Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s most famous atheists. An evolutionary biology at Oxford and best-selling author of The God Delusion — his new book ‘Outgrowing God — A Beginner’s Guide’ aims to inform young people about religion and atheism. He talks to Krishnan about why he wrote it, his passion for scientific truth and whether he thinks there’s life outside of Earth.
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Posted in space
Researchers discovered a star system with six planets which orbits in almost perfect rhythm…dubbed HD 158259 star is orbited by a super-Earth and five mini-Neptunes.
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Slack and Amazon announced a big integration late yesterday afternoon. As part of the deal, Slack will use Amazon Chime for its call feature, while reiterating its commitment to use AWS as its preferred cloud provider to run its infrastructure. At the same time, Amazon has agreed to offer Slack as an option for all internal communications.
“Some parts of Amazon had licensed Slack before, but this is the first time it will be offered as an option to all employees,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Make no mistake, this is a big deal as the SaaS communications tool increases its ties with AWS, but this agreement could also be about slighting Microsoft and its rival Teams product by making a deal with a cloud rival. In the past, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has had choice words for Microsoft saying the Redmond technology giant sees his company as an “existential threat.”
ESA’s Prometheus is the precursor of ultra-low-cost rocket propulsion that is flexible enough to fit a fleet of new launch vehicles for any mission and will be potentially reusable.
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Now that they exist it certainly will change the world.
Waste heat is all around you. On a small scale, if your phone or laptop feels warm, that’s because some of the energy powering the device is being transformed into unwanted heat.
It’s always exciting when you can bridge two different physical concepts that seem to have nothing in common—and it’s even more thrilling when the results have as broad a range of possible fields of application as from fault-tolerant quantum computation to quantum gravity.
Physicists love to draw connections between distinct ideas, interconnecting concepts and theories to uncover new structure in the landscape of scientific knowledge. Put together information theory with quantum mechanics and you’ve opened a whole new field of quantum information theory. More recently, machine learning tools have been combined with many-body physics to find new ways to identify phases of matter, and ideas from quantum computing were applied to Pozner molecules to obtain new plausible models of how the brain might work.
In a recent contribution, my collaborators and I took a shot at combining the two physical concepts of quantum error correction and physical symmetries. What can we say about a quantum error-correcting code that conforms to a physical symmetry? Surprisingly, a continuous symmetry prevents the code from doing its job: A code can conform well to the symmetry, or it can correct against errors accurately, but it cannot do both simultaneously.
By drawing inspiration from the structures and functionalities of squid skin cells, a team of researchers designed and engineered human cells that contain stimuli-responsive photonic architectures and, as a consequence, possess the ability to change their appearance and transmission of light.
Oligodendrocytes and astrocytes displayed more differences in the human evolutionary lineage than neurons as compared to similar cells in other primates. Credit: Pavel Odinev/ Skoltech.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have a utilization (or capacity) factor of 15–20% worldwide. We propose to enhance the energy yield in a software-defined manner by complementing commodity solar PV systems with cloud-based IoT-controlled reflectors. We also propose designs for brownfield and greenfield settings in solar farms. We study a number of practical engineering issues including effect of solar azimuth, shadowing effects, ground coverage ratio (GCR) tradeoff, constraints on angular control etc. Our designs can raise solar PV energy yield between 50–100% with modest tradeoffs on operational complexity, land requirements (ground coverage ratio) etc. The software-defined IoT control allows a variety of current and future operational or business constraints to be flexibly factored in to tradeoff these factors versus economic gain (eg: levelized cost of energy, LCOE). The paper presents both simulation and experimental evidence for our system. We are actively piloting this technology with solar PV developers and engineering, procurement, construction (EPC) companies in emerging markets.
