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Just a link to an upcoming event (April 14 – May 9, 2008) by the Max-Planck-Institut for complex system on Bio-inspired Complex Networks in Science and Technology, From Topology to Structure and Dynamics
According to world-nuclear-news.org today -on French President Nicholas Sarkozy`s state visit to China- a deal was signed which ensures that
France’s national nuclear champion Areva will build two power reactors at Taishan, China and undertake a feasibility study for a used nuclear fuel reprocessing plant as part of an Eur8 billion deal ($12 billion).
Areva are also to provide “all the materials and services required to operate” the forthcoming 1600 MWe EPR units, to be sited at Taishan, 100 km southwest of Guangzhou and 150 km west of Hong Kong in Guangdong province.
After about 10 years, the STIX fonts project published their fonts for beta testing today. Their goal
is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.
The fonts will be provided under a royality free license.
If we move around in space-time we can obtain much more information about the surrounding space-time than by just watching it. For example swimming is very different in a curved than in a noncurved space (-> here a website where observations are made how swimmers move around in various environments).
However linking sensoric information with motoric information, like in computer science applications is a very difficult task. The library on the website of David Philipona of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception has a good collection of links, like for example to the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological cybernetics with its famous virtual treadmill project cyberwalk.
The group at the Laboratoire did some works in order to find a mathematical formulation of how to gain information about the surrounding space via sensoric/motoric information, like e.g. in their paper
Perception of the structure of the physical world using unknown multimodal sensors and effectors
Todays title of the magazine nature reported about an experiment where the electron transport in a crystall could be observed within an range in the order of 10 attoseconds (10*10^{-18}s= 10 as).
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Scientific visualization from the past: In 1660 Andreas Cellarius published his Harmonia Macrocosmica. A beautifully illustrated star atlas. Here are nice scans of the plates while here and here are online browsable scans of the book. via the cartoonist
(a nuclear energy game, seen on Alte Schoenhauser Allee)
According to an article in the technology review the company NRG Energy “filed the first application for new nuclear reactors in the United States since 1978.”
Today Wednesday, Oct 3 the Wired Science Series premieres at 8 p.m. (east coast time?) on PBS. I am usually not announcing new TV shows on this blog, but looking at wired in general i think it will probably be a nice show which deserves more attention.
Among others the Wired Science show is intended for teachers in order to “electrify Science & Tech Instruction”. So if you have access to PBS hurry up, since as I understood the archived online versions are not free (?).
Moreover I would like to use this announcement as an introduction to a pledge for some help from you – the anonymous reader.
In an old randform post about solar cells I was writing a bit about the computer modelling of solar cells. In particular I mentioned that it seems that the involved models use mainly a theory which was to a great part developped by Shockley and Queisser in the 50/60s.
I try to stay up to date with what’s going on in the math and physics world by e.g. reading blogs of scientists. One of the probably most famous blogs in the mathematical physics world is this week’s finds by John Baez whom I visited on Friday.