Indigo Renderer Forum

hi there, this thread to discuss about scientific publications of interest for you.

My exclusive source is the CNRS press page (The National Center for the Scientific Reasearch, in France. English references can be found down most articles). Feel free to add your own findings here.

PS: I apology in advance for the scientific approximations (bias) that I may induce. If you know better please share !

edit: I came to use varied sources finally, it's a big internet.

A Diagonal Approach to Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide: Organocatalytic Transformation for the Reductive Functionalization of CO2
french article

Qualified as « Very Important Paper » by experts of the Angewandte Chemie review.

Lateral thinking: A diagonal approach to CO2 recycling has been explored for the formation of both functionalized and energetic chemicals featuring a reduced carbon center. The strategy relies on the tandem use of a functionalization reagent and a reductant that can be independently modified to access a wide spectrum of chemicals from CO2. It is exemplified with an organocatalytic process to convert CO2 to formamides (see picture).

Wth is this about... two outstanding facts:

• carbon dioxide, normally captured by Nature can be captured artifically (and ie contribute to the reduction of the oceans acidification).
  recycling carbon can produce a variety of complex organical compounds such as... ethanol

Twice the green for your fuel !!!

The text insert into the image within the article stands:

no metals
no solvants
no additives
one single step
non-toxic reactives

The process is catalytical, meaning that agents are accelerating substancially the transformation without resulting transformed themselves. In this case the catalysts are enzymes, not platinum or other toxic materials. Apparently the required reactives (amines?) are non toxic and very common (cheap).

Well I think this is really a great news !

Skin cells of a 101 years old individual were successfully reverted to stem cells using a cocktail of 6 genes. Transplant rejection days may be counted...

I am wondering wether they could also increase the telomeres count. Controlling the telomeres might be the shortest way to "immortality". edit: they could it seems !

press article: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-11-01-rege ... cell-gift/
french

The network of global corporate control

The title of the linked article leads to the pdf.

intro wrote:We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player.

outro wrote:In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. [...] A relevant additional fact at this point is that 3/4 of the core are financial intermediaries.

Fly over the system, it's a big little world.

Bees.

Simple neural system, no articulated language yet able to levels of abstraction. I'm not sure wich is smarter between them and me, they got the setup right after thirty tries and I gave up at the second

What I got is that the bees were trained to acquire an "abstract language" then after that allowed them to make the good choice: getting one drop of sweet water for sure, instead of quinina in case of a bad choice.

Then, the images were changed only to retain some concepts within, and the bees did recognize the relations. Later on the changes were more complicated and the bees were following wisely. Contact established.

References down the article: http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/2581.htm

It makes this amalgam between a language and an articulated language. Bees language is primarily visual obviously.

This work [...] questions many theories in areas such as animal cognition, human psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Hm well.

Thanks to science we can add to the literature on zombies: they may heal wounds and live about two weeks !

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3 ... s1890.html

How cool is that ?

Accelerated single photon emission from dye molecule-driven nanoantennas assembled on DNA
The DNA strand is synthetical and just a matter of linking the two gold particles together with an atomic precision.

I want this kind of stuff for my mobile instead of cell-stressing EM bursts ! By the way let's shield all electric devices until they reach an efficiency worthy of the name. Damnit.

Attosecond lighthouses: How to use spatio-temporally coupled light fields to generate isolated attosecond pulses.

H. Vincenti et F.Quéré, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108 (2012) 113904. PDF.
Communiqué (fr).

This led me to that:

The human genome: a multifractal analysis.

Real-Time Parallel Processing of Grammatical Structure in the Fronto-Striatal System: A Recurrent Network Simulation Study Using Reservoir Computing.

This demonstrates that a recurrent neural network can decode grammatical structure from sentences in real-time in order to generate a predictive representation of the meaning of the sentences.

Wow. Robots will be trained to talk !
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0052946
fr: http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/2989.htm

A complement of information on iCub, the learning robot.

http://vimeo.com/51011081

"The D-Wave machine", she said, "was 3,600 times as fast as the conventional system."

A Quantum Computer Aces Its Test:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/0 ... -its-test/

I... ehw... oh, I forgot.

Light-bending black hole mimic is first you can watch (making light curve):
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... watch.html

Attractive photons in a quantum nonlinear medium.

Called a new state of matter, photons were paired into a 'photon molecule' as if they had a mass. Applications are notably expected in quantum computing... or light sabers perhaps !

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 12512.html Nature article (paying if not a subscribed reader).
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/star- ... ter-425388