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A study in the January Physical Review E suggests that a sleep-wake cycle, allowing the brain to focus on one task at a time, may be the most efficient way to operate. The researcher shows mathematically that processing a continuously changing resource--s

I stop complaining about "useless" research such as infeasible invisibility devices... At least I start to understand why Italy is a country with one of the highest publication rates per researcher.

this is the infrastructure that satellites have to compete with ....

I guess you are right... Is ACT already planning a find-and-cut expedition?

now that we have the boat and thanks to Camilla it is still floating after the deluge ....

Let's keep going then ...

Or maybe not ..... 1) http://www.jstor.org/pss/3666221 (reminds me of someone :) 2) http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/think-well/201101/why-optimism-can-be-bad-your-mental-health (se comment above)

FEM modelling of bone structures in woodpeckers combined with high speed video of pecking motion etc headgear? shock absorbing structures? low mass hammering penetrators? Lizhen Wang1,2, Jason Tak-Man Cheung3, Fang Pu1, Deyu Li1, Ming Zhang2*, Yubo Fan1* 1 Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Health Technology and Informatics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 3 Li Ning Sports Science Research Center, Beijing, People's Republic of China Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries.

"...the woodpecker does not experience any head injury at the high speed of 6-7 m/s with a deceleration of 1000 g when it drums a tree trunk. It is still not known how woodpeckers protect their brain from impact injury...."

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.

he new SR-72 will use a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) that will employ the turbine engine at lower speeds, and use a scramjet at higher speeds. A scramjet engine is designed to operate at hypersonic velocities by compressing the air through a carefully designed inlet, but needs to be traveling supersonic before it is practical to begin with. So far research projects from NASA, the Air Force and other Pentagon entities have not been able to solve the problem of transitioning from the subsonic flight regime, through hypersonic flight with a single aircraft. Same problem as Reaction Engines is trying to solve, so I am not sure whether they actually cracked it. In any case, nice pictures. Not sure why the exhaust color is purple in color. Its not running on Argon I believe.

Weird article. Intermediate thruster stage (Ramjet) is missing. Scramjet has supersonic combustion and a normal turbine delivers subsonic flows. Even with afterburner - the Scramjet inlet would decelerate the flow down to subsonic velocity with "normal" subsonic combustion. The only thing I can imagine is that the Scramjet stage is bi-functional and covers both, subsonic and supersonic combustion. But the article doesn't say anything about it.

Give the Ubermancycle a try?

> As in never ever see sun and daylight :)) Like in the Netherlands you mean?

Tri-phasic sleep rhythm works fine.

Here we go! AI for Mario has arrived. What is still missing is the Italian accent in his robo-voice though. To compensate for that, we have a lot of German accent in the Youtube-video. Make sure to check it out if you always liked the background music from the games. Putting the trolling aside, I honestly like the idea! There is still some way to go, but maybe we will watch and even pay to be able to see twitch-streams of self-ware bots one day?

I'm actually considering doing an twitch-bot channel. Why pay when you can cash in? Kind of lazy tho`

research paper on ... football (I hope that my Mr Random selections did not choose england ...)

"Quantum mechanics is very successful; nobody's claiming that it's wrong," said Paul Milewski, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bath in England who has devised computer models of bouncing-droplet dynamics. "What we believe is that there may be, in fact, some more fundamental reason why [quantum mechanics] looks the way it does."

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.

"The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles - including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured." Pilot-wave theory reresurrected. Maybe something for the next "fundamental" :P physics RF?

And for the next 'Experimental Physics Stagiaire' position why not try to do "Unpredictable Tunneling of a Classical Wave-Particle Association" http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/eddi/Papers/PhysRevLett_TUNNEL.pdf, there are some rumors online that the results of Yves Couder Experiments can be reproduced with simple DIY vibrating tables! It is very funny to see the videos of the MIT's replication of this experiment (with lightening legends for those who are uncomfortable with the concepts involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5iHQMjcsM)

Hilarious critique to a quite important paper from Stanford trying to push the agenda of global warming .... "You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect."

also good overview: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

just a footnote here, that climate warming aspect is not derived by an agenda of presenting the world with evil. If one looks at big journals with high outreach, it is not uncommon to find articles promoting climate warming as something not bringing the doom that extremists are promoting with marketing strategies. Here is a recent article in Science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26612836 Science's role is to look at the phenomenon and notice what is observed. And here is one saying that the acidification of the ocean due to increase of CO2 (observed phenomenon) is not advancing destructively for coccolithophores (a key type of plankton that builds its shell out of carbonates), as we were expecting, but rather fertilises them! Good news in principle! It could be as well argued from the more sceptics with high "doubting-inertia" that 'It could be because CO2 is not rising in the first place'', but one must not forget that one can doubt the global increase in T with statistical analyses, because it is a complex variable, but at least not the CO2 increase compared to preindustrial levels. in either case : case 1: agenda for 'the world is warming' => - Put random big energy company here- sells renewable energies case 2: agenda for 'the world is fine' => - Put random big energy company here - sells oil as usual The fact that in both cases someone is going to win profits, does not correllate (still not an adequate statistical test found for it?) with the fact that the science needs to be more and more scrutinised. The blog of the Statistics Professor in Univ.Toronto looks interesting approach (I have not understood all the details) and the paper above is from JPL authors, among others.

I am having less and less faith in the Dwave machine, but nonetheless, maybe we should have a look at our future encryption techniques...

why less and less ... ?

How many people to we actually need put on that ship?

We should invite these people to the AF special issue

sounds really interesting. their simulations don't account for biological issues (mutation, migration, selection, drift, founder effect) though, so the numbers are very low. this paper (https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0094576513004669/1-s2.0-S0094576513004669-main.pdf?_tid=6bec2a5c-f05f-4024-b4de-af78ab06fd42&acdnat=1531827379_d4f0be1b193873890d6e5b4574e82f2e) takes those effects and their implications on genetic composition of populations into account, but the numbers are enormous. do you have an idea why they (marin and beluffi) wouldn't put those effects into the simulations?