Category: At the seaside
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The secret of world class putting
Watch professional golfers putt and you’ll eventually notice three common features about their style, says Robert Grober, an expert on the physics of golf at the Yale University. First, the putter head always moves at a constant speed when it hits the ball. Second, the length of time the putting stroke takes has little impact…
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The telescope that Antarctica broke
First light from any instrument is always exciting but particularly so when exotic locations and exciting goals are involved. The CORONA experiment offers both. CORONA is a stellar coronagraph designed to spot extrasolar planets orbiting other stars. It is based at Dome C, some 10,000 feet above sea level in in Antarctica, a location that…
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What should robots do for us?
Robots have great potential for assisting the old and disabled (not to mention the rest of us) . But if you’re developing one of these devices, where do you start? What kind of assistance you should concentrate on providing? Young Sang Choi and buddies from the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology have…
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Simulating Sweden
If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes. But…
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Space Station simulator given emotions
Astronauts training to work on the International Space Station have to have mastered a mind-boggling amount of kit before they leave Earth. One of these devices is the Canadarm 2, a robotic arm used to manipulate experiments outside the station. On Earth, astronauts train on a Canadarm 2 simulator connected to a virtual assistant that…
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Reinventing the dismal science
The discipline of economics in crisis. The credit crunch has exposed many economists’ most cherished ideas for the nonsense they manifestly are. With its theories in tatters, what now for the dismal science? It looks as if the best bet is take a a few leaves out of some network science text books. Economies are…
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The strange right hand of the universe
Is the Universe right handed? If Michael Longo at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is to be believed, the answer is yes; and the evidence comes from the right or left-handed shape of spiral galaxies. Astronomers have images of many thousands of spiral galaxies. But classifying them as left or right handed is…
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Levitating gas pipelines
Great to see one of the arXiv’s most creative minds posting again today. Alexander Bolonkin–he of “In Outer Space without a Space Suit?” and “Floating Cities, Islands and States” fame–is back with another startling idea. Methane is significantly lighter than air and so could be used to levitate the pipes it flows through. These aerial…
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Two new SETI searches see first light
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is picking up steam. The folks over at the Berkeley SETI group now have 7 separate searches underway at infrared, visible and radio wavelengths. Today, Andrew Siemiona and pals outline the two newest programs which have recently seen first light and are hunting for pulses just a few hundred nanosceonds…
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The terrible truth about economics
“Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing,” begins Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, an econophysicist at Capital Fund Management in Paris. That’s something of an understatement given the current global financial crisis. Economic sciences have a poor record of success, partly because they are hard (Newton once…