. Under this program, a JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) researcher has proposed the use of a pair of CubeSats for an autonomous mission to retrieve samples from Phobos, Mars' larger moon.

any idea how this works - who wants to have a closer look at it?

Wouldn't it be worth having a closer look?

it's still not clear to me how to get electricity in and out of this thing?

of relevance to this discussion: Koomey's Law, a Moore's Law equivalent for computing's energetic efficiency http://www.economist.com/node/21531350 http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/2148202/whither-moores-law-introducing-koomeys-law

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...

hey! This is essentially the Probabilistic Computing Ariadna

The link is there but my understanding of our purpose is different than what I understood from the abstract. In any case,the authors are from Palma de Mallorca, Balears, Spain "somebody" should somehow make them aware of the Ariadna study ... E.g somebody no longer in the team :-)

Mantis shrimp seem to have 12 types of photo-receptive sensors - but this does not really improve their ability to discriminate between colors. Speculation is that they serve as a form of pre-processing for visual information: the brain does not need to decode full color information from just a few channels which would would allow for a smaller brain. I guess technologically the two extremes of light detection would be RGB cameras which are like our eyes and offer good spatial resolution, and spectrometers which have a large amount of color channels but at the cost of spatial resolution. It seems the mantis shrimp uses something that is somewhere between RGB cameras and spectrometers. Could there be a use for this in space?

> RGB cameras which are like our eyes ...apart from the fact that the spectral response of the eyes is completely different from "RGB" cameras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg) ... and that the eyes have 4 types of light-sensitive cells, not three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-response.svg) ... and that, unlike cameras, human eye is precise only in a very narrow centre region (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea) ...hmm, apart from relying on tri-stimulus colour perception it seems human eyes are in fact completely different from "RGB cameras" :-) OK sorry for picking on this - that's just the colour science geek in me :-) Now seriously, on one hand the article abstract sounds very interesting, but on the other the statement "Why use 12 color channels when three or four are sufficient for fine color discrimination?" reveals so much ignorance to the very basics of colour science that I'm completely puzzled - in the end, it's a Science article so it should be reasonably scientifically sound, right? Pity I can't access full text... the interesting thing is that more channels mean more information and therefore should require *more* power to process - which is exactly opposite to their theory (as far as I can tell it from the abstract...). So the key is to understand *what* information about light these mantises are collecting and why - definitely it's not "colour" in the sense of human perceptual experience. But in any case - yes, spectrometry has its uses in space :-)

A liquid-liquid phase transition at 207K. The research is aimed at understanding what happens when thawing tissues from cyroprotection

The goal is to better understand how memory works to help for example against dementia, depression, stress.. but as we all know it would be great to learn how to fly a helicopter in 5 seconds as well.

... or to make a first real inception ;)

Looks fantastic!

Sounds like a great tool for calculation and may provide some deeper understanding. But: I think their comments about space and time are misleading. Often you can ignore space and time when you just want the probability of an event (and it makes your calculations easier) but especially in the low-energy regime an event is clearly localized.

where is Luzi? where is Anna? where is Sante? when you need them?