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your Ron Paul from yesterday ...

not surprising, just a google search on 'ron paul evolution' and boom first result: Ron Paul: I don't accept the theory of evolution http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/29/scitech/main20098876.shtml

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies - something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. "Simulation is the future of innovation"

enjoy ....

ok, but if we first have to define consciousness before starting dealing with any physics, isn't a large pause looming ahead, proposed by the author?

I kind of subscribe to Tononi's information theory approach to consciousness: http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full And of course the watered down wikipedia version for whoever lacks the patience to read the whole treatise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

The first complete theory of how plasmons produce "hot carriers" has been developed by researchers in the US. The new model could help make this process of producing carriers more efficient, which would be good news for enhancing solar-energy conversion in photovoltaic devices.

I did not read the paper but what is further down written in the article, does not give much hope that this actually gives much more insight than what we had nor that it could be used in any way to improve current PV cells soon: e.g. "To fully exploit these carriers for such applications, researchers need to understand the physical processes behind plasmon-induced hot-carrier generation. Nordlander's team has now developed a simple model that describes how plasmons produce hot carriers in spherical silver nanoparticles and nanoshells. The model describes the conduction electrons in the metal as free particles and then analyses how plasmons excite hot carriers using Fermi's golden rule - a way to calculate how a quantum system transitions from one state into another following a perturbation. The model allows the researchers to calculate how many hot carriers are produced as a function of the light frequency used to excite the metal, as well as the rate at which they are produced. The spectral profile obtained is, to all intents and purposes, the "plasmonic spectrum" of the material. Particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes "Our analyses reveal that particle size and hot-carrier lifetimes are central for determining both the production rate and the energies of the hot carriers," says Nordlander. "Larger particles and shorter lifetimes produce more carriers with lower energies and smaller particles produce fewer carriers, but with higher energies."

More than 40 years after a Soviet nuclear physicist proposed an outlandish theory that trios of particles can arrange themselves in an infinite nesting-doll configuration, experimentalists have reported strong evidence that this bizarre state of matter is real.

"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."

"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)

A nice programming guide explaining thoughts I often try to pass on

The fact that this article is written in two languages, one is english and the other one is russian...? I get the impression that russians are among the first to hit upon such barriers before the rest of us do, from scaling their programming to bumping upon theory of chaos etc etc Imho.

Showing why epycicles worked so well

I would troll the world and do a GR theory using epicycles :)

"Gravity spoils the symmetry regardless of whether magnetic monopoles exist or not. This is shocking. The bottom line is that the symmetry cannot exist in our universe at the fundamental level because gravity is everywhere"