Sunday Morning Illusion - Mad Art Lab. A brilliant set of observations from Peter van der Helm. See the full paper here from Unless otherwise stated, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution to MadArtLab.com. Polymer Journal | Self-Assembled Materials Special Issue and Web Focus. Self-Assembled Materials Recently, polymers have attracted a great deal of attention as functional materials in the fields of electronic, optical, photochemical, and energy devices, as well as being used as environmental materials and in bio-applications. The June special issue of Polymer Journal on Self-Assembled Materials will cover a variety of materials, including polymers, polymer/inorganic hybrids, assemblies of low molecular weight compounds, and nanoparticles. Interdisciplinary research involving polymers and other materials is expected to uncover science that will facilitate new frontiers of innovation in the field of polymeric and self-assembled materials.
Prior to the full compilation of the special issue on Self-Assembled Materials, we are proud to introduce a collection of featured review articles on Self-Assembled Materials. Featured Articles include: DNA nanostructures as scaffolds for metal nanoparticles Akinori Kuzuya and Yuichi Ohya. Why the euro went nuclear. It is fascinating to see the degree to which finance is now being discussed using phrases drawn from the science of atoms Will 2012 be the year of financial “meltdown” in Europe?
Could bad policy decisions create a “chain reaction” as investors panic about banks’ “toxic assets”? If so, will Europe’s banks turn “radioactive”, spreading “fallout” across global markets? Or will the problem be “contained” as “explosions” are “defused”? These questions are weighing on investors’ minds right now. But amid all the arguments about economics, it is worth thinking not just about the raw numbers – but also the language being used.
After months of rolling crises, I (like most people) have become almost inured to the words being bandied about; in the wake of 2011, disaster headlines have lost their shock appeal. I recently attended an interdisciplinary conference to discuss systemic risk in different fields of 21st-century life. Why? For the moment, there is still little sign of this occurring. Bosón de Higgs. Una explicación para cualquiera. A estas alturas del verano todo el mundo ha oído hablar del bosón de Higgs. En raras ocasiones un asunto tan imbricado de la Ciencia Base aflora a la superficie mediática, y aún más exótico es que esto ocurra en campos tan desconocidos como la Física Teórica y la Física de Partículas. Así que a los chalaos que nos apasionan estos asuntos asistimos encantados de ver que por unos días o semanas, asuntos como el Modelo Estándar o el bosón de Higgs están en boca de propios y extraños.
Encantados… y también espeluznados por el churrimerinismo despiadado con que se abordan los temas científicos en los medios generalistas, algo que por otro lado no nos sorprende después de años de seguir el absurdo epistemológico del Cambio Climático. Y no será por falta de buena información en Internet para todos los niveles de conocimiento. 1.- ¿Qué se investiga en el CERN? Básicamente Física de Partículas, esa parte de la Ciencia que estudia los constituyentes fundamentales de la materia. Rotundamente no.
Causes of Death in the United States, 1900 vs. 2010. Does 5-sigma = discovery? Yesterday, CERN scientists announced that they had "clear signs of a new particle," after a lengthy search for confirmation of the Higgs boson. Although scientists don't know how all of the properties of this new particle will match up with theoretical predictions, everyone's excited about this discovery. Researchers from both the CMS and ATLAS experiments emphasized that these were "5-sigma signals," at 125 and 126 GeV for CMS and ATLAS, respectively.
But what does a 5-sigma result mean, and why do particle physicists use this as a benchmark for discoveries? To answer these questions, we'll have to look at one of the statistician's oldest friends and C-student's worst enemies: the normal distribution or bell curve. The normal distribution is the most familiar class of statistical distributions, and it consistently rears its head in a number of sciences including physics.
As you can see in the graph above, the normal distribution takes the shape of a bell that quickly tapers off. Leaping Shampoo. Para qué le sirve a un investigador científico estar en Twitter. Hay dos tipos de científicos que publican sus artículos en ArXiv, los altruistas y los egoístas. Los primeros lo hacen para que el mayor número de personas pueda leer sus artículos gratis. Los segundos saben que los artículos que aparecen en ArXiv tienen una mayor probabilidad de ser citados y tener un mayor impacto. Estos últimos deberían apuntarse también a Twitter y otras redes sociales. Los estudios bibliométricos indican que los artículos que aparecen citados muchas veces en Twitter reciben un mayor número de descargas en ArXiv, un mayor número de citas y alcanzan un mayor impacto.
La visión de los científicos desde su “torre de marfil” es que los investigadores deciden de forma experta y racional sobre qué publicar, qué leer y a quién citar. El estudio considera 4606 artículos científicos aparecidos en arXiv entre octubre de 2010 y abril de 2011. Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access. 26 October 2011 Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available. The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665.
Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal. Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day. Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution.
Search the journal archive here. Doctorow: La guerra del copyright es solo la versión beta de lo que viene. El Chaos Computer Club celebró en Berlín la edición número 28 de su legendario Chaos Communication Congress. Como siempre, conseguir un boleto fue una verdadera odisea pero afortunamente y por tercer año consecutivo, tuve la gran suerte de asistir a uno de los eventos hacker más influyentes e interesantes que existen en torno a la convergencia de sociedad, utopía, política, información y tecnología en Europa.
Bajo el tema de “Behind Enemy Lines”, este año la conferencia se concentró en gran medida en abordar los ataques a la libertad de expresión, las armas digitales producidas por países “democráticos” y comercializadas en régimenes autoritarios y la discusión acerca de la ficción en torno a la llamada cyberseguridad que se ha propagado a raíz de las protestas en Medio Oriente, el aumento del secretismo gubernamental (y los leaks de respuesta) y el incremento de la corrupción institucional en torno a las legislaciones de internet (o bien, copyright). Imagénes Geraldine Juárez / ALT1040. [1111.3328] The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically.
Hard Candy Chemistry [SCIENCE!] Want Smarter Kids? Space Them (At Least) Two Years Apart. (iStockphoto) A new study (PDF here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced more than two years apart have higher reading and math scores than children born closer together. The positive effects were seen only in older siblings, not in younger ones.
The authors attribute at least part of the difference to older children getting more of their parents’ time during the first formative years of their lives before a younger sibling comes along. The paper is set to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Human Resources. Here’s the abstract: This paper investigates the effect of the age difference between siblings (spacing) on educational achievement. The paper fills in one of the few remaining gaps in the large body of economic research that’s been done on family structure and children’s outcomes. In Israel, a New Approach to Organ Donation.
Umami. Tomatoes are rich in umami components A loanword from the Japanese (うま味?) , umami can be translated as "pleasant savory taste".[4] This particular writing was chosen by Professor Kikunae Ikeda from umai (うまい) "delicious" and mi (味) "taste". The kanji 旨味 are used for a more general sense of a food as delicious. People taste umami through receptors for glutamate, commonly found in its salt form as the food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG).[5] For that reason, scientists consider umami to be distinct from saltiness.[6] Background[edit] Discovery[edit] Umami was first scientifically identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda,[17] a professor of the Tokyo Imperial University.
Professor Shintaro Kodama, a disciple of Ikeda, discovered in 1913 that dried bonito flakes contained another umami substance.[18] This was the ribonucleotide IMP. Properties of umami taste[edit] Umami has a mild but lasting aftertaste that is difficult to describe. Foods rich in umami[edit] Taste receptors[edit] References[edit]
Ley de Benford. La ley de Benford, también conocida como la ley del primer dígito, asegura que, en los números que existen en la vida real, la primera cifra es 1 con mucha más frecuencia que el resto de los números. Además, según crece este primer dígito, más improbable es que se encuentre en la primera posición. Esta ley se puede aplicar a hechos relacionados con el mundo natural o con elementos sociales: facturasartículos en revistasdirecciones de callesprecios de accionesnúmero de habitantestasas de mortalidadlongitud de los ríosFísicaconstantes matemáticasnúmeros primos[1] Historia[editar] Obsérvese que como primer dígito no se toma nunca el 0. El resultado más llamativo es el predominio del dígito 1 con una probabilidad del 30% mientras que la del 9 no alcanza el 5%, valores muy distintos al valor equiprobable de (100/9) % que cabría esperar.
Formulación matemática[editar] De un modo similar se puede enunciar una ley para las tres primeras cifras, para las cuatro primeras cifras, etc. [1105.4714] Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Superconducting Circuit.