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Robots are learning to stick their arms into crowded spaces without knocking things over. Continue reading →
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A new website shows daily global mood swings over a five-year period as expressed via Twitter.
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The language of innovation often stresses disruption–eliminating inefficient industries and replacing them with more streamlined, technologically advanced versions. Nowhere is disruption more complex and important than in the energy industry, with implications for so much of the way that we live, affecting global industry, economics, and climate. A major focus of synthetic biology today is [...]
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Scientists from Microsoft Research have developed IllumiRoom, a Kinect-based system that blurs the lines between virtual and reality. Continue reading →
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ESA’s Herschel space observatory has exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant, ending more than three years of pioneering observations of the cool Universe. The event was not unexpected: the […]
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Extending current energy and efficiency laws past their sunset dates could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by an additional 5 billion metric tons by 2040. An analysis in the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2013 compares energy and carbon savings between existing policies, which have provisions that will expire, and an Extended Policies scenario where the laws [...]
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Here is what happened since the last Nuit Blanche in Review (March 2013). When adding the three feeds together, Nuit Blanche has a combined readership through RSS of about 2500. In light of the upcoming shutdown of Google Reader, I pointed to John Cook's crowdsourced answer in one of the traditional around the webs in 78 hours. Those "around the webs in 78 hours" posts are a compilation of other's blogs items of interest. It really is a blogroll of some kind, except more lively. I
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Affordable tech automatically animates paper creations, no puppetry skills required. Continue reading →
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No summary available for this post.
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Geneva, Switzerland (and environs) will host lots of Improbability during the next week or so: two events. Both events will be webcast. Soprano Maria Ferrante and pianist Alice Martelli will perform songs from Ig Nobel operas, at both events. Improbable Research at CERN I will do a TEDx CERN talk on the topic: “Why All Good, and Some Bad, Research is [...]
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A core definition of Britishness, the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially “under review”. But don’t panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a “systematic periodic review” of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British. Belying stereotypes of [...]
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Francis Bach just let me know of this upcoming meeting on Big data: theoretical and practical challenges on May 14-15, 2013 in Paris. From the meeting's page:
Science and business are becoming increasingly driven by large amounts of data. This creates new practical and theoretical challenges, at the interface between statistics and computer science. The goal of the workshop is to bring together world-leaders in all aspects of large-scale inference, including computer
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