Category Archives: STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

Math and the Best Life

Posted on by

If mathematics is a medium for human flourishing, it stands to reason that everyone should have a chance to participate in it. But in his talk Su identified what he views as structural barriers in the mathematical community that dictate who gets the opportunity to succeed in the field — from the requirements attached to graduate school admissions to implicit assumptions about who looks the part of a budding mathematician.

Source: Math and the Best Life — an Interview With Francis Su | Quanta Magazine

Japan plans supercomputer to leap into technology future

Posted on by

In the area of supercomputing, Japan’s aim is to use ultra-fast calculations to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence (AI), such as “deep learning” technology that works off algorithms which mimic the human brain’s neural pathways, to help computers perform new tasks and analyze scores of data.

Source: Japan plans supercomputer to leap into technology future

GE is building America’s first offshore wind farm with turbines twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty

Posted on by

GE and Deepwater Wind, a developer of offshore turbines, are installing five massive wind turbines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They will make up the first offshore wind farm in North America, called the Block Island Wind Farm.

Over the past several weeks, the teams have worked to install the turbines 30 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, and are expected to finish by the end of August 2016. The farm will be fully operational by November 2016.

Source: GE is building America’s first offshore wind farm with turbines twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty

Image Kernels explained visually

Posted on by

An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They’re also used in machine learning for ‘feature extraction’, a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the process is referred to more generally as “convolution” (see: convolutional neural networks.)

Source: Image Kernels explained visually

Lincoln Laboratory demonstrates highly accurate vehicle localization under adverse weather conditions

Posted on by

The reliance on static underground features is LGPR’s advantage as a complement to other localization methods, even in fair weather conditions. The use of a subsurface map reduces the need for continual modifications to high-resolution road maps. Fusing GPS, lidar, camera, and LGPR results yields a system that can accurately localize even when one of the sensing modes fails. This “fail-safe” capability will be necessary to the development of dependable autonomous vehicles that can handle demanding ground environments.

Source: MIT Lincoln Laboratory: News: Lincoln Laboratory demonstrates highly accurate vehicle localization under adverse weather conditions

Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

Posted on by

The puzzle that required the 200-terabyte proof, called the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, has eluded mathematicians for decades. In the 1980s, Graham offered a prize of US$100 for anyone who could solve it. (He duly presented the cheque to one of the three computer scientists, Marijn Heule of the University of Texas at Austin, earlier this month.) The problem asks whether it is possible to colour each positive integer either red or blue, so that no trio of integers a, b and c that satisfy Pythagoras’ famous equation a2 + b2 = c2 are all the same colour. For example, for the Pythagorean triple 3, 4 and 5, if 3 and 5 were coloured blue, 4 would have to be red.

Source: Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

There are more than 102,300 ways to colour the integers up to 7,825, but the researchers took advantage of symmetries and several techniques from number theory to reduce the total number of possibilities that the computer had to check to just under 1 trillion. It took the team about 2 days running 800 processors in parallel on the University of Texas’s Stampede supercomputer to zip through all the possibilities. The researchers then verified the proof using another computer program.

More than 1,200 new planets confirmed using new technique for verifying Kepler data

Posted on by

The Vespa technique works by comparing the details of a transiting planet signal — specifically its duration, depth and shape — against simulated planetary and false positive signals to indicate the type of signal the candidate most likely is. At the same time, Vespa factors in the projected distribution and frequency of star types in the galaxy from which the signal originated to determine the chances that a planet with the characteristics being analyzed would exist.

Source: Princeton University – More than 1,200 new planets confirmed using new technique for verifying Kepler data

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

Posted on by

The conceptual problems arise with momentum. The system’s total momentum increases as it begins to move. But where does this momentum come from? Shawyer had no convincing explanation, and critics said this was an obvious violation of the law of conservation of momentum.

Source: The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

McCulloch says there is observational evidence for this in the form of the famous fly by anomalies. These are the strange jumps in momentum observed in some spacecraft as they fly past Earth toward other planets. That’s exactly what his theory predicts.

Kepler Spacecraft in Emergency Mode

Posted on by

The last regular contact with the spacecraft was on April. 4.  The spacecraft was in good health and operating as expected.

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, detecting nearly 5,000 exoplanets, of which, more than 1,000 have been confirmed. In 2014 the Kepler spacecraft began a new mission called K2. In this extended mission, K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae, and many other astronomical objects.

Source: Mission Manager Update: Kepler Spacecraft in Emergency Mode | NASA

Also From: Kepler Reaction Wheel Failure Cripples Spacecraft, but Mission Thrives

To save on bandwidth, Kepler only downlinks data from the pixels associated with 156,000 target stars out of the millions of stars in the Kepler field.  Data from an “aperture” of pixels around each target star are downlinked to Earth, and computer programs on Earth measure the brightness of the star based on the light that hit the pixels in the aperture.  If the telescope pointing is not good enough to keep the target stars in their respective apertures on the pixels, it is impossible to measure the brightness of those stars with a precision of 20 parts per million.

Update From:  Kepler telescope readies for new mission after communications scare

Once the spacecraft checks out, Kepler will kick off its latest effort, looking toward the galactic center for planets whose gravity distorts the light from far more distant stars. This technique, known as gravitational microlensing, has been used with ground-based telescopes to discover about 46 planets, some of them orphaned from their parent stars. But the method is a first for Kepler, which searches for dips in starlight caused by planets crossing in front of their suns.