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Showing posts from May, 2016

Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs

Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/return-of-incandescent-light-bulbs-as-mit-makes-them-more-effici/   Ever since the EU restricted sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs, homeowners have complained about the  shortcomings of their energy-efficient  replacements. The clinical white beam of  LEDs  and frustrating time-delay of ‘green’ lighting has left many hankering after the instant, bright warm glow of traditional filament bulbs. But now scientists in the US believe they have come up with a solution which could see a reprieve for incandescent bulbs. "The lighting potential of this technology is exciting." Prof Gang Chen, MIT R esearchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure in the glass they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost in heat, while still allowing the light through.

How I Designed a Practical Electric Plane for NASA

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-i-designed-a-practical-electric-plane-for-nasa To win a competition, a Georgia Tech student devised a fuel-cell plane to rival today’s best-selling small aircraft By Tom Neuman Posted 24 May 2016 | 15:00 GMT Illustration: John MacNeill Submitted to a NASA competition for students, the design for this electric aircraft had to meet certain requirements, the most important of which was that it could be manufactured within five years. If you fly one of today’s small piston-powered planes, you will burn many gallons of fuel per hour and suffer through the noise equivalent of a ride on a power mower. But unlike what you face while cutting your grass, if the engine quits, it means an immediate emergency landing at best and a crash at worst. Fortunately, it’s now possible to env

data satelit sentinel

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-2/Data_products https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/home http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36313251?utm_content=buffer009f8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/magazine/warburg-effect-an-old-idea-revived-starve-cancer-to-death.html?_r=0 he story of modern cancer research begins, somewhat improbably, with the sea urchin. In the first decade of the 20th century, the German biologist Theodor Boveri discovered that if he fertilized sea-urchin eggs with two sperm rather than one, some of the cells would end up with the wrong number of chromosomes and fail to develop properly. It was the era before modern genetics, but Boveri was aware that cancer cells, like the deformed sea urchin cells, had abnormal chromosomes; whatever caused cancer, he surmised, had something to do with chromosomes. Today Boveri is celebrated for discovering the origins of cancer, but another German scientist, Otto Warburg, was studying sea-urchin eggs around the same time as Boveri. His research, too, was hailed as a major breakthrough in our understanding of cancer. But in the following decades, Warburg’s discovery would l

XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way

http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in-matplotlib/ One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack. Well, "eventually" has finally come. Observe: In [1]: % pylab inline Welcome to pylab, a matplotlib-based Python environment [backend: module://IPython.kernel.zmq.pylab.backend_inline]. For more information, type 'help(pylab)'. In [2]: plt . xkcd () # Yes... plt . plot ( sin ( linspace ( 0 , 10 ))) plt . title ( 'Whoo Hoo!!!' ) Out[2]: <matplotlib.text.Text at 0x2fade10> The plt.xkcd() function enables some rcParam settings which can automatically convert any matplotlib plot into XKCD style. You can peruse the matp