Social science: The cost of children
Nature 499, 7456 (2013). doi:10.1038/nature12257
Authors: Ruth Mace
An investigation into the causes of the decline in the number of children being born finds that economic motivations are more influential than child mortality or social learning, but also reinforces the relatedness of these factors.
We present a stochastic model for amplifying, diffusive media like, for instance, random lasers. Starting from a simple random-walk model, we derive a stochastic partial differential equation for the energy field with contains a multiplicative random-advection term yielding intermittency and power-law distributions of the field itself. Dimensional analysis indicate that such features are more likely to be observed for small enough samples and in lower spatial dimensions.
UK scientists fear further cuts
Nature 498, 7453 (2013). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/498151a
Author: Daniel Cressey
Funding jitters rife ahead of government spending review.
Science prizes: The new Nobels
Nature 498, 7453 (2013). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/498152a
Author: Zeeya Merali
The launch of several science mega-prizes is making some researchers millionaires — but others question whether such awards are the best way to promote their field.
Jacopo.bertolottiI agree with every single word here (and it doesn't happen very often to me).
In the not too distant past, Congress decided that it wanted more direct oversight over science granting. Canada seems to be jumping on the same bandwagon, so maybe it's something in the water. Scientists were outraged, and there has been much written about how bad an idea this is. But most of the objections have centered on the expertise of legislators—or rather a lack thereof—while the problems actually run a lot deeper than that.
I don't happen to agree that political oversight should be absent from science. Taxpayers pay for science, so they should, through the political process, have some say in funding priorities. This idea can be seen in action in Europe, where science funding has been made largely subservient to societal needs. Funding priorities are set through a consultative and consensus-driven process that combines relevant industries, scientists, and relevant government institutes. Their recommendations are taken to the politicians, who either release the money or make recommendations for changes based on other considerations.
For instance, in energy research, fusion is often specifically excluded because fusion researchers draw on money through ITER, which is government funded. Essentially, everybody (except maybe the fusion researchers) wants to make sure that fusion research doesn't get two slices of the pie.
How drones made it easy for Americans to kill a particular person anywhere on the planet.
Editor’s Note: This story relies upon anonymous sources who could not have spoken on the record without prosecution or other serious repercussions. The author revealed their identities to MIT Technology Review.
Jacopo.bertolottimuahahah
The smartcards used to pay for public transportation in the Netherlands may now be hacked with an Android phone, according to a report from NOS.nl. The crack requires two free apps that allow the cracker to load the card with money and travel without paying anything.
NOS carries little detail on the nature of the hack, but Dutch hackers appear to have a somewhat long and storied history of cracking Netherlands’ smartcard, the OV-Chipkaart. The chip inside the card has been modified repeatedly by the card creator, Trans Link, but there is no shortage of tutorials on how to hack them, and there are plenty of stories about hacks that have taken place. There are also less technical Android apps to circumvent paying for transport, like OV Hacker, which plays the tone a Chipkaart would make when successfully scanned in order to trick bus drivers.
A research article from 2009 laid out how the RFID chip inside the card can be read with an NFC reader, decrypted with one application, and then reloaded with the desired amount by another application. The chip has been modified since then, but there’s at least one thread on the xda-developers forums where a user notes that his Android smartphone was able to read out the (encrypted) contents of his OV-Chipkaart with the NFC reader inside his phone.
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Jacopo.bertolottiTrivial in many senses. But the picture is still impressive.
Researchers demonstrate an invisibility cloak that can be scaled to almost any size and say it could be used to hide orbiting satellites
Nature Physics 9, 357 (2013). doi:10.1038/nphys2614
Authors: Q. Baudouin, N. Mercadier, V. Guarrera, W. Guerin & R. Kaiser
In conventional lasers optical cavities are used to provide feedback to gain media. Mirrorless lasers can be built by using disordered structures to induce multiple scattering, which increases the path length in the medium, providing the necessary feedback. Interestingly, light or microwave amplification by stimulated emission also occurs naturally in stellar gases and planetary atmospheres. The possibility of additional scattering-induced feedback—random lasing—could explain the unusual properties of some space masers. Here, we report experimental evidence of random lasing in a controlled, cold atomic vapour, taking advantage of Raman gain. By tuning the gain frequency in the vicinity of a scattering resonance, we observe an enhancement of the light emission due to random lasing. The unique possibility to both control the experimental parameters and to model the microscopic response of our system provides an ideal test bench for better understanding natural lasing sources, in particular the role of resonant scattering feedback in astrophysical lasers.
Jacopo.bertolottiThe debate about econophysics goes on
Open competitions can help find an optimal solution to a well-understood problem, but they are a poor way to innovate.
Open innovation contests are gaining popularity with companies. The thinking is that since not all the smart people work for your company, and technology is developing so rapidly, why not hold a contest to get the best minds competing to innovate for you? While 99 percent of the entries will fail, those entries aren’t on your company’s income statement. And when that 1 percent succeeds by pulling off a true breakthrough, then your company will be the big winner.
Author(s): J. R. Ott, M. Wubs, P. Lodahl, N. A. Mortensen, and R. Kaiser
We investigate cooperative fluorescence in a dilute cloud of strongly driven two-level emitters. Starting from the Heisenberg equations of motion, we compute the first-order scattering corrections to the saturation of the excited-state population and to the resonance-fluorescence spectrum, which bot...
[Phys. Rev. A 87, 061801] Published Wed Jun 05, 2013
Jacopo.bertolottiThis paper deserve a prize for the title!
Author(s): Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, and Itai Cohen
Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disorder...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 228701] Published Wed May 29, 2013
Jacopo.bertolottiFunny little paper. Not sure how it ended up in PRL though.
Author(s): S. B. Yuste, E. Abad, and Katja Lindenberg
Exploration and trapping properties of random walkers that may evanesce at any time as they walk have seen very little treatment in the literature, and yet a finite lifetime is a frequent occurrence, and its effects on a number of random walk properties may be profound. For instance, whereas the ave...
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 220603] Published Thu May 30, 2013
Nature Photonics 7, 454 (2013). doi:10.1038/nphoton.2013.95
Authors: Jung-Hoon Park, Chunghyun Park, HyeonSeung Yu, Jimin Park, Seungyong Han, Jonghwa Shin, Seung Hwan Ko, Ki Tae Nam, Yong-Hoon Cho & YongKeun Park
Nature Photonics 7, 473 (2013). doi:10.1038/nphoton.2013.108
Authors: C. Liu, A. Di Falco, D. Molinari, Y. Khan, B. S. Ooi, T. F. Krauss & A. Fratalocchi
Jacopo.bertolottiI will give this filter some serious thought
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