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Joris _

Elon Musk: SpaceX signs "biggest" commercial launch deal ever - The Write Stuff - Orlando Sentinel - 0 views

  • ore than half of his company’s manifest of about 30 launches are purely commercial
  • His statement challenges critics of private space companies whom have maintained that there is not enough commercial business to support them
  • lower launch costs for the government
pacome delva

Royal Society Fellows Question Body's Climate Change Statements - 1 views

  • The Royal Society has released a statement acknowledging that its climate guide is being updated and noting: "The new guide has been planned for some time but was given added impetus by concerns raised by a small group of Fellows of the Society that older documents designed to challenge some of the common misrepresentations of the science were too narrow in their focus."
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    The "climatosceptics" are more and more powerful, in France it's crazy how much they are in newspaper and television... Before it was fancy to fear the global warming, now it's fancy to fight the "dictat" of the Science, as if Science was a religion with its dogma !
Francesco Biscani

Saturn's rings gave birth to mini-moons - 0 views

  • Low density, recent surfaces, and somewhat oblong shapes all hint that some of these moons are likely to be less than 100 million years old.
  • Researchers suspected that the moons might have originated through some sort of interactions within the A Ring, but the number of bodies involved made modeling the system too computationally challenging. Fortunately, Moore's Law caught up with Cassini, and today's issue of Nature contains a paper that describes a model that successfully reproduces the pattern of moons we now observe.
Juxi Leitner

NASA - Ideas for New NASA Prize Challenges - 0 views

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    I am wondering what they would say to some of the IDEASTORM ideas ;)
duncan barker

Challenging Existence of 'Absolute Time' - 3 views

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    I doubt that Shnoll is really the first one making such experiments, but perhaps they are more complete than any others done before. Similar things are very popular in the context of Psychology and more exotic fields. If I remember correctly someone ran long experiments with random number generators... Mostly the stories died after a short time, since the experiments are not reproducable. Anyway, why do these guys always have to claim that their work is somehow fundamentally changing our view of physics, notoriously referring to Einstein-Bohr debates and this stuff. That's nonsense! If these effects exist the first explanation is always much simpler. There is somewhere something that influences physics on Earth in a defined way. But this influence depends on the relative position or whatever of the Earth to that whatever-it-is. No problem with absolute time and all that sh...
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    Two years ago, nearly unnoticed in the West, the Russian biophysicist S.E. Shnoll published a paper in the prominent Russian physics journal Uspekhi Fisicheskikh Nauk ..... ah then ...
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    You are right, Leo, they are mostly Russians that publish in some unspellable Journals nobody knows.... or then they are supported by Templeton Foundation.
Luís F. Simões

Inferring individual rules from collective behavior - 2 views

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    "We fit data to zonal interaction models and characterize which individual interaction forces suffice to explain observed spatial patterns." You can get the paper from the first author's website: http://people.stfx.ca/rlukeman/research.htm
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    PNAS? Didnt strike me as sth very new though... We should refer to it in the roots study though: "Social organisms form striking aggregation patterns, displaying cohesion, polarization, and collective intelligence. Determining how they do so in nature is challenging; a plethora of simulation studies displaying life-like swarm behavior lack rigorous comparison with actual data because collecting field data of sufficient quality has been a bottleneck." For roots it is NO bottleneck :) Tobias was right :)
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    Here they assume all relevant variables influencing behaviour are being observed. Namely, the relative positions and orientations of all ducks in the swarm. So, they make movies of the swarm's movements, process them, and them fit the models to that data. In the roots, though we can observe the complete final structure, or even obtain time-lapse movies showing how that structure came out to be, getting the measurements of all relevant soil variables (nitrogen, phosphorus, ...) throughout the soil, and over time, would be extremely difficult. So I guess a replication of the kind of work they did, but for the roots, would be hard. Nice reference though.
Joris _

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics - New Horizons Challenge - 5 views

shared by Joris _ on 16 Nov 10 - No Cached
Juxi Leitner liked it
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    the ACT should participate, a least someone in it, ...
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    seems as if they are lacking ideas ?? :-) and honestly: "The Grand Prize Winner will be announced 6 January and will receive $500 plus a one year, on-line subscription to the AIAA Journal of their choice. Two runner-up winners will each receive $250 and a one year, on-line subscription to the AIAA Journal of their choice." ... :-)
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

The Fantastical Promise of Reversible Computing  - Technology Review - 2 views

  • Reversible logic could cut the energy wasted by computers to zero. But significant challenges lie ahead.
  • By some estimates the difference between the amount of energy required to carry out a computation and the amount that today's computers actually use, is some eight orders of magnitude. Clearly, there is room for improvement.
  • There are one or two caveats, of course. The first is that nobody has succeeded in building a properly reversible logic gate so this work is entirely theoretical. But there are a number of computing schemes that have the potential to work like this. Thapliyal and Ranganathan point in particular to the emerging technology of quantum cellular automata and show how their approach might be applied.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.4222: Reversible Logic Based Concurrent Error Detection Methodology For Emerging Nanocircuits
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    We did look at making computation powers more efficient from the bio perspective (efficiency of computations in brain). This paper was actually the base for our discussion on a new approsach to computing http://atlas.estec.esa.int/ACTwiki/images/6/68/Sarpeshkar.pdf and led to several ACT internal studies
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    here is the paper I told you about, on the computational power of analog computing: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0304-3975(95)00248-0 you can also get it here: http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/95-09-079.pdf
Nicholas Lan

prediction markets - 2 views

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    talking of interesting business models - > futures markets for whether or not despots will still be in power by the end of the year. Markets>Foreign Affiars/International security
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    "Challenge the Intrade Crowd with Your Wisdom"... Yeah...
Luís F. Simões

Coding for Outer Space - A Programming Contest | Google Lunar X PRIZE - 1 views

  • This weekend, programmers from all over Europe will be gearing up to compete in the 5'th Catalysts Coding Coding Contest (CCC'11). This year, the theme is Astronautics.
  • The competition is also open to online participants.
  • Individuals or teams of up to three people will be given a series of challenging problems that must be solved as quickly as possible.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As a contestant, you must conceive of a proper solution and produce the correct output in order to advance to the next level. How you get there is completely up to you. You may use any computational means at your disposal.
  • Online contestants will not be eligible for prizes – they compete for glory alone.
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    who is interested in following this a bit closer?
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."
Luís F. Simões

When Astronomy Met Computer Science | Cosmology | DISCOVER Magazine - 1 views

  • “That’s impossible!” he told Borne. “Don’t you realize that the entire data set NASA has collected over the past 45 years is one terabyte?”
  • The LSST, producing 30 terabytes of data nightly, will become the centerpiece of what some experts have dubbed the age of peta­scale astronomy—that’s 1015 bits (what Borne jokingly calls “a tonabytes”).
  • A major sky survey might detect millions or even billions of objects, and for each object we might measure thousands of attributes in a thousand dimensions. You can get a data-mining package off the shelf, but if you want to deal with a billion data vectors in a thousand dimensions, you’re out of luck even if you own the world’s biggest supercomputer. The challenge is to develop a new scientific methodology for the 21st century.”
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    Francesco please look at this and get back wrt to the /. question .... thanks
pacome delva

Physics - Atoms in a lattice keep time - 0 views

  • If your wristwatch was as accurate as today’s atomic clocks, it would not gain or lose a second in 80 million years.
  • The NIST group traps and cools neutral 171Yb atoms and loads them into a one-dimensional lattice, so that about 30,000 atoms fill several hundred lattice sites.
  • Lemke et al. compare their optical lattice clock with the current standard atomic fountain clock and find that the accuracy of the Yb lattice clock potentially challenges the current standard.
ESA ACT

Intel Announces Winner of University Notebook Challenge - 0 views

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    Pedal Power the Healthy Solution for the Energy-Efficient Laptop of the Future
ESA ACT

Live Insects Challenge Humans in PacMan - 0 views

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    Bored by the stupid virtual ghosts of PacMan?
ESA ACT

What are the greatest challenges to the advancement of science and research? - 0 views

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    Our entry may not have made it to the publication but perhaps the other opinions will give some food for thought
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