17981348
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techbeat writes:
As you read, your brain not only takes in individual words, but also combines them to extract the meaning of each sentence. It is a feat you take for granted, but it's beyond today's computer programs. Now their abilities may be about to leap ahead, thanks to a form of graphical mathematics borrowed from quantum mechanics, reports New Scientist. "It's important for people like Google," says physicist Bob Coecke at the University of Oxford, who is pioneering the new approach to linguistics. At the moment computers "only understand sentences as a bag of different words without any structure". The team plans to train the new system on a billion pieces of text, starting with formal, carefully written legal or medical documents and workng up to more challenging extracts such as ambiguous sentences or sloppily written pages on the web.
17844482
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techbeat writes:
Are the residents of the far reaches of the periodic table all around us? Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel claims that there are naturally-occurring traces of roentgenium, atomic number 111 — previously only made in laboratories — in gold. Uranium is the heaviest known naturally-occurring element. Heavier, "transuranium" elements have been made by fusing smaller atoms and nuclei together, and the superheavy ones exist only fleetingly. In 2008, Marinov claimed to have detected element 122 in a solution prepared from natural minerals. That was met with huge scepticism, with other scientists unimpressed by the evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
17844412
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techbeat writes:
New Scientist reports: During my time as an eager undergraduate mathematician, I'd often wonder what it would feel like to prove a truly new result and have my name immortalised in the mathematical history books. I thought that dream had died when I gave up maths to become a science writer, but now a theorem named after me is a reality – and I've got the certificate to prove it.While most mathematical theorems result from weeks of hard work and possibly a few broken pencils, mine comes courtesy of TheoryMine , a company selling personalised theorems as novelty gifts for £15 a pop.
17603574
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techbeat writes:
Have we ever made a supersolid, a ghostly, quantum form of matter in which a solid flows, frictionless, through itself? The debate rages on, as New Scientist reports. The first supersolid was reportedly made in 2004, but whether the researchers involved had simply misinterpreted their results wasn't clear. Had they instead made a different phase, dubbed a "quantum plastic"? Now the original researchers have new evidence suggesting that genuine supersolids have been made after all.
17563238
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techbeat writes:
A strain of Escherichia coli bacteria can now solve the logic puzzles – with some help from a group of students at the University of Tokyo, Japan, reports New Scientist. The team begin with 16 types of E. coli, each colony assigned a distinct genetic identity depending on which square it occupied within a four-by-four sudoku grid.The bacteria can also express one of four colours to represent the numerical value of their square. As with any sudoku puzzle, a small number of the grid squares are given a value from the beginning by encouraging the bacteria in these squares to differentiate and take on one of the four colours.The Tokyo team's sudoku-solving bacteria competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week.
17549178
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techbeat writes:
The building of a real-life version of Maxwell's demon – which can turn information into useful energy – hints at future nanomachines powered purely by information, reports New Scientist. Conceived by James Clerk Maxwell, the demon might watch a tiny ball on a spiral staircase, waiting for it to randomly hop up a step and then slam in a barrier to stop the ball moving down again. If the demon keeps doing this the ball keeps climbing — and gaining potential energy. Now researchers in Japan have used a tiny rotor and an electric field to construct a version of Maxwell's demon — and to confirm that the exchange rate between energy and information matches theoretical predictions. The feat also suggests a fundamental limit on the energy computers need to store information,
16679238
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techbeat writes:
A flake of exotic carbon a few atoms thick has claimed a record: the speck has been spun faster than any other object, at a clip of 60 million rotations per minute. Previously, micrometre-sized crystals have been spun at up to 30,000 rpm using an optical trap. It is thanks to graphene's amazing strength that the flakes are not pulled apart by the much higher spinning rate, says Bruce Kane at the University of Maryland in College Park. Spinning could be a way to probe the properties of graphene, or manipulate it in new ways.
16506332
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techbeat writes:
Forget Flatland, writes New Scientist. Several different quantum gravity theories all predict the same strange behaviour at small scales: fields and particles start to behave as if space is one-dimensional. It's an observation that could bring together several disparate attempts to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. To explain how dimensions could vanish, Steven Carlip at the University of California, Davis turns to the idea of "quantum foam", in which quantum fluctuations alter the geometry of space-time, rendering it choppy and inhomogeneous at small scales.
16454870
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techbeat writes:
The big bang machine may already be living up to its nickname, writes New Scientist. Researchers on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, have seen hints of what may be the hot, dense state of matter thought to have filled the universe in its first nanoseconds.
16079048
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techbeat writes:
"The labyrinthine patterns on the skins of some animals may be the result of interbreeding between two more simply patterned species," writes New Scientist. A Japanese team of researchers tuned parameters within reaction-diffusion equations, dreamed up decades ago by Alan Turing , the second world war code breaker, so that they produced the patterns of two spotted salmonids. The researchers "crossed" these parameters, producing a set of intermediate values, which they plugged these into the equations. The resulting in silico offspring had coats that matched those seen in real, hybrid salmonids.
15818624
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techbeat writes:
Empty space may really be empty, writes New Scientist. Though quantum theory suggests that a vacuum should be fizzing with particle activity, it turns out that this paradoxical picture of nothingness may not be needed. A calmer view of the vacuum would also help resolve a nagging inconsistency with dark energy, the elusive force thought to be speeding up the expansion of the universe.
