News

Making Radio Chips for Hell

Mixer IC works at 500 degrees Celsius, so it can take the heat on the surface of Venus, inside a natural gas turbine, or in the bowels of a 6-kilometer deep oil well. There are still some places the Internet of Things fears to tread. Researchers at the University of Arkansas and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden, are building a radio for those places.

An Interesting New Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression

Introducing Git protocol version 2

Today we announce Git protocol version 2, a major update of Git’s wire protocol (how clones, fetches and pushes are communicated between clients and servers). This update removes one of the most inefficient parts of the Git protocol and fixes an extensibility bottleneck, unblocking the path to more wire protocol improvements in the future. The main motivation for the new protocol was to enable server side filtering of references (branches and tags).

Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics

Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. I also suggest that recent important empirical results, such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect supersymmetry where many expected to find it, question the validity of certain philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method.

NASA asks for Europa lander science experiments—and that’s a big deal

Introducing Thanos: Prometheus at Scale

Prometheus’s simple and reliable operational model is one of its major selling points. However, past a certain scale, we’ve identified a few shortcomings. To resolve those, we’re today officially announcing Thanos, an open source project by Improbable to seamlessly transform existing Prometheus deployments in clusters around the world into a unified monitoring system with unbounded historical data storage.

Mathematicians Disprove Conjecture Made to Save Black Holes

Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false. The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose.

The popular creation story of astronomy is wrong

In the early years of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler argued that the universe contained thousands of mighty bodies, bodies so huge that they could be universes themselves. These giant bodies, said Kepler, testified to the immense power of, as well as the personal tastes of, an omnipotent Creator God. The giant bodies were the stars, and they were arrayed around the sun, the universe’s comparatively tiny central body, itself orbited by its retinue of still tinier planets.

Gardener: Manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers

Many Open Source tools exist which help in creating and updating single Kubernetes clusters. However, the more clusters you need the harder it becomes to operate, monitor, manage and keep all of them alive and up-to-date. And that is exactly what project Gardener focuses on.

First measurement of subatomic particle’s mechanical property reveals distribution of pressure inside proton