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How to bend waves to arrive at the right place

Waves do not always spread uniformly into all directions, but can form a remarkable “branched flow.” At TU Wien (Vienna) a method has now been developed to control this phenomenon.

In , the light wave of a laser beam propagates on a perfectly straight line. Under certain circumstances, however, the behavior of a wave can be much more complicated. In the presence of a disordered, irregular environment a very strange phenomenon occurs: An incoming wave splits into several paths, it branches in a complicated way, reaching some places with high intensity, while avoiding others almost completely.

This kind of “branched flow” has first been observed in 2001. Scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have now developed a method to exploit this effect. The core idea of this new approach is to send a wave signal exclusively along one single pre-selected , such that the wave is hardly noticeable anywhere else. The results have now been published in the journal PNAS.

Former Area 51 Scientist Discloses Projects That have Never Been Seen by the Public

https://youtu.be/e5nJA8Hkvyc

Space technology expert and former Area 51 rocket designer David Adair will show you visuals and graphics of what the Aerospace Community had intended to build in space with the Shuttle program. These projects have never been seen before or announced to the public.

Learn about: Space Stations, Space Manufacturing, Space Based Medicines and Micro-Gravity Processing that the Aerospace Corporations wanted to build but were told NO by NASA because it was ‘too much industrialization of space’. Prepare to be amazed at the possibilities that exist! Meet and hear from one of the most exceptional rocket scientists of our time.

Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Just Resuscitated Bitcoin

Bitcoin reached the highest value the popular cryptocurrency has had in the last 16 months — $11,251.21 — on Monday.

And Facebook is likely to blame. Analysts suggest that the social media giant’s recent unveiling of its own cryptocurrency called Libra likely bolstered investors’ confidence in crypto across the board, according to Agence France-Presse. Though Bitcoin never really recovered from its massive crash in late 2017, the recent resurgence is a sign that the cryptocurrency isn’t quite fading away as some believed.

The Universe is 14 Billion Years Old But Visible Universe is 92 Billion Light Years Wide

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old.

About five billion years ago, an energy field that we call dark energy became important. Dark energy is a repulsive form of gravity, which means that the expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating.

After 9 billion years of the expansion of space slowing down, it’s now speeding up.

Performance-enhancing bacteria found in the microbiomes of elite athletes

New research has identified a type of bacteria found in the microbiomes of elite athletes that contributes to improved capacity for exercise. These bacteria, members of the genus Veillonella, are not found in the guts of sedentary people.

By taking a closer look at the bacteria, the researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center determined Veillonella metabolizes produced by and converts it into propionate, a short chain fatty acid. The then utilizes that propionate to improve exercise capacity. The results were reported today in Nature Medicine.

“Having increased exercise capacity is a strong predictor of overall health and protection against cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and overall longevity,” says Aleksandar D. Kostic Ph.D., TITLE., a co-author on the paper. “What we envision is a probiotic supplement that people can take that will increase their ability to do meaningful exercise and therefore protect them against chronic diseases including diabetes.”

AI trained on 3500 years of games finally beats humans at Dota 2

By Timothy Revell

They say 10,000 hours makes an expert, but for video-game playing AIs much more is needed. After playing thousands of years’ worth of the video game Dota 2, artificial intelligence is now able to beat the world’s top amateurs.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer battle arena game. Two teams of five take on each other across a large map, defending their own base whilst trying to attack their opponents. It is the game that has the largest prize money of any e-sport, so there are many professional players able to play at a very high level.

What happened to cognitive science?

More than a half-century ago, the ‘cognitive revolution’, with the influential tenet ‘cognition is computation’, launched the investigation of the mind through a multidisciplinary endeavour called cognitive science. Despite significant diversity of views regarding its definition and intended scope, this new science, explicitly named in the singular, was meant to have a cohesive subject matter, complementary methods and integrated theories. Multiple signs, however, suggest that over time the prospect of an integrated cohesive science has not materialized. Here we investigate the status of the field in a data-informed manner, focusing on four indicators, two bibliometric and two socio-institutional. These indicators consistently show that the devised multi-disciplinary program failed to transition to a mature inter-disciplinary coherent field. Bibliometrically, the field has been largely subsumed by (cognitive) psychology, and educationally, it exhibits a striking lack of curricular consensus, raising questions about the future of the cognitive science enterprise.