Advanced Concepts Team

After exploring the shrews' swampy palm forests habitat, the researchers also have a new guess about why the spine evolved: They suggest that the creatures might wedge themselves between the trunk of a palm tree and the base of its leaves, then use the strength and flexion of their muscular spine to force open this crevice, revealing insect larvae-a food source that other animals can't access. However, no hero shrew has yet been observed busting its back for a snack.

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music." -Betrand Russell

One of the feats: "The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet tens of light years away"

not entirely unexpected but some interesting points

if any of you happen to pass by North Korea, get me one of these ... probably the only tablet on the market with out an NSA backdoor - unfortunately it can't connect to the internet either ....

I am not so sure if its NSA backdoor proof (unless you mean no internet connection? :P), as it is build on Android OS (Ice Cream sandwich)

Thousands of cycling accidents were re-enacted using stunt riders and crash-test dummies to collect the specific movement patterns of cyclists in accidents. In parallel, normal cycling data has been collected using test cyclists wearing Hövding in everyday cycling. Based on this collected data, they have developed an algorithm that can distinguish normal cycling from accidents. As you don't want the 399GBP device to inflate when taking a sharp corner...

interesting blog entry on TOR and the NSA

on a somewhat related note. court document from the fbi agent that was chasing that silk road guy a friend sent me the other week. an interesting read if only because i found the content quite unexpected e.g. 2 pages of login instructions http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

if you ever wanted to know how the famous MI5 started ... in the mind of a paranoid novelist

I just love this sentence: " He gave in - and MI5 was set up - created in large part by the dreams of a socially excluded novelist, and the paranoid imaginings of the readers of the Daily Mail."

By reactivating a dormant gene called Lin28a, which is active in embryonic stem cells, researchers were able to regrow hair and repair cartilage, bone, skin and other soft tissues in a mouse model.

regrow hair???!!!??? :-)

Atmospheric rivers, short-lived wind tunnels are created in the upper troposphere and carry vast amounts of water. They 'fuel' from the tropical Pacific reservoir and cause heavy precipitation events and even floods to mid-latitude land, as soon as they encounter the Sierra mountains. The new finding is that two inter-hemispheric climatic oscillation modes allow for their creation, as soon as they are found in a certain phase combination.

Could we conceivably control these like we're thinking to do with taifuns? :)) Would be geoengineering at its finest

Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?

"I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed" Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\

The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.

At least we don't come up with this kind of crap!

OMG ... its coming ... the future we all have dreaded where in perfectly flat caribbean beaches underwater mines are growing like flowers

My daily read, a collection of blog posts related mostly to energy by UCSD prof Tom Murphy. Especially his experiments into home energy storage and his "do the math" attitude towards renewables are insightful and if not, then sometimes just plain funny.

nice one: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/#more-1414

Putting together the picture of how climate works. An informative slide that shows which are the climatic subsystems that can undergo(/have undergone in the past) bifurcations (Lenton et al., 2008 PNAS).

NASA answer to the big data hype

"The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.

They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.

smart idea

nice summary overview

Assuming the worst, Obama always has its handy antispy kit with him http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html?hp&_r=2&

Kudos, Netflix! If this is how you take care of your customers, you will have one more soon.

Okay, where can I buy one?