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.
Read moreAN INTERESTING NEW PATTERN IN THE PRIME NUMBERS: PARALLAX COMPRESSION
Shaun explained that he had developed a new algorithm (he calls it “Parallax Compression”) for wrapping the primes on a plane, and visualizing their distribution, inspired by the Ulam Spiral. Shaun’s algorithm revealed an interesting non-random, fractal-like pattern in the distribution of primes, that to our knowledge, had not been found before. It made it possible to easily see where there are regions of prime and non-prime numbers, anywhere on the number line, at any level of scale.
Read moreINTRODUCING 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).
Read morePHYSICS 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.
Read moreNASA ASKS FOR EUROPA LANDER SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS—AND THAT’S A BIG DEAL
NASA is in various stages of planning two multi-billion dollar missions to Jupiter’s intriguing, ice-covered moon of Europa. One, a flyby mission known as the Europa Clipper, will make dozens of passes of the moon down to an altitude of about 25km as it assesses the nature of the ice and the ocean below and looks for clues of habitability. A secondeven more ambitious missionwould seek to actually land on Europa, sample its ice, and look for signs of life.
Read moreINTRODUCING 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. Source: improbable.io
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.
Read moreTHE 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.
Read moreGARDENER: 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. Source: gardener.cloud
FIRST MEASUREMENT OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLE’S MECHANICAL PROPERTY REVEALS DISTRIBUTION OF PRESSURE INSIDE PROTON
Inside every proton in every atom in the universe is a pressure cooker environment that surpasses the atom-crushing heart of a neutron star. That’s according to the first measurement of a mechanical property of subatomic particles, the pressure distribution inside the proton, which was carried out by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The nuclear physicists found that the proton’s building blocks, the quarks, are subjected to a pressure of 100 decillion Pascal (1035) near the center of a proton, which is about 10 times greater than the pressure in the heart of a neutron star.
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