Computer Science / Engineering posts
- March 3, 2015
- 08:00 AM
- 9 views
Star Trek Phasers, Coming To Us Sooner or Laser
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
Can we make a Star Trek phaser? In a classic example of life imitating art, the militaries of many countries are actively pursuing such directed energy weapons. So far, we’ve developed high-energy lasers and masers, particle beams, and something that looks a lot like an aimed lightning bolt. But our versions are huge, what must be overcome to make hand-held versions?... Read more »
Shao, L., Cline, D., Ding, X., Ho, Y., Kong, Q., Xu, J., Pogorelsky, I., Yakimenko, V., & Kusche, K. (2013) Simulation prediction and experiment setup of vacuum laser acceleration at Brookhaven National Lab-Accelerator Test Facility. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 25-29. DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2012.09.053
Bartal, T., Foord, M., Bellei, C., Key, M., Flippo, K., Gaillard, S., Offermann, D., Patel, P., Jarrott, L., Higginson, D.... (2011) Focusing of short-pulse high-intensity laser-accelerated proton beams. Nature Physics, 8(2), 139-142. DOI: 10.1038/nphys2153
Oxborrow, M., Breeze, J., & Alford, N. (2012) Room-temperature solid-state maser. Nature, 488(7411), 353-356. DOI: 10.1038/nature11339
Peralta, E., Soong, K., England, R., Colby, E., Wu, Z., Montazeri, B., McGuinness, C., McNeur, J., Leedle, K., Walz, D.... (2013) Demonstration of electron acceleration in a laser-driven dielectric microstructure. Nature, 503(7474), 91-94. DOI: 10.1038/nature12664
R.D. Curry. (2012) Investigation of a toroidal air plasma under atmospheric conditions . Plasma Science (ICOPS), 2. DOI: 10.1109/PLASMA.2012.6383564
- March 2, 2015
- 11:55 PM
- 16 views
Short history of iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments
by Artem Kaznatcheev in Evolutionary Games Group
Nineteen Eighty — if I had to pick the year that computational modeling invaded evolutionary game theory then that would be it. In March, 1980 — exactly thirty-five years ago — was when Robert Axelrod, a professor of political science at University of Michigan, published the results of his first tournament for iterated prisoner’s dilemma […]... Read more »
Axelrod, R. (1980) More effective choice in the prisoner's dilemma. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 24(3), 379-403. DOI: 10.1177/002200278002400301
- February 28, 2015
- 04:42 PM
- 96 views
Coding Responsibly Part II: Keeping a Notebook
by Geoffrey Hannigan in Prophage
In my last post I started writing about the next step a coding student can take after learning the basics. This next step is of course learning not just to code, but to code responsibly. Last time I talked about using version control to keep track of code changes as you work through a project. For this next post, I want to take the conversation further by discussing...... Read more »
Perkel, J. (2011) Coding your way out of a problem. Nature Methods, 8(7), 541-543. DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1631
- February 28, 2015
- 09:15 AM
- 74 views
Five motivations for theoretical computer science
by Abel Molina in Evolutionary Games Group
There are some situations, perhaps lucky ones, where it is felt that an activity needs no external motivation or justification. For the rest, it can be helpful to think of what the task at hand can be useful for. This of course doesn’t answer the larger question of what is worth doing, since it just distributes […]... Read more »
Barton, N.H., Novak, S., & Paixão, T. (2014) Diverse forms of selection in evolution and computer science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(29), 10398-9. PMID: 25009183
- February 27, 2015
- 11:17 AM
- 76 views
How Deep Mind learns to win
by neuroecology in Neuroecology
About a year ago, DeepMind was bought for half a billion dollars by Google for creating software that could learn to beat video games. Over the past year, DeepMind has detailed how they did it. Let us say that you were … Continue reading →... Read more »
Mnih V, Kavukcuoglu K, Silver D, Rusu AA, Veness J, Bellemare MG, Graves A, Riedmiller M, Fidjeland AK, Ostrovski G.... (2015) Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. Nature, 518(7540), 529-533. PMID: 25719670
Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Alex Graves, Ioannis Antonoglou, Daan Wierstra, & Martin Riedmiller. (2013) Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning. arXiv. arXiv: 1312.5602v1
- February 24, 2015
- 10:56 AM
- 71 views
A Few Citizen Scientists Do Most of the Work
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
Nothing turns your internet procrastination time into feelings of goodwill and teamwork like a citizen science project. You can click through a set of penguin photos or moon craters and know that your data are contributing to real science. As more citizens take part, and more researchers discover the joys of free labor, these projects are gaining popularity. But not all citizen scientists pull their weight. In fact, most do nearly nothing.
Henry Sauermann, a management professor at the G........ Read more »
Sauermann, H., & Franzoni, C. (2015) Crowd science user contribution patterns and their implications. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(3), 679-684. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1408907112
- February 24, 2015
- 08:00 AM
- 54 views
Seeing Our Way to Invisibility
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
Is it possible to hide in plain sight? Star Trek had cloaking devices, and Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins had their magic cloaks. In real life, we can make things disappear too. Cloaking devices are quickly becoming reality, and we bend light to make them work.... Read more »
Choi, J., & Howell, J. (2014) Paraxial ray optics cloaking. Optics Express, 22(24), 29465. DOI: 10.1364/OE.22.029465
Fan, P., Chettiar, U., Cao, L., Afshinmanesh, F., Engheta, N., & Brongersma, M. (2012) An invisible metal–semiconductor photodetector. Nature Photonics, 6(6), 380-385. DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2012.108
Soric, J., Chen, P., Kerkhoff, A., Rainwater, D., Melin, K., & Alù, A. (2013) Demonstration of an ultralow profile cloak for scattering suppression of a finite-length rod in free space. New Journal of Physics, 15(3), 33037. DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/15/3/033037
- February 23, 2015
- 05:52 PM
- 52 views
Merging bacteria and solar technology to make biofuel
by This Science is Crazy in This Science Is Crazy!
https://thisscienceiscrazy.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/merging-bacteria-and-solar-technology-to-make-fuel/... Read more »
Torella JP, Gagliardi CJ, Chen JS, Bediako DK, Colón B, Way JC, Silver PA, & Nocera DG. (2015) Efficient solar-to-fuels production from a hybrid microbial-water-splitting catalyst system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 25675518
- February 20, 2015
- 10:52 AM
- 81 views
Video Tip of the Week: RStudio as an interface for using R
Although typically we focus on databases and algorithms in use in bioinformatics and genomics, there are some other tools that support this work that are crucial as well. The statistical software and computing tools associated with R fall into this category. Increasingly RStudio is being adopted by folks in genomics, and although we talked about R in the past, I hadn’t highlighted the RStudio interface before. But this really lowered the barrier to entry, and has changed the way to use R e........ Read more »
Racine Jeffrey S. (2011) RStudio: A Platform-Independent IDE for R and Sweave. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 27(1), 167-172. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jae.1278
- February 17, 2015
- 07:05 AM
- 88 views
I'll Beam Right Over
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
Star Trek’s 50th anniversary is next year. Wouldn’t transporting a person to the ISS be a great way to celebrate? Well, there are a couple of problems to overcome, but we’re on our way. We have recently learned how to transport information and light from one place to another, without it ever existing anywhere in between! And this will help us make quantum computers that will be able to transport all the information contained in every atom of your body.... Read more »
Filippov, S., & Ziman, M. (2014) Entanglement sensitivity to signal attenuation and amplification. Physical Review A, 90(1). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.90.010301
Ma, X., Herbst, T., Scheidl, T., Wang, D., Kropatschek, S., Naylor, W., Wittmann, B., Mech, A., Kofler, J., Anisimova, E.... (2012) Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward. Nature, 489(7415), 269-273. DOI: 10.1038/nature11472
Shomroni, I., Rosenblum, S., Lovsky, Y., Bechler, O., Guendelman, G., & Dayan, B. (2014) All-optical routing of single photons by a one-atom switch controlled by a single photon. Science, 345(6199), 903-906. DOI: 10.1126/science.1254699
Yokoyama, S., Ukai, R., Armstrong, S., Sornphiphatphong, C., Kaji, T., Suzuki, S., Yoshikawa, J., Yonezawa, H., Menicucci, N., & Furusawa, A. (2013) Ultra-large-scale continuous-variable cluster states multiplexed in the time domain. Nature Photonics, 7(12), 982-986. DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.287
- February 14, 2015
- 10:00 PM
- 133 views
Evolutionary non-commutativity suggests novel treatment strategies
by Dan Nichol in Evolutionary Games Group
In the Autumn of 2011 I received an email from Jacob Scott, now a good friend and better mentor, who was looking for an undergraduate to code an evolutionary simulation. Jake had just arrived in Oxford to start his DPhil in applied mathematics and by chance had dined at St Anne’s College with Peter Jeavons, […]... Read more »
Tan, L., Serene, S., Chao, H.X., & Gore, J. (2011) Hidden randomness between fitness landscapes limits reverse evolution. Physical Review Letters, 106(19), 198102. PMID: 21668204
- February 13, 2015
- 03:36 PM
- 108 views
Interstellar helps physicists research spinning black holes
by Dr. Jekyll in Lunatic Laboratories
There is a saying that life imitates art and while people like to disagree with the meaning of it, sometimes art can imitate life. For instance the team responsible for the Oscar-nominated visual effects at the centre of Interstellar, have turned science fiction into science fact by providing new insights into the powerful effects of black holes.... Read more »
Oliver James, Eugenie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, & Kip S. Thorne. (2015) Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar. Classical and Quantum Gravity. arXiv: 1502.03808v1
- February 10, 2015
- 07:00 AM
- 120 views
Sometimes Warped Thinking Is A Good Thing
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
As Star Trek’s 50th anniversary approaches, are we getting closer to traveling at light speed? Believe it or not – yes, we are. We have begun to understand and harness the power of antimatter, and the plasma bubble-driven warp drive has moved from silly idea to serious consideration – so much so that NASA has designed a warp drive ship, the IXS Enterprise, of course.... Read more »
S. Beghella-Bartoli, P.M. Bhujbal, A. Nas. (2015) Confirmation of Santilli's detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lens. America Journal of Modern Physics, 4(1), 34. info:/
Alcubierre, M. (1994) The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11(5). DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001
Ganiev, Y., Gordeev, V., Krasilnikov, A., Lagutin, V., Otmennikov, V., & Panasenko, A. (2000) Aerodynamic Drag Reduction by Plasma and Hot-Gas Injection. Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, 14(1), 10-17. DOI: 10.2514/2.6504
Ronan Keane, & Wei-Ming Zhang. (2012) Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization. J.Br.Interplanet.Soc. arXiv: 1205.2281v2
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- February 9, 2015
- 01:30 PM
- 109 views
Slime mould and researcher set to play piano duet
by GrrlScientist in Maniraptora
SUMMARY: A single-celled organism will perform a piano duet with a computer musician at Plymouth University on 1 March 2015. The public is invited. ... Read more »
Nakagaki Toshiyuki, Yamada Hiroyasu, & Tóth Ágota. (2000) Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature, 407(470). DOI: 10.1038/35035159
Saigusa Tetsu, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, & Yoshiki Kuramoto. (2008) Amoebae Anticipate Periodic Events. Physical Review Letters, 100(1). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.100.018101
Miranda Eduardo R. , Adamatzky Andrew, & Jones Jeff . (2011) Sounds Synthesis with Slime Mould of Physarum polycephalum. Journal of Bionic Engineering, 107-113. arXiv: 1212.1203
- February 8, 2015
- 03:11 PM
- 122 views
‘Virtual virus’ unfolds the flu on a CPU
by Dr. Jekyll in Lunatic Laboratories
The flu virus can be pretty nasty — it’s quick to evolve — which means yearly flu shots are needed and then it’s only a guess to which strain will be the most prevalent. Well new research aims to change all that, by combining experimental data from X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryoelectron microscopy and lipidomics (the study of cellular lipid networks), researchers have built a complete model of the outer envelope of an influenza A virion for the first time. So would that ma........ Read more »
Reddy, T., Shorthouse, D., Parton, D., Jefferys, E., Fowler, P., Chavent, M., Baaden, M., & Sansom, M. (2015) Nothing to Sneeze at: A Full-Scale Computational Model of the Human Influenza Virion. Biophysical Journal, 108(2), 31. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2014.11.195
- February 6, 2015
- 08:34 AM
- 168 views
Why do we have music? Can one trace the origins of musicality?
by Henkjan Honing in Music Matters
Why do we have music? And what enables us to perceive, appreciate and make music? The search for a possible answer to these and other questions forms the backdrop to a soon-to-be released theme issue of Philosophical Transactions, which deals with the subject of musicality. An initiative of Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), this theme issue will see Honing and fellow researchers present their most important empirical results and offer a joint rese........ Read more »
Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. (2015) Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), 20140088-20140088. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088
Gingras, B., Honing, H., Peretz, I., Trainor, L., & Fisher, S. (2015) Defining the biological bases of individual differences in musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), 20140092-20140092. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0092
Fitch, W. (2015) Four principles of bio-musicology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), 20140091-20140091. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0091
Hoeschele, M., Merchant, H., Kikuchi, Y., Hattori, Y., & ten Cate, C. (2015) Searching for the origins of musicality across species. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), 20140094-20140094. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0094
- January 27, 2015
- 07:30 AM
- 164 views
Star Date: Pretty Darn Soon
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
Star Trek celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2016. In preparation for the celebrations, we’re checking in on how close we are to making Star Trek technology a reality. The replicator made food and recycled trash, and later was used to make parts for the Enterprise. A machine fabricated what they needed on the spot. We have that now on the space station! Do you know how 3-D printing works and how we print parts, food, and even living tissue? Here’s how.... Read more »
Yu, A., & Khan, M. (2015) On-demand three-dimensional printing of surgical supplies in conflict zones. Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 78(1), 201-203. DOI: 10.1097/TA.0000000000000481
Murphy, S., & Atala, A. (2014) 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs. Nature Biotechnology, 32(8), 773-785. DOI: 10.1038/nbt.2958
Kolesky, D., Truby, R., Gladman, A., Busbee, T., Homan, K., & Lewis, J. (2014) Bioprinting: 3D Bioprinting of Vascularized, Heterogeneous Cell-Laden Tissue Constructs (Adv. Mater. 19/2014). Advanced Materials, 26(19), 2966-2966. DOI: 10.1002/adma.201470124
- January 25, 2015
- 09:19 PM
- 144 views
Coding Responsibly Part I: Version Control
by Geoffrey Hannigan in Prophage
As a result of the growing number of resources allowing everyone to learn how to code, as well as numerous other awesome educational efforts, programming is steadily growing in popularity and accessibility...... Read more »
Perkel, J. (2011) Coding your way out of a problem. Nature Methods, 8(7), 541-543. DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1631
- January 13, 2015
- 02:01 PM
- 161 views
Publishing to Keep up with Ebola
by Roli Roberts in PLOS Biologue
As you read this, thread-like viruses less than one micron in length are spreading through human populations in West Africa, taking lives, wrecking communities and generally creating havoc in the countries affected. Infection with the Ebola virus results in an … Continue reading »The post Publishing to Keep up with Ebola appeared first on PLOS Biologue.... Read more »
Drake JM, Kaul RB, Alexander LW, O’Regan SM, Kramer AM, Pulliam JT, Ferrari MJ, Park AW. (2015) Ebola Cases and Health System Demand in Liberia. PLoS Biology, 13(1). info:/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002056
- January 13, 2015
- 08:00 AM
- 215 views
Delicate Arteries Of Energy
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
As dependent on electricity as America is, it is surprising how easily it could be taken away. Do you know how electricity comes to your house? Here is the national electrical grid easily explained and the points at which it can be vulnerable to sun, weather, and terrorism.... Read more »
Paul W. Parfomak. (2014) Physical Security of the U.S. Power Grid: High-Voltage Transformer Substations . Congressional Research Service Reports. info:/
Bashan, A., Berezin, Y., Buldyrev, S., & Havlin, S. (2013) The extreme vulnerability of interdependent spatially embedded networks. Nature Physics, 9(10), 667-672. DOI: 10.1038/nphys2727
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