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MIT CityFARM at the MIT Media Lab

MIT CityFARM at the MIT Media Lab

Why you can’t trust research: 3 problems with the quality of science Traditional scientific communication directly threatens the quality of scientific research. Today’s system is unreliable — or worse! Our system of scholarly publishing reliably gives the highest status to research that is most likely to be wrong. This system determines the trajectory of scientific careers. These claims and the problems described below are grounded in research recently presented by Björn Brembs and Marcus Munafò in Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank. Retraction ratesRetraction is one possible response to discovering that something is wrong with a published scientific article. Retraction rates have increased tenfold in the past decade, after many years of stability, and a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that two-thirds of all retractions follow from scientific misconduct: fraud, duplicate publication and plagiarism (Ferric C. However, impact factor can also be illegitimately manipulated.

MIT Wants to Turn Everyone Into a Farmer With Its Food Computers In 2011, Caleb Harper found himself in Japan shortly after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima as part of a “motley crew” sent by MIT’s Media Lab who were tasked with finding creative solutions to problems created by the disaster. One of the things that became immediately clear to Harper was that the disaster had created a food crisis in the region. Not only was Japan already importing about 70 percent of its foodstuffs, but the rest of the world had stopped buying rice and other Japanese agricultural products out of fear of radiation contamination. To make matters worse, it was unclear whether it would be physically possible to continue growing food in the area around Fukushima due to salt deposits from the tsunami and the possibility of radiation contamination. “When I got to Fukushima, I realized that that part of the country is like the breadbasket of Japan, but it was a post-apocalyptic version,” Harper, the director of MIT’s Open Agriculture Initiative, told Motherboard.

Beyond the Moore's Law: Nanocomputing using nanowire tiles An interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from The MITRE Corporation and Harvard University have taken key steps toward ultra-small electronic computer systems that push beyond the imminent end of Moore's Law, which states that the device density and overall processing power for computers will double every two to three years. In a paper that will appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they designed and assembled, from the bottom up, a functioning, ultra-tiny control computer that is the densest nanoelectronic system ever built. The ultra-small, ultra-low-power control processor—termed a nanoelectronic finite-state machine or "nanoFSM"—is smaller than a human nerve cell. It is composed of hundreds of nanowire transistors, each of which is a switch about ten-thousand times thinner than a human hair. In the nanoFSM, these nanoswitches are assembled and organized into circuits on several "tiles."

Courtirey – La terre vivante Natural sense of touch restored with bionic hand - tech - 05 February 2014 Video: Bionic hand gives lifelike sense of touch We have the world at our fingertips. A sense of touch can sometimes be as important as sight, helping us to avoid crushing delicate objects or ensuring that we hold on firmly when carrying hot cups of coffee. Now, for the first time, a person who lost his left hand has had a near-natural sense of touch restored thanks to a prosthesis. "I didn't realise it was possible," says Dennis Aabo Sørensen, who is so far the only person to have been fitted with the new prosthesis. To restore Sørensen's sense of touch, Silvestro Micera at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues implanted tiny electrodes inside the ulnar and median nerve bundles in Sørensen's upper arm. The team then connected the electrodes to pressure sensors on the fingertips and palm of a robotic prosthetic hand via cables running down the outside of Sørensen's arm. Getting to grips Knowing how firmly he was grasping an object was a game-changer.

Home - Potag'Home First plastic cell with working organelle - Radboud University For the first time, chemists have successfully produced an artificial cell containing organelles capable of carrying out the various steps of a chemical reaction. This was done at the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM) at Radboud University Nijmegen. The discovery was published in the first 2014 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie, and was also highlighted by Nature Chemistry. It is difficult for chemists to match the chemistry in living cells in their laboratories. From left to right: substances are confined in small spheres (the organelles) and mixed with reagents and enzymes. A research team led by Jan van Hest (Radboud University) and Sébastien Lecommandoux (University of Bordeaux) created their organelles by filling tiny spheres with chemicals and placing these inside a water droplet. ‘Competing groups are working closer to biology; making cells from fatty acids, for example. Article in Angewandte Chemie Comments in Nature Chemistry

Yohan Hubert : cultivons la ville - Découvrir - Plantes & santé Plantes & Santé Vous pratiquez la culture hors-sol, dont l’évocation rappelle les productions sous serre souvent gloutonnes en énergie. En même temps vos projets se teintent de préoccupations écologiques. N’est-ce pas contradictoire ? Yohan Hubert Nous faisons pousser des végétaux en dehors de la pleine terre. Cela va de la simple plante en pot, jusqu’à des techniques extrêmement complexes qui permettent de cultiver une grande variété d’espèces potagères sur une surface limitée. P. & S. Y. P. & S. Y. P. & S. Y. P. & S. Y. P. & S. Y. Parcours 1998 Maîtrise des techniques de fertilisation hors-sol et initiation d’un programme d’expérimentation sur la fertilisation organique. 2000 Création d’un conservatoire de plantes endémiques sur une friche industrielle à Grenoble. 2004 Animation de modules pédagogiques « végétalisation hors-sol du bâti » au lycée des métiers du bâtiment Roger Deschaux. 2007 Dépôt d’un brevet sur la culture biologique verticale. Aller plus loin www.culture-hors-sol.org

Spin: The quantum twist coming to a computer near you - physics-math - 13 January 2014 (Image: Leandro Castelao) A mysterious quantum property is already harnessed in your hard drive – now it's set to take over the rest of your gadgets ONE foggy day in early December 1943, a giant awoke. Born in an engineering lab in north-west London, Colossus was the world's first digital, programmable electronic computer – a tower of racks and wires that ate its way through miles of punched-card instructions every hour. Its processing power would enable the Allies to quickly decipher messages from Nazi high command – and help them win the second world war. Computers have come a long way in the 70 years since, but deep down they work in essentially the same way: by manipulating electrical charge.

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