Month: November 2007
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The tricky task of river delta modelling
Geobods have a problem: they can’t model any geophysical process worth its salt on computer because of the complexity of the processes involved and the timescales over which they take place. It’s just too computationally demanding. One process in particular has defied attempts to model it: river delta formation. But Hansjorg Seybold from the Swiss…
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Solar System heading thataway
Take a look at the cosmic microwave background radiation and ya can see a slight bias caused by the movement of the solar system. Now Christopher “He’s Alive” Gordon at the University of Oxford and a coupla pals have worked out where we’re goin’ by estimating our motion relative to the CMB using Type Ia…
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The smoking gun that may prove our climate models wrong
If ya live in Europe, fall 2006 musta been one helluva season. Many climatologist worry that climate models severely underestimate the effects of global warming. The extraordinary temperatures recorded in Europe in Autumn 2006 might just be the smoking gun that proves that these models really do get it wrong, big time. Here’s what happened.…
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Breaking the Netflix Prize dataset
Hell, this is good work. In October last year, Netflix released over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 subscribers to their online DVD rental service. The company then offered a prize of $1million to anyone who could better the company’s system of DVD recommendation by 10 per cent or more. Of course, Netflix assured…
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Perfect steganography
Steganography is the practice of hiding a message within another object such as an image, video or audio file. In some sense, it’s akin to camouflage, a-lurkin’ and a-hidin’ behind an image. By contrast, cryptographers make no attempt to hide their work but instead merely encrypt it. “Steganography differs from cryptography in that the presence…
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Nuts ‘n’ bolts
The best of the rest this week from the physics arXiv An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything Imaging the Internal Structure of the Earth with Atmospheric Neutrinos A Novel Design of Dielectric Perfect Invisibility Devices Odyssey: a Solar System Mission Neural Synchronization and Cryptography Indications of a Past Flare of the Galactic-Center Black Hole
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How to maximise your PageRanking
Google’s PageRank system rules the web, right? This is the algorithm that determines how far up the list yer site appears in a given Google search. A better ranking can mean big bucks for some sites The PageRank algorithm is closely guarded secret. But a growing number of academics are trying to reverse engineer the…
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The frightening prospect of flu
Bird flu may get all the headlines but the number of deaths it causes each year is currently measured in hundreds. The real killer, the one that should set yer spine a-shiver, is ordinary fly which kills hundreds of thousands each year. With winter nearly upon us up here in the northern hemisphere, the spectre…
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Bent on plastic electronics
Ain’t we expecting alot from organic transistors: flexible electronics, inkjet-printed microchips and so on. But one reason that they’ve yet to hit the market big time is that their electronic behavior is hard to pin down and, even worse, seems to change with time. What’s going on? Bertram Batlogg and buddies from the Swiss Federal…
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A habitable planet in Libra?
Where are all them habitable planets that we gonna move to when Earth becomes too hot ‘n’ nasty for us? (By “habitable”, astrobiobods mean host to liquid water.) Turns out that a coupla good candidates are orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light years from here in the constellation of Libra (Gliese…