Saturday 11 April 2015
Friday 10 April 2015
Genetics of Earth and Moon
"The giant impact theory echoes what we know about the formation of the entire Solar System, which coalesced from a disk of gas and dust around the young Sun. The Earth and the other planets grew in a series of collisions, starting from dust particles and culminating in massive impacts between planet-sized bodies. The last giant impact involving the growing Earth may have spawned the Moon by creating a disk of rocky debris in orbit around the planet. The giant impact model has become so popular that the two bodies involved in the impact even have names: the proto-Earth (the progenitor of Earth) and Theia (the impacting body, named for the Greek goddess who was the mother of the Moon)....
In the giant impact theory, the proto-Earth and Theia are generally assumed to have had different oxygen isotope signatures. That’s because each planet’s signature is determined by its orbit; presumably, the only way to get nearly identical signatures is for two planets to form on nearly the same orbit, which does not fit with how we think planets grow. So if Earth and Theia had different fingerprints, why do the Earth and Moon share the same one?" (source)
In the giant impact theory, the proto-Earth and Theia are generally assumed to have had different oxygen isotope signatures. That’s because each planet’s signature is determined by its orbit; presumably, the only way to get nearly identical signatures is for two planets to form on nearly the same orbit, which does not fit with how we think planets grow. So if Earth and Theia had different fingerprints, why do the Earth and Moon share the same one?" (source)
The Unaware
“In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved,” wrote a team of researchers led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doctoral student Motahhare Eslami, in a new paper on Facebook’s news feed algorithm.
The new qualitative research study sampled 40 Facebook users and ran them through an in-depth examination of the ways that Facebook filters their experience. Twenty-five of the users—or more than 60 percent — had no idea that there even was a filtering algorithm, let alone one that looks at more than a thousand data signals to determine what to show a user. The researchers termed these innocent users “the unaware.” (source)
The new qualitative research study sampled 40 Facebook users and ran them through an in-depth examination of the ways that Facebook filters their experience. Twenty-five of the users—or more than 60 percent — had no idea that there even was a filtering algorithm, let alone one that looks at more than a thousand data signals to determine what to show a user. The researchers termed these innocent users “the unaware.” (source)
Wednesday 8 April 2015
Tuesday 7 April 2015
Iran Nuclear Deal
"Under this agreement, however, Iran will only be permitted to enrich uranium with 5060 IR-1 machines at Natanz, which means the P-5+1 has frozen Iran’s enrichment program at existing levels for the next ten years. Not only are the IR-1 centrifuges woefully out of date and prone to high failure rates, Iran has been using these machines for almost a full decade. In other words, it has nothing further to learn from continued enrichment with this technology, and the next decade becomes a “lost decade” when it comes to the modernization of Iran’s enrichment program." (source)
Monday 6 April 2015
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