Science
A unique robot with unique features Baxter is an entirely new type robot that is redefining the way robots can be used in manufacturing environments. It performs a variety of repetitive production tasks – all while safely and intelligently working next to people. How?
Rethink Robotics :: Baxter
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Reading Materials by Eugene Wigner
Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
Hashing out the classic question with Strouhal numbers and simplified flight waveforms.
Primary authors These authors contributed equally to this work. Rahul Sarpeshkar & Timothy K.
Synthetic analog computation in living cells : Nature
This story was originally published as a series of four articles. Although the series will continue, we thought that a revised compilation would make better reading for those who haven't read the whole series. One of the great untold stories in science is the process of science itself. I don't mean stories about what scientists have discovered and what those discoveries tell us; we (and many others) cover those every day.
Going inside the machinery and machinations of working in science
Gestion de Pannes : l'algorithme des Généraux Byzantins (Yann CEZARD, DESS TNI - Université de Montpellier II, décembre 2001) Introduction Ce rapport constitue une présentation de l'algorithme des Généraux Byzantins. Il se repose en grande partie sur l'article " The Byzantine Generals Problem " de Leslie LAMPORT, Robert SHOSTAK et Marshall PEASE [1] . Cet article a été publié en juillet 1982 dans la revue ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 4, No. 3. Nous ferons donc ici de nombreuses références à cet article.
Gestion de Pannes : l'algorithme des Généraux Byzantins
Emergence
Snowflakes forming complex symmetrical patterns is an example of emergence in a physical system. In philosophy , systems theory , science , and art , emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
Tragedy of the commons
In economics , the tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group's long-term best interests. In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin explored this social dilemma in "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the journal Science . [ 1 ]UXBlog | IDV Solutions' User Experience: Tornado Tracks
Got this data from NOAA via the spectacular Data.gov. It tracks 56 years of tornado paths along with a host of attribute information. Here, the tracks are categorized by their F-Scale (which isn't the latest and greatest means but good enough for a hack like me), where brighter strokes represent more violent storms. Here it is broken out by scale. Delicious poster print available here ; this version will have a set of insets along the bottom breaking out the storms by severity.
Wind Map
An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US. The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We've done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires :-)Origin-of-life researchers face a deceptively straightforward question: how did simple chemicals produce complex biochemistry? The complexity of this starts to come in when you consider the many complex biomolecules that would have been useful or essential to the first biochemical reactions. And it gets worse when you consider that there are lots of simple organic chemicals that plausibly could have been present on the early Earth. Figuring out which reactions to even start looking at can be a real challenge. The extent of that challenge was highlighted a few years back, when a Cambridge lab suggested most earlier researchers had gone down a dead end.
Simple reaction makes the building blocks of a nucleic acid
Linking simple chemistry to something like life
Origin of life researchers have made impressive progress in recent years, showing that simple chemicals can combine to make nucleotides , the building blocks of DNA and RNA. Given the right conditions, these nucleotides can combine into ever-longer stretches of RNA. A lot of work has demonstrated that RNAs can perform all sorts of interesting chemistry, specifically binding other molecules and catalyzing reactions. So the case for life getting its start in an RNA world has gotten very strong in the past decade, but the difference between a collection of interesting RNAs and anything like a primitive cell—surrounded by membranes, filled with both RNA and proteins, and running a simple metabolism—remains a very wide chasm. Or so it seems.“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Evolutionarily speaking, it’s a yawn of a conundrum. We know it was the egg, which evolved (with shell to enable a terrestrial lifestyle) some 300 million years ago, long before a chicken first clucked across a patch of open ground. In between the origin of the egg and the domestication of the chicken, however, there are plenty of other interesting features to consider. Take the feather.
Birds and the feather did not evolve together
150,000 cloud virtual machines will help solve mysteries of the Universe
When you're running the world's largest particle accelerator, smashing particles at nearly the speed of light to understand the Universe at its most basic levels, you'd better have a great IT strategy. That's why CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, opened a new data center and is building a cloud network for scientists conducting experiments using data from the Large Hadron Collider at the Franco-Swiss border. CERN's pre-existing data center in Geneva, Switzerland, is limited to about 3.5 megawatts of power. "We can't get any more electricity onto the site because the CERN accelerator itself needs about 120 megawatts," Tim Bell, CERN's infrastructure manager, told Ars. The solution was to open an additional data center in Budapest, Hungary, which has another 2.7 megawatts of power.History
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