This is a video entry in the Flame Challenge.
The Flame Challenge is a competition in which scientists across the world had to answer the question “What is a flame” such that an 11-year old could understand it.
This was one of my favorite entries.
NASA to Reveal Hubble Discovery of Milky Way’s Violent Fate
Figure: Galactic Cannibalism of two galaxies that wandered too close to each other’s orbit.
NASA will reveal new discoveries about the violent fate of our Milky Way galaxy on Thursday (May 31), the space agency has announced.
NASA will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Scientists will discuss new Hubble Space Telescope findings about the inevitable crash of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, which will occur billions of years from now.
“Because of uncertainties in Andromeda’s motion, it has not been possible to determine whether the Milky Way will have a head-on collision or glancing blow with the neighboring galaxy billions of years in the future,” NASA officials said in a media alert Friday (May 25). “Hubble’s precise observations will settle this question.”
Source: ikenbot
Antimatter-Powered Supernovae
The largest stars die in explosions more powerful than anyone thought possible—some triggered in part by the production of antimatter
SpaceX successfully launched its commercial rocket today marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station. The Falcon 9 rocket along with the Dragon capsule is loaded with the hopes and dreams of hundreds of students from around the USA.
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space ScienceEducation (NCESSE) in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is an important U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS)—America’s newest National Laboratory.
The SpaceX Falcon/Dragon ship launch successfully marks a new era in commercial space transportation. It will deliver cargo, for now, and astronauts later, saving money for NASA and the government.
Overview (of computing)
In the earliest days of computing, the game of chess represented a challenge to the science and research community who sought to explore the calculating capabilities of these machines. Chess, while a very structured and focused game, requires a certain level of intelligence that some humans never master.
IBM took on this challenge and Friday May 11, 2012 marks the 15 year anniversary of Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, and its victory to become a world chess champion.
Deep Blue was a highly powerful computer that was programmed to solve the complex, strategic game of chess. But IBM’s goal behind Deep Blue was a much grander challenge - it enabled researchers to discover and understand the limits of massively parallel processing and high performance computing.
Deep Blue’s legacy can be found in the way computer systems are used to automate and help humans with their decision making in tackling tough problems. If Deep Blue could explore up to 200 million possible chess positions per second, then couldn’t this deep computing capability be used to help society handle the kinds of complex calculations required in areas such as drug development, financial risk assessment, and extensive data mining? Deep Blue proved that industry could tackle these issues with smart algorithms and sufficient computational power.
Ultimately, the creation of Deep Blue helped pave the way for new kinds of advanced computers and breakthroughs such as IBM Blue Gene and IBM Watson. IBM Blue Gene, when it was introduced in 2004, demonstrated the next grand challenge in computing and was both the most powerful supercomputer and the most efficient, but it was built to help biologists observe the invisible processes of protein folding and gene development. Deep Blue was also one of the earliest experiments in supercomputing that propelled IBM to become a market leader in this space to this day.
15 years on the world has seen epic growth in the volume and variety of data that is being generated by the planet, so much so that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Continuing along the trajectory of using science and technology to tackle challenges such as making sense of the trillions of bytes of data in our world and mining it for information and knowledge, IBM developed IBM Watson. IBM Watson can hold the equivalent of about one million books worth of information. Yet its significance was not solely the amount of information it could process, but a new generation of technology that uses algorithms to find answers in unstructured data more effectively than standard search technology, while also understanding natural language. The promise of IBM Watson is being explored by industry today - as an online tool to assist medical professionals in formulating diagnoses and simplifying the banking experience by analyzing customer needs in the context of vast amounts of ever-changing financial, economic, product and client data.
Deep Blue can be thought of as the earliest pioneer in a new era of computing, laying the groundwork for a generation of computers and software that do more than compute – they will be able to sense, learn and predict – what can be termed as the cognitive era of computing. These smart machines and systems will be better equipped to handle the vast amounts of data now pervading our society and make sense of it to solve the latest challenges in our world, whether its predicting outages across the grid, to exploring the origins of the universe etc.
Source: ibmdeepblue15
Happy Birthday Richard Feynman!
The Higgs Boson Explained with Animation
Can’t tell your “God Particle” from your “Dog Particle”? Too many quarks making you quack? Feel like a Higgs Bozo? Here’s what CERN is looking for, and what it might mean, via an awesome animation.
A PhD Comics animation, that is.
Source: openculture.com
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by GCHQ.
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by the government’s communications headquarters, GCHQ.
It is believed Turing wrote the papers while at Bletchley Park working on breaking German Enigma codes.
A GCHQ mathematician said the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”.
It comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Turing’s birth.
The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at Kew, west London.
GCHQ was able to approximately date the papers because in one example Turing had made reference to Hitler’s age.
