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LeopoldS

Solar Flower high concentration PV - 3 views

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    interesting collaboration ... unfortunately no prices yet available
johannessimon81

Google combines skycrane, VTOL and lifting wing to make drone deliveries - 6 views

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    Nice video featuring the technology. Plus it comes with a good soundtrack! Google's project wing uses a lifting wing concept (more fuel efficient than normal airplane layouts and MUCH more efficient than quadrocopters) but it equips the plane with engines strong enough to hover in a nose up position, allowing vertical landing and takeoff. For the delivery of packages the drone does not even need to land - it can lower them on a wire - much like the skycrane concept used to deliver the Curiosity rover on Mars. Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. Anyways, the video is great for its soundtrack alone! ;-P
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    could we just use genetic algorithms to evolve these shapes and layouts? :P
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    > Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. I think apart from coolness using a skycrane helps keep the rotating knives away from the recipient...
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    Honest question, are we ever going to see this in practice? I mean besides some niche application somewhere, isn't it fundamentally flawed or do I need to keep my window opened on the 3rd floor without a balcony when I ordered something from DX? Its pretty cool yes, but practical?
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    Package delivery is indeed more complicated than it may seem at first sight, although solutions are possible for instance by restricting delivery to distribution centers. What we really need of course is some really efficient and robust AI to navigate without any problems in urban areas : ) The hybrid is interesting since it combines the advantage of a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (and hover), and a wing for more efficient forward flight. Challenges lie in the control of the vehicle under any angle and all that this entails also for higher levels of control. Our lab has first used this concept a few years ago for the DARPA UAVforge challenge, and we had two hybrids in our entry last year for the IMAV 2013 (for some shaky images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XgRK7pMoU ).
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    Fair enough, but even if you consider advanced/robust/efficient AI, why would you use a drone? Do we envision hundreds of drones above our heads in the street instead of UPS vans, or postmen, considering delivers letters might be more easily achievable. I am not so sure if personal delivery will take this route. On the other hand, if the system would work smoothly, I can image that I'm send a mail with the question whether I'm home (or they might know already from my personal GPS tracker) and then notify me that they are launching my DVD and it will come crashing into my door in 5min.
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    I'm more curios how they're planning to keep people from stealing the drones. I could do with a drone army myself and having cheap amazon or google drones flying about sounds like a decent source.
Thijs Versloot

Boron 'buckyball' discovered - 1 views

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    Jul 13, Nanotechnology/Nanomaterials Researchers have shown that clusters of 40 boron atoms form a molecular cage similar to the carbon buckyball. This is the first experimental evidence that such a boron cage structure exists. Credit: Wang lab / Brown UniversityThe discovery 30 years ago of soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules called buckyballs helped to spur an explosion of nanotechnology research.
Athanasia Nikolaou

Neural Networks (!) in OLCI - ocean colour sensor onboard Sentinel 3 - 3 views

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    Not easily digestible piece of esa document, but to prove Paul's point. And yes, they have already planned to train neural networks on a database of different water types, so that the satellite figures out from the combined retrieval of backscattering and absorption = f(λ) which type of water it is looking at. Type of water relates to οptical clarity of the water, a variable called turbidity. We could do this as well for mapping iron fertilization locations if we find its spectral signature. Lab time?????
johannessimon81

Emperor LX chair: A way to never have your desk at the wrong height anymore - 6 views

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    Zivile can you order this for me?
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    would you really want to work in one of these?? I certainly wont ...
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    work, game, watch movies, eat... - I wonder if a toilet is included though. :-P
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    I will get one as soon as they put it in a spherical dome like that of Darth Vader's...
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    @Johannes: The Japanese version will definitely have a toilet included, of course with health analysis, automatic appointment making with the doctors, life time estimation, diet planning, etc.
Thijs Versloot

Time 'Emerges' from #Quantum Entanglement #arXiv - 1 views

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    Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it
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    I always feel like people make too big a deal out of entanglement. In my opinion it is just a combination of a conserved quantity and an initial lack of knowledge. Imagine that I had a machine that always creates one blue and one red ping-pong ball at the same time (|b > and |r > respectively). The machine now puts both balls into identical packages (so I cannot observe them) and one of the packages is sent to Tokio. I did not know which ball was sent to Tokio and which stayed with me - they are in a superposition (|br >+|rb >), meaning that either the blue ball is with me and the red one in Tokio or vice versa - they are entangled. So far no magic has happened. Now I call my friend in Tokio who got the ball: "What color was the ball you received in that package?" He replies: "The ball that I got was blue. Why did you send me ball in the first place?" Now, the fact that he told me makes the superpositon wavefunction collapse (yes, that is what the Copenhagen interpretation would tell us). As a result I know without opening my box that it contains a red ball. But this is really because there is an underlying conservation law and because now I know the other state. I don't see how just looking at the conserved quantity I am in a timeless state outside of the 'universe' - this is just one way of interpreting it. By the way, the wave function for my box with the undetermined ball does not collapse when the other ball is observed by my friend in Tokio. Only when he tells me does the wavefunction collapse - he did not even know that I had a complementary ball. On the other hand if he knew about the way the experiment was conducted then he would have known that I had to have a red ball - the wavefunction collapses as soon as he observed his ball. For him it is determined that my ball must be red. For me however the superposition is intact until he tells me. ;-)
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    Sorry, Johannes, you just develop a simple hidden-parameters theory and it's experimentally proven that these don't work. Entangeled states are neither the blue nor the red ball they are really bluered (or redblue) till the point the measurement is done.
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    Hm, to me this looks like a bad joke... The "emergent time" concept used is still the old proposal by Page and Whotters where time emerges from something fundamentally unobservable (the wave function of the Universe). That's as good as claiming that time emerges from God. If I understand correctly, the paper now deals with the situation where a finite system is taken as "Mini-Universe" and the experimentalist in the lab can play "God of the Mini-Universe". This works, of course, but it doesn't really tell us anything about emergent time, does it?
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    Actually, it has not been proven conclusively that hidden variable theories don' work - although this is the opinion of most physicists these days. But a non-local hidden variable would still be allowed - I don't see why that could not be equivalent to a conserved quantity within the system. As far as the two balls go it is fine to say they are undetermined instead of saying they are in bluered or redblue state - for all intents and purposes it does not affect us (because if it would the wavefunction would have collapsed) so we can't say anything about it in the first place.
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    Non-local hidden variables may work, but in my opinion they don't add anything to the picture. The (at least to non-physicists) contraintuitive fact that there cannot be a variable that determines ab initio the color of the ball going to Tokio will remain (in your example this may not even be true since the example is too simple...).
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    I guess I tentatively agree with you on both points. In the end there might anyway be surprisingly little overlap between the way that we describe what nature does and HOW it does it... :-D
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    Congratulations! 100% agree.
Dario Izzo

Forget Brainstorming - Newsweek - 6 views

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    nice link from toby .... it contains some of the things that I have been saying to the wind!!
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    Oh god, this is so beautiful... I'm not even going to quote the best parts, they are so many :)
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    "employees need to be able to put their own ideas into practice" - but they also need to want to do it ....
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    "In Galinsky's lab, people were more creative after watching a slide show about China: a 45-minute session increased creativity scores for a week." Hippo: we need more pictures from you!!
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    "Do something only you would come up with-that none of your friends or family would think of." - according to them, this is one of their success recipes .... a recipe for the team?
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    >Get moving. I always said that fitness test should be included in the recruitment process!!!
duncan barker

1663 Science and Technology Magazine Home : Science : Los Alamos National Lab - 0 views

shared by duncan barker on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
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    Time reversed waves to detect defects in materials and earth quakes
Nicholas Lan

hilarious publications list - 2 views

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    his day to day research experience must be relatively unusual highlights include: - Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18380130 'The effect of a joke on tipping when it is delivered at the same time as the bill' http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/Articles/JASP2002.pdf "Love is in the air": Effects of Songs With Romantic Lyrics on Compliance to a Courtship Request. http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/Articles/PsyMusic2010.PDF and the mostly confusing 'Presence of Various Figurines on a Restaurant Table and Consumer Choice: Evidence for an Associative Link.'
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    Now that's what I call applied science... will consider applying to his lab for a post-doc!
Joris _

NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 4 views

  • The most important near-term development is electric propulsion.
  • using high-density batteries powered off ground-based solar grids
  • microwave thermal propulsion
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    "Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds," Worden said. this sounds to me a bit too much like Pete Worden :-) but I really like this one :-) One of those billionaires might be Google's Larry Page, who is keenly interested in space travel and NASA Ames's research. "Larry asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, 'Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?,'" Worden told the Long Now audience. "So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price."
LeopoldS

Machine Made of Lego Builds Anything You Want - Out of Lego | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 5 views

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    nice ....
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    "which raises the possibility - theoretically at least - that the machine could, with some modifications, build a copy of itself." - very interesting way to say that the machine can't build a copy of itself... But generally, this is ubercool :-) When you're getting one?
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    we should have built a rep-rap
Dario Izzo

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!!! - 3 views

  • Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.
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    haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.
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    well sure competitiveness is good but to verify (and that should be the case for scientific experiments) the code should be public, it would be nice to have something like bibtex for code libraries or versions used.... :) btw I fully agree that the code should go public, I had lots of trouble reproducing (reprogramming) some papers in the past ... grr
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    My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).
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    Same battle we are fighting since a few years....
pacome delva

Dutch Scientists Grow First Pork Meat In Lab - 4 views

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    So much for dutch food!!!
pacome delva

Planetary physics shrunk into a lab as MIT pursues fusion - 1 views

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    Cool video...
pacome delva

Higgs hunters face long haul - 2 views

  • to reduce the chances of the LHC being derailed again by a similar accident, physicists at the Geneva lab have decided to run the collider at just half its design energy for the next 18-24 months.
  • Once the 7 TeV run is over, CERN will shut the LHC down in 2012 for a year or more to prepare it to go straight to maximum-energy 14 TeV collisions in 2013. This will be a complex job that will involve replacing some 10,000 superconducting magnet connections with more robust ones.
  • choosing to stay at lower energies is a big price to pay in terms of the Higgs search. "We will need more than twice the data at 7 TeV compared to that needed at 10 TeV to reach the same discovery potential," she says. "At this energy we can at best expect to exclude a Higgs with a mass between 155 and 175 GeV."
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    no Higgs boson before 2013... and a replacement of 10,000 superconducting magnet connections ! Reminds me of the the gravitational detectors... no detection before an upgrade in 2013...! There are the big announcements to make the cash flow... and reality !
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    Higgs is almost 81, so he should better invest in his health if he wants the Nobel prize... But who cares, it's another 5 years window where high-energy theorists can produce nonsense with no experimental evidence. They should be happy!
Francesco Biscani

LaTeX Lab - Welcome - 6 views

shared by Francesco Biscani on 11 May 10 - Cached
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    Finally LaTeX for Google docs?
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    mmm seems better (more option and direct preview) than spartantex
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    Great!!! seems like the tool we were looking for....
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    does not seem to work (at least not with Safari)
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    Excellent!!!!!!!!! and works with Linux :-)
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    Here it works fine in Chromium, Firefox and Opera (Linux).
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    Worked fine, but after saving a document I can't get it back to the LaTeX mode...
pacome delva

Synthetic Genome Brings New Life to Bacterium - 0 views

  • For 15 years, J. Craig Venter has chased a dream: to build a genome from scratch and use it to make synthetic life. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, say they have realized that dream.
  • "One thing is sure," Boeke says. "Interesting creatures will be bubbling out of the Venter Institute's labs."
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    wow, a big step in genomics...!
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    But isn't it just yet another word abuse? From what I understand, they just synthesised a genome identical to the one of an existing bacteria... while undoubtedly nice work, this is *very* far from "creating life from scratch"... The fact that you are able to copy something, doesn't mean you understand how it works...
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    well of course we are far from engineering specific functions, and this is just a copy of a function that already existed. However it is quite impressive and the first time it is done. And the challenge here is not really to "copy" the ADN, but the fact that it works... in other words it is not because you copy the ADN identically that the phenotype (traduction of the ADN) will be the same, which is the case in this experiment.
Luís F. Simões

Seminar: You and Your Research, Dr. Richard W. Hamming (March 7, 1986) - 10 views

  • This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?" From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
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    Here's the link related to one of the lunch time discussions. I recommend it to every single one of you. I promise it will be worth your time. If you're lazy, you have a summary here (good stuff also in the references, have a look at them):      Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming. PLoS Comput Biol 3(10): e213.
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    I'm also pretty sure that the ones who are remembered are not the ones who tried to be... so why all these rules !? I think it's bullshit...
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    The seminar is not a manual on how to achieve fame, but rather an analysis on how others were able to perform very significant work. The two things are in some cases related, but the seminar's focus is on the second.
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    Then read a good book on the life of Copernic, it's the anti-manual of Hamming... he breaks all the rules !
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    honestly I think that some of these rules actually make sense indeed ... but I am always curious to get a good book recommendation (which book of Copernic would you recommend?) btw Pacome: we are in Paris ... in case you have some time ...
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    I warmly recommend this book, a bit old but fascinating: The sleepwalkers from Arthur Koestler. It shows that progress in science is not straight and do not obey any rule... It is not as rational as most of people seem to believe today. http://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-History-Changing-Universe-Compass/dp/0140192468/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294835558&sr=8-1 Otherwise yes I have some time ! my phone number: 0699428926 We live around Denfert-Rochereau and Montparnasse. We could go for a beer this evening ?
Joris _

The Associated Press: Daunting space task _ send astronauts to asteroid - 1 views

  • NASA leaders say civilization may depend on it
  • NASA is thinking about jetpacks, tethers, bungees, nets and spiderwebs to allow explorers to float just above the surface of it while attached to a smaller mini-spaceship.
  • At the moment, there are only a handful of asteroid options and they all have names like 1999AO10 or 2009OS5.
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  • NASA is pursuing its concept for a mini-spaceship exploration vehicle, about the size of a minivan. And it's planning an underwater lab for training, an effort to mimic an asteroid mission's challenges
  • "There's a lot of things we need to invent and build between now and then."
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