Cool Science thread

[JimmyCarter]

Sounds like its still just rumors but...


http://gizmodo.com/rumors-are-flying...vit-1752259868

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time

[iceman]

winds: http://earth.nullschool.net

[Dantheman]

Big development in AI research
http://mashable.com/2016/01/27/googl.../#Qy3STYv2iqqT

[iceman]

It's just crunching numbers though ^^^ right? Yeah a lot of them and very fast but as far as I can tell it's just hammering the game with horsepower, not anything more "intelligent" than that.

[Dantheman]

Not according to the people working on the project:

"There are more configurations on the board than there are atoms in the universe," explained Google DeepMind researcher David Silver..."The game of Go is intractable to brute force search."

According to the Go Wiki page, in chess there are 10^120 possible games. In Go there are 10^761, which is an incomprehensibly large number. It sounds like they utilized some pretty high level machine learning that is potentially applicable to a vast array of uses that go far beyond a board game. Totally different approach than IBM used with Deep Blue. It's also noteworthy that two years ago it was predicted that it would take ten more years to accomplish this.

[abraham]

Yeah the go thing is way cool. Of course I still get ruined playing my phone on moderate but such is life.

[sb]

bummer to be that dude kild by metorite

[abraham]

Scottyb needs one of these for his home brewing!

Saw it in one of the nasa magazines. Mars tech -> brewing tech
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2016/cg_3.html

[sb]

Dood that's awesome

[Dantheman]

Sounds like its still just rumors but...

http://gizmodo.com/rumors-are-flying...vit-1752259868

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time

Presser scheduled for Thursday http://www.cbsnews.com/news/have-ein...ly-been-found/

[JimmyCarter]

Presser scheduled for Thursday http://www.cbsnews.com/news/have-ein...ly-been-found/

And it's confirmed!
http://gizmodo.com/holy-shit-scienti...f-g-1755465297

[sb]

It looks kewl but how does this affect my bacon?

[Dantheman]

So rad.

The source? A supermassive black hole collision that took place 1.3 billion years ago. When it occurred, about three times the mass of the sun was converted to energy in a fraction of a second.

That's just insane.

[PNWbrit]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...linical-trials

[Dantheman]

http://phys.org/news/2016-03-atmosph...batteries.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...re-ever-found/

[Dantheman]

http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/03/qua...nd-encryption/

[abraham]

http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/03/qua...nd-encryption/

Cool, I was talking with a quantum matter researcher about quantum computing over too many beers last weekend and the issue of getting the qubits to work together came up. As far as I can tell that has been an issue with the dwave system, that they are technically using qubits but they haven't been able to use them in a way that takes advantage of the quantum nature for calculation. I'm not convinced this is 'just' an engineering problem now, but it is very cool

[Mazderati]

Black. Very black.

[Meathelmet]

Black. Very black.

Vantablack.

And artist Anish Kapoor gets exclusive rights for it (for artistic use)...

[Dantheman]

Black. Very black.

Whoa.

[sb]

So is the meteor gonna miss us today?

[My Pet Powder Goat]

I like to be surprised

[BmillsSkier]

So is the meteor gonna miss us today?

Please, meteor hit us.

[old goat]

Please, meteor hit us.

Meteor winter. Yay!

[BmillsSkier]

Meteor winter. Yay!

I'd make bumper stickers, but what would be the point?