Followup: Sunspot groups loopy magnetism

post from Bad Astronomy on 20 April 2011 09:00:36 AM. © Bad Astronomy

Yesterday I posted a video showing a cluster of sunspots forming on the Sun’s surface. As it happens, a new video was released last night from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite showing this same sunspot group, but this time, along[...]

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Gotta Keep em Separated

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 20 April 2011 09:00:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

Even though oil and water don't mix, it doesn't mean that it's easy to separate the two once combined. Luckily, nanotechnology researchers from Michigan Technological University are working on a filter that "quickly and easily" does just that.Yoke Khin Yap and Jaroslaw Drelich have developed a

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The human skin condition

post from Top stories on 20 April 2011 08:51:15 AM. © Top stories

Credit: Wikimedia commons

Mother Nature gave us pimples, and then she made us self-conscious about them.

Humans are pimply. It's part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. While it's true that some form of acne vulgaris affects other species?it's been found in some Mexican hairless dogs and induced experimentally in rhino mice?acne is largely an affliction of our accursed species alone. (Somewhere between 85 and 100 percent of adolescents exhibit acne?and a significant minority of adults, too.) Why is the human animal so peculiar in its tendency to form volcanic comedones, papules, pustules, nodular abscesses, and, in some severe cases, lasting scars? According to evolutionary theorists Stephen Kellett and Paul Gilbert, we probably owe these unsavory blemishes to our having lost our apish pelts too rapidly for our own good.

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Robots take center stage at Stanford block party

post from Top stories on 20 April 2011 08:39:54 AM. © Top stories

They seem to do it all by themselves: vacuum, move ordinary objects from one place to another, even drive a car. But, behind every autonomous robot is a human, whether in the role of academic, industrialist or hobbyist. Those people creating the gizmos showed off their machines and the technology behind them at Stanford's second-annual Robot Block Party. Held on campus at the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, the event hosted about a dozen leading commercial robot designers, as well as researchers from Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Center for Automotive Research.

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Google's 27-language text-to-speech upgrade

post from Top stories on 20 April 2011 08:36:19 AM. © Top stories

Creating genuine artificial intelligence is one of the biggest challenges in computing. But it's nothing on getting a computer to sound like a human.

Having a computer read text in a lifelike and natural voice is so tough that for a while, work on it just stopped. "People have worked on these things for decades, and kind of stopped working on them because so little progress was made," says Jan Van Santen, a professor at Oregon University and Director of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding.

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Is Your Own Work Your Own Work

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 20 April 2011 08:00:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

The publicity surrounding recently uncovered high-profile incidents of plagiarism has focused people's attention on this increasing problem. The amount and variety of information available on-line and through other sources makes the crime easier to commit and more difficult to detect. After all, who

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How Are You adapting to Shorter Design Cycles

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 20 April 2011 08:00:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

IC design teams are constantly struggling with the challenge of shorter time to market at reduced cost and greater complexity. Which steps in the design cycle could be improved in terms of productivity to meet this challenge? What are the greatest obstacles to an IC design team's victory? What key t

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rethinking petroleum a little too hard, redux

Uh oh. Just when you thought that we were once again safe from the abiogenic oil theory I had to debunk last year, there’s now some theoretical chemistry which says that maybe, possibly, methane could form chains of hydrocarbons about 70 miles[...]

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http://worldofweirdthings.com/2011/04/20/rethinking-petroleum-a-little-too-hard-r
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