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is a groundbreaking weekly publication that provides a timely, concise, and understandable analysis of the scientific content and commercial potential of the most important translational research papers from across the life science literature.

maybe everyone else than me knows them already: nature has a series on the future of science.

A contribution to why we need the ACT, what science needs to proceed, etc.

Rock Festival as Human Experiment: Hip Hopping for Science

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

also interesting (for the Earth Science girls): Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, who studies how rocket plumes from Mars landers affect the Martian surface.

It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.

and how can we use this?

Yes, you read correctly. Apply current to your brain to get smarter. Ariadna anyone?

Alvin, the only deep-diving manned submersible used for science has been upgraded, allowing scientists to explore for the 1st time the depth of the oceans down to 6500m bsl.

More in the ethic realm, I once was in a talk by Ivan Schuller (http://ischuller.ucsd.edu/) where he revisited the concept of Langmuir's Pathological Science (http://yclept.ucdavis.edu/course/280/Langmuir.pdf), defined as the act in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions" providing a list of aspects common to fraudulent science. Unfortunately there is no video of this very interesting talk, but the slides are available here: http://ethics.ucsd.edu/seminars/seminars/2006/summaries/Pathological_Science.pdf

Hilarious critique to a quite important paper from Stanford trying to push the agenda of global warming .... "You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect."

also good overview: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

just a footnote here, that climate warming aspect is not derived by an agenda of presenting the world with evil. If one looks at big journals with high outreach, it is not uncommon to find articles promoting climate warming as something not bringing the doom that extremists are promoting with marketing strategies. Here is a recent article in Science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26612836 Science's role is to look at the phenomenon and notice what is observed. And here is one saying that the acidification of the ocean due to increase of CO2 (observed phenomenon) is not advancing destructively for coccolithophores (a key type of plankton that builds its shell out of carbonates), as we were expecting, but rather fertilises them! Good news in principle! It could be as well argued from the more sceptics with high "doubting-inertia" that 'It could be because CO2 is not rising in the first place'', but one must not forget that one can doubt the global increase in T with statistical analyses, because it is a complex variable, but at least not the CO2 increase compared to preindustrial levels. in either case : case 1: agenda for 'the world is warming' => - Put random big energy company here- sells renewable energies case 2: agenda for 'the world is fine' => - Put random big energy company here - sells oil as usual The fact that in both cases someone is going to win profits, does not correllate (still not an adequate statistical test found for it?) with the fact that the science needs to be more and more scrutinised. The blog of the Statistics Professor in Univ.Toronto looks interesting approach (I have not understood all the details) and the paper above is from JPL authors, among others.

"A new Angry Birds-style game is set to help launch a new understanding of quantum science. Some find the concepts of quantum science confusing or unintuitive. Einstein even called quantum effects "spooky." To help people better understand some of the core concepts of quantum science, the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo is launching a game - the Quantum Cats" Looking forward to see the ACT winning the Quantum Cats competition :)

From the section Science & Environment Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity. They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

Scientific use cases show promise, but challenges remain for complex data analytics.

The Nature paper this article is reviewing (behind their paywall) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-018-0075-8

New results in NLP might allow to automate scientific discoveries by data mining of papers. Work considers 3.3M abstracts from material science, physics and chemistry and claims to discover new materials before they are published later on.

ACT did that from diigo post digging in the retreat of 2014! Still without NLP.

That's cool! Didn't know.

A college course at University of Washington on "Calling Bullshit". We should invite them to give a lunch lecture at ESA... Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: * Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. * Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. * Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit. * Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit. * Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit. We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

love it: "Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit - and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument."