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anybody wanna try? surprising to me

The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.

nice overview of the 3 main space related projects attempting to bring internet access to the world, namely SpaceX+Google micro-satellites network, OneWeb+Virgin Galactic OneWeb and Project Loon by Google. not a lot of technical details though...

True! Half the Phd Positions offered are in studying eddy variability. It links to resolving the - yet another holy grail - problem of turbulence.

"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.

"Collider is an arty audiovisual experience that provides a first-person perspective of a particle hurtling through the Large Hadron Collider"... with the use of the Leapmotion sensor and Oculus Rift hmd. Come to my desk if you wanna try it :) (not that fun actually)

we will come when you figure out how to capture a particle!!! or a dragonball, is the same

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

There is actually a windows program called flux, that changes the temperature on your screen to match normal light cycles. When the sun sets it switches to a "warmer" more reddish tint on your screen to promote sleepiness. The typically bright blue/neon white settings of most pc settings is quite "awakening" and keeps your brain running for longer. This impacts your sleeping patterns and all the consequences of that. Amazingly, this flux thing does have an effect. That being said, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it all on PC/artificial lighting time. Sedentary lifestyles, etc can very well place one in a position of long term pc/phone usage so it's quite hard to draw a causal link.

nice - also exists for MAC btw: https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/mac/

very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."

any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?

"Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA

Commit Assist Tool allows predicting bugs in large code bases typically found in AAA-games.

A short article about Saul Griffith and his R&D company Otherlab. Pretty much halfway between Mythbusters and the ACT.

I think the image of the pine tree nicely illustrates both effects.

NASA has tested a prototype of a new design for a small uranium reactor as a power source for deep space exploration. In principle this should pose a smaller radiation danger during launch and more energy per mass compared to RTGs.

Sorry, did not see your entry when posting mine ...

interesting stuff ... I like this quote "When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars-sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific-you need to find another diagnosis. That's the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There's a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they're embarking on isn't really that risky. They're wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong-to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary-no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new."

"The metamaterial aperature is only 40 centimeters long and it doesn't move. It's a circuit-board-like structure consisting of two copper plates separated by a piece of plastic. One of the plates is etched with repeating boxy structures, units about 2 millimeters long that permit different lengths of microwaves to pass through. Scanning the scene at various microwave frequencies allows the computer to capture all the information necessary to reproduce a scene."

where is Luzi's comment when one needs it ???

Data-Visualization Firm's New Software Autonomously Finds Abstract Connections --> Annalisa?

I had a nice introduction about Ordinal Regression via Manifold Learning by Francisco last week. It is doubtless a very actual research branch!

I doubt :) The original paper from Liu is from 2011 and has .... wait for it .... 1 quotation (and a self-one)!!! http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=it&q=Ordinal+Regression+via+Manifold+Learning&btnG=&lr=

Solid state tunnel junction can cool "payload" to sub-Kelvin temperatures. This would be much more convenient than for example helium3-helium4 mixing. Proposed use for cooling sensors on spacecraft - could extend lifetime of satellites like ESA's about to switched off Herschel almost indefinitely.