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Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen.

a follow-up question: Can quantum computer be efficient for global optimisation ?

looking a bit back to small world nets bibliography I bumped into that. quote: The probability that a Brazilian soccer player has worked at $N$ clubs or played $M$ games shows an exponential decay while the probability that he has scored $G$ goals is power law. (!)

A key technical barrier to furthering our understanding of complex neural networks has been the lack of tools for the simultaneous spatiotemporal control and detection of activity in a large number of neurons.

The latest from Schmidt / Lipson / Eureqa. A significant improvement over their previous work is that now "The algorithm selects between multiple candidate models by designing experiments to make their predictions disagree."

12 new NIAC 1 studies - many topics familiar to us ... please have a look at those closest to your expertise to see if there is anything new/worth investigating (and in general to be knowledgeable on them since we will get questions sooner or later on them)
Principal Investigator Proposal Title Organization City, State, Zip Code
Atchison, Justin Swarm Flyby Gravimetry Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218-2680
Boland, Eugene Mars Ecopoiesis Test Bed Techshot, Inc. Greenville, IN 47124-9515
Cash, Webster The Aragoscope: Ultra-High Resolution Optics at Low Cost University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0389
Chen, Bin 3D Photocatalytic Air Processor for Dramatic Reduction of Life Support Mass & Complexity NASA ARC Moffett Field, CA 94035-0000
Hoyt, Robert WRANGLER: Capture and De-Spin of Asteroids and Space Debris Tethers Unlimited Bothel, WA 98011-8808
Matthies, Larry Titan Aerial Daughtercraft NASA JPL Pasadena, CA 91109-8001
Miller, Timothy Using the Hottest Particles in the Universe to Probe Icy Solar System Worlds John Hopkins University Laurel, MD 20723-6005
Nosanov, Jeffrey PERISCOPE: PERIapsis Subsurface Cave OPtical Explorer NASA JPL Pasadena, CA 91109-8001
Oleson, Steven Titan Submarine: Exploring the Depths of Kraken NASA GRC Cleveland, OH 44135-3127
Ono, Masahiro Comet Hitchhiker: Harvesting Kinetic Energy from Small Bodies to Enable Fast and Low-Cost Deep Space Exploration NASA JPL Pasadena, CA 91109-8001
Streetman, Brett Exploration Architecture with Quantum Inertial Gravimetry and In Situ ChipSat Sensors Draper Laboratory Cambridge, MA 02139-3539
Wiegmann, Bruce Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS) NASA MSFC Huntsville, AL 35812-0000

Eh, the swarm flyby gravimetry is very similar to the "measuring gravitational fields" project I proposed in the brewery

They use a technique they call "Empirical Dynamic Modeling" to find correlations between different variables of chaotic systems. Might be interesting for things like climate modeling and similar chaotic systems. The idea seems pretty straight forward but I never encountered it before - so I'm no sure if this is really a new development (curious if anybody else knows). If you are short on time just watch the video embedded in the article.

Just by reading the page and the related material I didn't really get much, but I think it could be worth investing some time in reading more about it. But I'm interested in this, so I'll try to dig deeper!

interesting study showing seasonal changes to brain functions Agata, you didn't tell us about this yet :-) "the present study provides compelling evidence for previously unappreciated annual varia- tions in the cerebral activity required to sustain ongoing cognitive processes in healthy volunteers. The data further show that this annual rhythmicity is cognitive-process-specific (i.e., the phase of the rhythm changes between cognitive tasks), speaking for a complex impact of season on human brain function. Annual var- iations in cognitive brain function may contribute to explain intraindividual cognitive changes that could emerge at specific times of year."

Thank you for this interesting study. I will make a brief intro about it during our Wednesday meeting. Especially, that spring is coming...;)

Google Deepmind about to reveal recent progress on AI for a complex competitive eSport title.

Material point method is an efficient and promising method for simulating complex stuff. Not used much in Astro, a lot in gaming, cartoons etc.... Worth having a look in comparison with SPH in simulation (for example those connected to the HERAS mission)

ridiculous next frontier for patenting ... mathematics!!!!!

should I take these as an indication of news from the bankers concerning your business case?

this would trigger innovation, and kill mathematics! The world is crazy... imagine a mathematician that will have to pay to use a demonstration for his own demonstration... haha. And the interviewed guy in the article say that this would benefit mathematicians !!! what a joke ! And all the schools that will have to pay billions to Euclid's heirs ! This would kill physics too, and all domains that use mathematics as a tool !

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

Interesting research field about self-propelled particle swarms: very simple rules lead to complex behavior - in a real-world experiment!

"Australia's Royal Air Force has been left red-faced after a job ad asked applicants to solve a complex math problem was revealed to be unsolvable. Bosses posted the puzzle in a bid to attract the country's best minds to its ranks"

good luck with this....

In 1996 Sokal hoaxed sociologists with his famous nonsense text on political implications of quantum gravity. Can one play a similar game with "researchers" on Boltzmann brains, multiverses, string landscapes or similar? I doubt, this is just reality satire that can't be topped.

Poor Boltzmann ...

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

Perhaps when you think of bacterial communities you think of a flask full of rapidly dividing E. coli. But in non-lab conditions, bacteria grow in complex, heterogeneous communities composed of diverse microscopic organisms. In these communities, bacteria need a means to communicate with their kin, and they do this through a language known as quorum sensing (QS), where bugs secrete and detect factors that tell them whether they're surrounded by kin (and if so, how many there are).

Interesting. these guys are apparently gonna try developing pulsar navigation. They propose to solve the low apparent brightness problem using relatively complex signal processing and filtering to limit the antenna size etc. The say they've already had some promising results using ground based data. worth a science coffee perhaps?

Absolutely. Sante can you get in contact with them?

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. [...] These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

...unless life arrived together with the nutrients...

Viking was one of the best sterilised sc we have ever launched! Just strange to read such an article published in an obscure Korean journal ...

On Saturday at 10:02 a.m. EST an Atlas V rocket carrying its precious cargo, the Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover, took off successfully from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. A statement from NASA Project Manager Peter Theisinger confirmed that all had gone according to plan.