Advanced Concepts Team

The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions. The reason why you shouldn't use Excel (or Numbers or OpenOffice or ...) without knowing what it actually really does!

"Despite years of promise, an odor-emitting component in devices such as televisions, phones, computers and more has yet to be developed."

"The Atomki group has produced three previous papers on their beryllium-8 experiments - conference proceedings in 2008, 2012 and 2015. The first paper claimed evidence of a new boson of mass 12 MeV, and the second described an anomaly corresponding to a 13.45-MeV boson. (The third was a preliminary version of the Physical Review Letters paper.) The first two bumps have disappeared in the latest data, collected with an improved experimental setup. "The new claim now is [a] boson with a mass of 16.7 MeV," Naviliat-Cuncic said. "But they don't say anything about what went wrong in their previous claims and why we should not take those claims seriously." One naturally wonders, he said, "Is this value that they quote now going to change in the next four years?""

MTA-Atomki A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say - if the finding holds up. Would be cool, after all the high energy physics being done to verify the SM it could be extended at the other end where nobody bothered to look ;)

"A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions" Machine Ethics is basically the return of philosophy through code. Here you can learn a bit about it, and help the MIT collect data on how humans make choices when faced with ethical dilemmas, and how we perceive AIs making such choices.

" The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today's nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy."

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view

A scalable quantum simulation of a molecule for the first time ever. It would finally enable practical simulation of "large" chemical systems. A research performed with Google and world class universities.

A team of researchers in TU berlin and Caltech used Schrödinger's equation to visualise superfluidic flow (fluids with zero viscosity). Smoke and dry ice are close to this state in nature. Strangely enough for an equation that describes subatomic particles, it works, and reproduces experimental results better that Euler and Langrange schemes.

Baratunde Cola would like to put sand into your computer. Not beach sand, but silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer to inexpensively provide improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices. The silicon dioxide doesn't do the cooling itself.

"But beyond its beautiful aesthetic, the pigment could help make buildings more efficient. This is because the pigment reflects a large amount of infrared light. As a result, a roof painted with YLnMn blue could help to keep buildings cool, thus conserving energy."

First experimental study of laser filamentation in the mid-IR.

"Media Lab's technique opens new frontier in 3-D printing."