L’isolement social agit sur le cerveau…
▻https://www.rtflash.fr/l-isolement-social-agit-sur-cerveau/article
Une étude réalisée par des chercheurs du California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a montré comment l’isolement social peut transformer le cerveau …
Consciousness Is Made of Atoms, Too - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/-consciousness-is-made-of-atoms-too
In “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” published in 1934, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll attempted to show that every animal creates a “world” (he called it its umwelt) from stimuli in the environment to which it responds. Illustration by Ivana Rezek / FlickrIn his first lecture on physics to freshmen and sophomores at the California Institute of Technology, in 1961-62, Richard Feynman said:If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in (...)
Study Links Gut Bacteria to Parkinson’s Disease
▻http://www.healthline.com/health-news/study-links-gut-bacteria-to-parkinsons
Genetics and environment are possible factors, but now researchers say gut bacteria could contribute to the nervous system disorder.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) published a report today in the journal Cell detailing their discovery of a link between intestinal bacteria and Parkinson’s disease (PD).
Changes in bacteria, or the bacteria themselves, contribute to — and may even cause — motor skill decline, the scientists concluded.
#flore_intestinale #Maladie_de_Parkinson
L’étude est accessible ici
Gut Microbiota Regulate Motor Deficits and Neuroinflammation in a Model of Parkinson’s Disease: Cell
▻http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31590-2
Consciousness Is Made of Atoms, Too - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/consciousness-is-made-of-atoms-too
In his first lecture on physics to freshmen and sophomores at the California Institute of Technology, in 1961-62, Richard Feynman said:If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. (...)
How #Comets are born
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/07/28/how-comets-are-born
This story is mirrored from the ESA Web Portal. Detailed analysis of data collected by #Rosetta show that comets are the ancient leftovers of early #solar_system #formation, and not younger fragments resulting from subsequent collisions between other, larger bodies. Understanding how and when objects like #Comet_67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko took shape is of utmost importance in determining how exactly they can be used to interpret the formation and early evolution of our Solar System. A new study addressing this question led by Björn Davidsson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA), has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. If comets are #primordial, then they could help reveal the properties of the solar nebula from which the Sun, (...)
The unusually high porosity of the interior of the nucleus provides the first indication that this growth cannot have been via violent collisions, as these would have compacted the fragile material. Structures and features on different size scales observed by Rosetta’s cameras provide further information on how this growth may have taken place.
Earlier work showed that the head and body were originally separate objects, but the collision that merged them must have been at low speed in order not to destroy both of them. The fact that both parts have similar layering also tells us that they must have undergone similar evolutionary histories and that survival rates against catastrophic collision must have been high for a significant period of time.
Merging events may also have happened on smaller scales. For example, three spherical ‘caps’ have been identified in the Bastet region on the small comet lobe, and suggestions are that they are remnants of smaller cometesimals that are still partially preserved today.
At even smaller scales of just a few metres across, there are the so-called ‘goosebumps’ and ‘clod’ features, rough textures observed in numerous pits and exposed cliff walls in various locations on the comet.
While it is possible that this morphology might arise from fracturing alone, it is actually thought to represent an intrinsic ‘lumpiness’ of the comet’s constituents. That is, these ‘goosebumps’ could be showing the typical size of the smallest cometesimals that accumulated and merged to build up the comet, made visible again today through erosion due to sunlight.
According to theory, the speeds at which cometesimals collide and merge change during the growth process, with a peak when the lumps have sizes of a few metres. For this reason, metre-sized structures are expected to be the most compact and resilient, and it is particularly interesting that the comet material appears lumpy on that particular size scale.
L’obliquité du soleil est causé par la Planète X
▻http://www.brujitafr.fr/2016/07/l-obliquite-du-soleil-est-cause-par-la-planete-x.html
Source de cette nouvelle : 15 juillet 2016 un document PDF du : Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 ▻http://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.03963.pdf En résumé , le premier paragraphe décrit très bien...
Fish School Us on Wind Power - Issue 37: Currents
▻http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/fish-school-us-on-wind-power-rp
As they drove on featureless dirt roads on the first Tuesday of 2010, John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, and his then-student Robert Whittlesey, were inspecting a remote area of land that they hoped to purchase to test new concepts in wind power. They named their site FLOWE for Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy. Situated between gentle knolls covered in sere vegetation, the four-acre parcel in Antelope Valley, California, was once destined to become a mall, but those plans fell through. The land was cheap. And, more importantly, it was windy. Estimated at 250 trillion Watts, the amount of wind on Earth has the potential to provide more than 20 times our current global energy consumption. Yet, only four (...)
#Silicon_army : le président de #Google devient (officiellement) conseiller pour le Pentagone
▻http://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/2016/03/03/32001-20160303ARTFIG00203-le-president-de-google-devient-conseiller-pour-le
Le ministère américain de la Défense embauche chez Google. Eric Schmidt, président de la holding Alphabet, qui englobe le moteur de recherche, va en effet prendre la direction d’un nouveau comité de conseil du Pentagone en matière d’innovation technologique. Il sera à la tête d’une douzaine de personnes et conseillera l’armée sur des domaines « très connus de la Silicon Valley » (…)
Le département de la Défense a aussi annoncé mercredi le concours « Piratez le Pentagone », qui offre une récompense pécuniaire à ceux qui parviendront à trouver des failles sur les pages Internet de l’entité.
Le communiqué : ▻http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/684366/pentagon-to-establish-defense-innovation-advisory-board
L’an dernier, le « Wall Street Journal » révélait qu’Eric Schmidt et Larry Page, co-fondateur de Google, s’étaient rendus à la Maison Blanche plus de 200 fois depuis que Barack Obama avait été élu.
▻http://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/021739515432-google-se-rapproche-encore-un-peu-plus-du-gouvernement-america
Résumé en deux tweets :
“There is going to be some technical minds who come in and giving me advice to be more innovative,” Carter says. “I am so grateful to Eric Schmidt for his willingness to do this. He’s the perfect chairman for this.”
▻http://europe.newsweek.com/us-defense-secretary-ashton-carter-doesnt-believe-encryption-backdo
A propos du concours de hackers : bug bounty et pentesting
▻http://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/quand-pentagone-recrute-directeur-google-et-offre-services-hackers-pour-pi
Le Pentagone organise ce que l’on appelle un “Bug Bounty” : cela consiste à inviter des hackers à identifier des failles de sécurité dans ses technologies, et à les récompenser quand ils en découvrent. Plus la faille trouvée est critique, plus la récompense est élevée. C’est une pratique assez courante chez les géants des technologies aux Etats-Unis, initiée par Netscape dès 1995.
Aujourd’hui, la plupart des grands de la Silicon Valley pratiquent le Bug Bounty afin de sécuriser leurs technologies : Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Paypal, IBM, eBay… Mais des entreprises hors du cadre strict des technologies s’y mettent également, tel United Airlines ou General Motors.
Cette approche de la détection de faille de sécurité connait un boom aux Etats-Unis depuis quelques années, car elle se révèle être un complément indispensable à l’approche traditionnelle, le pentesting, qui consiste à mobiliser un ou deux experts durant quelques semaines en leur confiant la mission de découvrir ces même failles. Avec un Bug Bounty, on peut attirer bien plus de monde, et par là même des compétences et des approches bien plus variées, reflétant la diversité que l’on peut trouver du coté des attaquants. Qui plus est, un Bug Bounty peut être ouvert de façon indéfinie, offrant une attention permanente, là où elle n’était que ponctuelle auparavant avec la précédente approche, le pentesting. Enfin, c’est une approche bien plus rationnelle en termes de ROI : plutôt que d’acheter du temps de recherche d’un ou deux experts, on achète directement auprès des experts le résultat de cette recherche.
Le fait que le Pentagone organise son propre Bug Bounty est en quelque sorte la validation ultime de cette approche de la sécurité informatique, qui fait appel à la foule sur le mode du crowdsourcing et de l’“économie collaborative”.
Aux Etats-Unis, c’est une pratique courante, et l’arrivée du Pentagone n’est que l’aboutissement d’un mouvement entammé depuis des années par tous les géants des technologies, alors qu’en Europe, cette approche de la sécurité informatique est apparue plus récemment. Deux plateformes de Bug Bounty on été lancées cette année en France : Yogosha et BountyFactory.
Cf. ►http://seenthis.net/messages/433852
►http://seenthis.net/messages/442383
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/447649
Increasingly eclectic Pentagon innovation board adds Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/07/26/increasingly-eclectic-pentagon-innovation-board-adds-neil-degrasse-t
The board now includes 15 members and is at full size. Other members named Tuesday include Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America; Milo Medin, Google’s vice president for access services, broadband and fiber network; Instagram chief executive Marne Levine; J. Michael McQuade, United Technologies’s senior vice president for science and technology. Adam Grant, an organizational psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School; Richard Murray, a bioengineering professor at the California Institute of Technology; Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar at Harvard; Danny Hillis, co-founder of Applied Inventions; and Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, whose focus includes biomedical and genomic research.
Carter announced in June that he had named retired Navy Adm. William McRaven, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Aspen Institute chief executive Walter Isaacson to the board.
Une planète géante découverte grâce à des simulations numériques
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/cosmos/article/2016/01/20/et-si-neptune-n-etait-pas-la-derniere-planete-de-notre-systeme-solaire_48506
Des astronomes viennent d’annoncer avoir découvert dans notre système solaire une #planète géante… dans des simulations numériques. Cette neuvième planète serait dix fois plus lourde que la Terre et mettrait 10 000 à 20 000 ans pour faire le tour du Soleil sur une orbite bien au-delà de Neptune, la planète la plus éloignée de la Terre.
Selon les deux chercheurs du California Institute of Technology (Caltech) qui ont publié leurs résultats dans The Astronomical Journal le 20 janvier, son existence permettrait d’expliquer des anomalies observées sur des objets transneptuniens découverts ces dernières années, tels que Sedna, découvert en 2003.
[...]
Néanmoins, cette grande planète reste invisible jusqu’à présent, même si les chercheurs estiment qu’elle pourrait être repérée par des instruments comme le télescope de l’observatoire W. M. Keck, à Hawaï.
Il faudra donc attendre encore pour savoir si l’histoire de la découverte de Neptune se répétera. Des anomalies sur l’orbite d’Uranus avaient permis, par le calcul, de prévoir l’existence de cette huitième planète au XIXe siècle.
Fish School Us on Wind Power - Issue 15: Turbulence
▻http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/fish-school-us-on-wind-power
As they drove on featureless dirt roads on the first Tuesday of 2010, John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, and his then-student Robert Whittlesey, were inspecting a remote area of land that they hoped to purchase to test new concepts in wind power. They named their site FLOWE for Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy. Situated between gentle knolls covered in sere vegetation, the four-acre parcel in Antelope Valley, California, was once destined to become a mall, but those plans fell through. The land was cheap. And, more importantly, it was windy. Estimated at 250 trillion Watts, the amount of wind on Earth has the potential to provide more than 20 times our current global energy consumption. Yet, only four (...)
Intrigué par le titre de la série All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace , je découvre ce poème écrit par Richard Brautigan en 1967
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan
▻http://www.brautigan.net/machines.html
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Le recueil qui contient ce poème porte la mention de copyright suivante
© Copyright 1967 by Richard Brautigan
Permission is granted to reprint
any of these poems in magazines,
books and newspapers if they are
given away free.
Il a enregistré ses poèmes ▻http://www.brautigan.net/recordings.html
▻http://www.brautigan.net/audio/listening/pill.mp3
(je reprends toute la piste, on trouve facilement des vidéos sur YT reprenant uniquement le premier poème)
Track 6: The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster
– All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
– December 30,
– A Boat
– Haiku Ambulance
– Death Is A Beautiful Car Parked Only
– Karma Repair Kit
– Crab Cigar
– Widow’s Lament
– The Pumpkin Tide
– Man
– Adrenalin Mother
– San Francisco
– 1942
– At the California Institute of Technology
– Xerox Candy Bar
– Alas, Measured Perfectly."
Interview sur une télévision suisse en 1983.
Il s’est suicidé l’année suivante.
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI8woHgQ0FE
Le titre de son poème est visiblement une source d’inspiration. Outre les documentaires présentés ici, on trouve.
Le nom d’un groupe : Machines of Loving Grace
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machines_of_Loving_Grace
Machines of Loving Grace was an industrial rock band from Tucson, Arizona. (1989-1997)
Je choisis Butterfly Wings , de l’album Concentration , 1993
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEt86vB1seU
Well, you can’t place faith in material things
Material things will fail you
A hurricane triggered by a butterfly’s wings
Your conspirators betray you
Don’t place faith in human beings
Human beings are unreliable things
Don’t place faith in human beings
Human beings or butterfly wings
Well, you can’t place faith in a new regime
That fascist faith will kill you
A hurricane triggered by a butterfly’s wings
Your conspirators betray you
Une chanson de Princess Chelsea , première piste de l’album Lil’ Golden Book , 2011
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Chelsea
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9hS6Udee8g
Even though we sometimes fight
We both know we’ll be alright
Slumber parties late at night
Me & You
We are machines of loving grace
So take my hand lets fly through space
We can save the human race
Me & You
Through the darkness sparks of light
Speeding asteroids hold on tight
In our spaceship late at night
I Love You
PS : vous avez compris que le site incontournable sur Brautigan est le suivant : ▻http://www.brautigan.net
Comprehensive information about Richard Brautigan, his life, and writings
Merci @simplicissimus... Lundi j’ai essayé de traduire « Machines of loving grace » mais pas facile, en fait c’est surtout « loving grace » qui pose problème. En discutant dimanche avec une californienne, elle me disait que l’expression n’était pas religieuse, mais plutôt un truc de hippie, une histoire de corps qui ne fait qu’un avec son environnement, à force de l’irradier de son attention bienveillante... #écologie
cf. ►http://seenthis.net/messages/76709 pour le doc d’Adam Curtis.
Via et par @shouhart, une traduction du poème de Brautigan :
Sous la haute surveillance de machines pleines d’amour et de grâce
Il me plaît à imaginer (et
le plus tôt le mieux !)
une prairie cybernétique
où mammifères et ordinateurs
vivent ensemble une harmonie
mutuellement programmée
semblable à de l’eau pure
effleurant un ciel sans nuage.
Il me plaît à imaginer
(tout de suite, allons !)
une forêt cybernétique
semée d’électronique et de pins
où les cerfs flânent en paix
au-dessus d’ordinateurs
pareils à des fleurs
aux pétales filés.
Il me plaît à imaginer
(il en sera ainsi !)
une écologie cybernétique
où nous sommes libres de tout travail
réunis à la nature,
mêlés aux mammifères
nos frères et sœurs
et sous la haute surveillance
de machines pleines d’amour et de grâce.
Le poème de Brautigan est largement commenté dans le livre de Fred Turner : Aux sources de l’utopie numérique, comme très significatif de la relation entre les communalistes et les technologies.
Gates Foundation backs toilet pioneers | Nature
►http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/gates-foundation-backs-toilet-pioneers.html
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the winners of this year’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, handing over a US$100,000 first prize to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for work on a solar-powered toilet (right) that recycles water and generates hydrogen and electricity
The Reinvent the Toilet Fair brought together participants from 29 countries, including researchers, designers, investors and representatives of the communities who will ultimately use the new inventions. At the event, Loughborough University, UK, was awarded the $60,000 second-place prize for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water, while the University of Toronto in Canada won the third place prize of $40,000 for a toilet that sanitizes faeces and urine, while transforming waste products into resources and clean water.