facility:massachusetts institute of technology

  • How #chat #api boosts the Engagement and Retention of Users
    https://hackernoon.com/how-chat-api-boosts-the-engagement-and-retention-of-users-646bb7bb1739?s

    Instant #messaging is a term that entered common usage during the 90s. The days of GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, Orkut, who can forget?But do you know that the actual concept of instant messaging dates back to the mid-1960s? The Compatible Time-Sharing Systems (CTSS) were one of the very first multi-user operating systems, created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Computation Center in 1961. They allowed up to 30 users to log in at the same time and send messages to each other. Those systems, which perhaps seems closer to emails today, had a lot of registered users from MIT and nearby colleges by 1965.Since then, we have come a long way as today we have multiple ways to communicate. In the case of user-user interaction, we have options like push notification, in-app (...)

    #in-app-messaging #chat-api

  • Big Tech May Look Troubled, but It’s Just Getting Started - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/technology/big-tech-troubled-just-getting-started.html

    Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, together generated $166.9 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2018 alone — up 24 percent from a year earlier, when the four companies hauled in $134.4 billion.

    “Much as people are now wary or even unhappy with the outsized power held by Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., they are simultaneously quite dependent on the services they provide,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Big Tech needs to be regulated, many are beginning to argue, and yet there are worries about giving that power to the government.

    “The government doesn’t have a good clue,” said Mr. Bajarin, the consultant. “They’re not even asking the kind of questions that would drive to regulation.”

    Which leaves regulation up to the companies themselves, always a dubious proposition.

    #silicon_valley #régulation

  • Mining in Space Could Lead to Conflicts on Earth - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/-mining-in-space-could-lead-to-conflicts-on-earth

    Platinum-group metals in space may serve the same role as oil has on Earth, threatening to extend geopolitical struggles into astropolitical ones, something Trump is keen on preparing for. Yesterday he said he’s seriously weighing the idea of a “Space Force” military branch.Illustration by Maciej Frolow / Getty Images Space mining is no longer science fiction. By the 2020s, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries—for-profit space-mining companies cooperating with NASA—will be sending out swarms of tiny satellites to assess the composition of hurtling hunks of cosmic debris, identify the most lucrative ones, and harvest them. They’ve already developed prototype spacecraft to do the job. Some people—like Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Sara Seager, former NASA (...)

  • Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/-your-brains-music-circuit-has-been-discovered

    The discovery that certain neurons have “music selectivity” stirs questions about the role of music in human life. Illustration by Len SmallBefore Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of people,” he says. With his club days behind him, McDermott now ventures into the effects of sound and music in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2015, he and a post-doctoral colleague, Sam Norman-Haignere, and Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive (...)

  • As towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left to fly blind
    https://www.statnews.com/2018/03/20/news-deserts-infectious-disease

    Epidemiologists rely on all kinds of data to detect the spread of disease, including reports from local and state agencies and social media. But local newspapers are critical to identifying outbreaks and forecasting their trajectories.

    On the map, Majumder saw every county without a local newspaper as a community where health officials and disease researchers could be flying blind.

    “We rely very heavily on local news. And I think what this will probably mean is that there are going to be pockets of the U.S. where we’re just not going to have a particularly good signal anymore,” said Majumder, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Majumder is a computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap, a 12-year-old disease detection project run by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital. The website uses nontraditional data sources — reports from local news outlets and social media platforms among them— to track global infectious disease activity in real time.

  • Harvard Thinks It’s Found the Next Einstein — and She’s 23
    http://secondnexus.com/technology-and-innovation/23-year-old-einstein/2

    At age 23, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is already one of the most well-known and accomplished physicists in the U.S.

    The Cuban-American Chicago native graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just three years with a 5.0-grade point average, the highest possible, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard with full academic freedom — meaning she can pursue her own study on her own terms without staff interference.

    Pasterski first attracted the attention of the scientific and academic community after single-handedly building her own single-engine airplane in 2008, at age 14, and documenting the process on YouTube.

    #femme #science

  • How Do You Say “Life” in Physics ? - Issue 50 : Emergence
    http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics-rp

    “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaptation,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned (...)

  • TEDxNYED - Henry Jenkins - 03/06/10 - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFCLKa0XRlw

    Une vidéo de Henry Jenkins lors d’un TEDx à New York en 2010. Sur l’usage de la culture populaire pour se mobiliser dans des actions civiques.

    Ajoutée le 13 avr. 2010

    Henry Jenkins joins USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MITs Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.

    #Henry_Jenkins #Culture_Participative

  • Is the staggeringly profitable #business of scientific publishing bad for #science? | Science | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

    The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

    [...]

    It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact #publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big #influence on where science goes,” he said.

    And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”

    • #Robert_Maxwell #Reed-Elsevier #Elsevier #multinationales #business #Pergamon

      With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

      #profit

      In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

      The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

      A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

      Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications

      It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

      Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.

      Scientific articles are about unique discoveries: one article cannot substitute for another. If a serious new journal appeared, scientists would simply request that their university library subscribe to that one as well. If Maxwell was creating three times as many journals as his competition, he would make three times more money.

      “At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. #Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology. It was edited by a young biologist named #Ben_Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.

      Suddenly, where you published became immensely important. Other editors took a similarly activist approach in the hopes of replicating Cell’s success. Publishers also adopted a metric called “#impact_factor,” invented in the 1960s by #Eugene_Garfield, a librarian and linguist, as a rough calculation of how often papers in a given journal are cited in other papers. For publishers, it became a way to rank and advertise the scientific reach of their products. The new-look journals, with their emphasis on big results, shot to the top of these new rankings, and scientists who published in “high-impact” journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world. (Garfield later referred to his creation as “like nuclear energy … a mixed blessing”.)

      And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”

      As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.

      Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.

      With the purchase of Pergamon’s 400-strong catalogue, Elsevier now controlled more than 1,000 scientific journals, making it by far the largest scientific publisher in the world.

      At the time of the merger, Charkin, the former Macmillan CEO, recalls advising Pierre Vinken, the CEO of Elsevier, that Pergamon was a mature business, and that Elsevier had overpaid for it. But Vinken had no doubts, Charkin recalled: “He said, ‘You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. That’s what happened at Pergamon. And then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.’ He was right and I was wrong.”

      By 1994, three years after acquiring Pergamon, Elsevier had raised its prices by 50%. Universities complained that their budgets were stretched to breaking point – the US-based Publishers Weekly reported librarians referring to a “doomsday machine” in their industry – and, for the first time, they began cancelling subscriptions to less popular journals.

      In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year – according to a report based on freedom of information requests, Cornell University’s 2009 tab was just short of $2m – and any student or professor could download any journal they wanted through Elsevier’s website. Universities signed up en masse.

      Those predicting Elsevier’s downfall had assumed scientists experimenting with sharing their work for free online could slowly outcompete Elsevier’s titles by replacing them one at a time. In response, Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without. Pay, and the scientific lights stayed on, but refuse, and up to a quarter of the scientific literature would go dark at any one institution. It concentrated immense power in the hands of the largest publishers, and Elsevier’s profits began another steep rise that would lead them into the billions by the 2010s. In 2015, a Financial Times article anointed Elsevier “the business the internet could not kill”.

      Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)

      Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company received 1.5m article submissions last year, and published 420,000; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review.

      In a sense, it is not any one publisher’s fault that the scientific world seems to bend to the industry’s gravitational pull. When governments including those of China and Mexico offer financial bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, they are not responding to a demand by any specific publisher, but following the rewards of an enormously complex system that has to accommodate the utopian ideals of science with the commercial goals of the publishers that dominate it. (“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in,” Neal Young told me.)

      Since the early 2000s, scientists have championed an alternative to subscription publishing called “open access”. This solves the difficulty of balancing scientific and commercial imperatives by simply removing the commercial element. In practice, this usually takes the form of online journals, to which scientists pay an upfront free to cover editing costs, which then ensure the work is available free to access for anyone in perpetuity. But despite the backing of some of the biggest funding agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, only about a quarter of scientific papers are made freely available at the time of their publication.

      The idea that scientific research should be freely available for anyone to use is a sharp departure, even a threat, to the current system – which relies on publishers’ ability to restrict access to the scientific literature in order to maintain its immense profitability. In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.

      Elbakyan is an unabashed utopian. “Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers,” she told me in an email. In a letter to the court, she cited Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.

      Whatever the fate of Sci-Hub, it seems that frustration with the current system is growing. But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.

      https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
      #Butterworths #Springer #Paul_Rosbaud #histoire #Genève #Pergamon #Oxford_United #Derby_County_FC #monopole #open_access #Sci-Hub #Alexandra_Elbakyan

    • Publish and be praised (article de 2003)

      It should be a public scandal that the results of publicly-funded scientific research are not available to members of the public who are interested in, or could benefit from, such access. Furthermore, many commercial publishers have exploited the effective monopoly they are given on the distribution rights to individual works and charge absurdly high rates for some of their titles, forcing libraries with limited budgets to cancel journal subscriptions and deny their researchers access to potentially critical information. The system is obsolete and broken and needs to change.

      https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/09/research.highereducation

  • How Facebook Sees the World - Pacific Standard
    https://psmag.com/news/how-facebook-sees-the-world

    “Fake news” became the media’s favorite electoral boogeyman during the presidential election, and with good reason: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University found that Facebook and Twitter indeed precipitated an unprecedented level of misinformation, creating what the Columbia Journalism Review called a “media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.” Research confirms that the wave of anti-establishment fake news that came crashing down on social media users in the months leading up to the election is very real.

    Facebook’s old existential crisis appears over: By necessity, it is a publisher rather than simply a technology company—and it needs editors.

    But this poses an interesting question: How does Facebook see the world? The company says its mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” But it’s far from a neutral platform. In addition to individual products like its much-maligned “Trending News” module, which has vacillated from left-leaning editorial node to hoax whisperer, the platform’s fundamental design subtly shapes our behavior and, in turn, the structure of the digital social relations that reflect and augment our real-life ones, from the media we share to the “filter bubbles” we build for ourselves.

    The full corpus of the Guardian’s “Facebook Files” offers a fascinating look at how a technology company long in denial of its editorial responsibilities is suddenly grappling with its new role as the largest de facto censor of information on the planet, one that reportedly deals with more than 6.5 million reports regarding allegedly fake accounts each week. “Facebook cannot keep control of its content,” one company employee told the Guardian. “It has grown too big, too quickly.”

    This, in some ways, may mark the beginning of the end of Facebook as a somewhat unfiltered reflection of our “real” social and political worlds—and, in turn, our best and worst impulses. Facebook has become “the most powerful mobilizing force in politics, fast replacing television as the most consequential entertainment medium,” as Farhad Manjoo wrote for the New York Times Magazine in April. “But over the course of 2016, Facebook’s gargantuan influence became its biggest liability.” Now all-powerful, Facebook has adopted the unilateral policing power of a state—a power that may one day control flow of information at the behest of government

    #Facebook #médias_sociaux #censure #fake_news

  • LibrePlanet 2017 on March 25-26
    https://www.april.org/node/21131

    Début: 25 Mars 2017 - 00:00Fin: 26 Mars 2017 - 00:00

    LibrePlanet is the annual conference of the Free Software Foundation. The 2017 edition will take place on the 25th and 26th of March at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, USA.

    Marianne Corvellec, member of April’s Board of directors, will attend and speak on the following topic: “The GNU philosophy: Ethics beyond ethics” (16:35—17:20, on Sunday, March 26th).

    The programme and practical details are available on the LibrePlanet 2017 Conference site.

    #Raising_awareness

  • Zcash, a Harder-to-Trace Virtual Currency, Generates Price Frenzy - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/dealbook/zcash-a-harder-to-trace-virtual-currency-generates-price-frenzy.html

    Speculators are snapping up a new virtual currency known as Zcash that was designed by university academics and built to be all but untraceable. (...)

    The company behind Zcash, led by a developer named Zooko Wilcox, has the support of privacy activists and computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has already secured $3 million in backing from a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are involved in the virtual currency industry.

    #monnaie #anonymat #bitcoin via @Snowden

  • What’s universal grammar? Evidence rebuts Chomsky’s theory of language learning - Salon.com
    http://www.salon.com/2016/09/10/what-will-universal-grammar-evidence-rebuts-chomskys-theory-of-language-learn

    The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar — famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages — and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

    #noam_chomsky

  • Climate Change Has Produced a New Underwater Sound Superhighway - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/climate-change-has-produced-a-new-underwater-sound-superhighway

    In March, a team of scientists dragged a blast furnace on a sled across a giant slab of ice in the Beaufort Sea, above the Arctic Circle. With the furnace, the researchers (from the United States Navy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) melted a hole in the ice big enough to fit their 850-pound, 12-foot drone, which they dropped through to the icy waters below. Their mission: to measure how climate change is altering the acoustics of the Arctic Ocean. The USS Providence in the Arctic Ocean.Marion Doss / FlickrUnderstanding how sound travels under water is critical to the Navy because its submarines use sonar to communicate, and to track and identify foreign vessels. The speed of sound is variable in water, changing with temperature, salinity, and pressure. As temperature (...)

  • China media again touts plans to float nuclear reactors in disputed South China Sea | Reuters
    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-ruling-china-nuclear-idUSKCN0ZV0UH

    China aims to launch a series of offshore nuclear power platforms to promote development in the South China Sea, state media said again on Friday, days after an international court ruled Beijing had no historic claims to most of the waters.
    […]
    China’s first floating nuclear reactor will be assembled by the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation’s (CSIC) subsidiary, Bohai Heavy Industry, and the company will build 20 such reactors in the future,” the newspaper said.

    The marine nuclear power platform will provide energy and freshwater to the Nansha Islands,” it said, referring to the disputed Spratly Islands.

    The newspaper was citing a social media post by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), which has since been deleted.

    • What is a floating nuclear power plant?
      http://www.foronuclear.org/es/ask-the-expert/121982-what-is-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant


      Artist’s depiction of CGN’s future floating nuclear power plant.
      © CGN.

      On the other hand, China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) is planning to complete its construction of a small modular multifunction floating reactor by 2020. It will be the first Chinese floating reactor, with design known as ACPR50S. Construction will start in 2017 and it is expected to start generating electricity by 2020.

      According to CGN, this 200 MW (60 MWe) reactor is designed to provide electricity, heat and desalination. It can be used on islands or coastal areas, and also for offshore oil and gas exploration. 

      The plant uses a small modular reactor and is based on the offshore version of the 100 MWe ACP1000S design from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC).

    • Et sur la même page (non datée)

      What is a floating nuclear power plant?
      http://www.foronuclear.org/es/ask-the-expert/121982-what-is-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant


      Artist’s depiction of the Russian floating nuclear power plant, Akademik Lomonosov, currently in construction.
      © Rosatom

      The world’s first floating nuclear power plant is currently being built at the Baltiysky Zavod shipyard in Saint Petersburg, Russia. This site, known as Akademik Lomonosov, is the property of the Russian nuclear operator Rosenergoatom. It contains two KLT-40C naval propulsion reactors with a 35 MWe capacity each. These are mounted on a barge that is 144 meters long by 30 meters wide. The plant does not self propel, but must be towed to its destination and dock at the required port. Operation is previewed for 2017 at the Chukotka district, in Northwestern Russia.

    • Et, bien moins avancé que les deux premiers,

      What is a floating nuclear power plant?
      http://www.foronuclear.org/es/ask-the-expert/121982-what-is-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant


      Artist’s depiction of the floating nuclear power plant proposed by MIT.
      © MIT

      In the field of research, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is currently developing a small offshore nuclear power plant (OFNP) which would be located at a minimum distance of 12 km from the coast. The plant combines two established and proven technologies: the nuclear reactor and the offshore oil platform. It would be placed on deep waters far from coastal populations, and would only be connected to land by an underwater energy transmission line. By placing the platform on an area with a depth of at least 100 meters, the sea water absorbs the movements of the sea floor and protects the plant from earthquakes and tsunamis. The sea can also be an infinite source of cooling water in case of an emergency.

      The design consists of a cylindrical platform. The smaller version is 45 meters wide and would produce 300 MW of electricity. An alternative, larger design could reach 1100 MW, with 75 meters of diameter. In both cases, and in the same way as oil platforms, these sites include staff accommodation and a heliport for transport.

      The site would be entirely built in a shipyard, and at the end of its operative life it would return to the shipyard for dismantling.

  • Copyrighting DNA Is a Bad Idea - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/copyrighting-dna-is-a-bad-idea

    A few years ago, molecular biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were the first to file a patent for CRISPR-Cas9. It’s a DNA-editing technology adapted from the prokaryote immune system. Cas9 is a protein that can seek out and “cut” targeted gene strands with unprecedented ease and precision, allowing for customizable DNA. “It could allow us to cure genetic disease,” Doudna recently told an audience at a TED conference, in London. But half a year after her and Charpenteir’s patent claim, another group, with ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, filed an expedited claim and ended up winning the patent the next year. Feeling cheated, the Doudna and Charpentier team requested (...)

  • Science Should Be Totally Beautiful - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/science-should-be-totally-beautiful

    Felice Frankel lives between the lines. Along with being a part-time science photographer, she’s a researcher at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “As a photographer,” Frankel says, “I look for edges.” Her previous career, as a photographer of architecture, taught her how to capture the most striking elements of a design. “But here’s the thing,” she says. “Edges don’t really exist. If you really, really get down to things, what looks like a clean separation from one place to another, when you investigate it microscopically or macroscopically, is not as perfect as it appears.” Left: Microscopic image of channels within a microfluidic device. Right: Detail of Michael Singer’s installation at the Becton Dickinson Indoor garden.Photos (...)

  • Mining in Space Could Lead to Conflicts on Earth - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/mining-in-space-could-lead-to-conflicts-on-earth

    Space mining is no longer science fiction. By the 2020s, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries—for-profit space-mining companies cooperating with NASA—will be sending out swarms of tiny satellites to assess the composition of hurtling hunks of cosmic debris, identify the most lucrative ones, and harvest them. They’ve already developed prototype spacecraft to do the job. Some people—like Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Sara Seager, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, and science writer Phil Plait—argue that, to continue advancing as a space-faring species, we need to embrace this commercial space mining industry, and perhaps even facilitate it, too. But should we? This question concerns me, as both an astrophysicist and a space enthusiast. Before (...)

    • NASA may have its shortcomings, but at least its missions and research goals answer to the public. It’s not exactly a welcome thought to imagine more and more of our presence and activity in space being ceded, with NASA’s help, to private industry.

      What should happen instead? Commercial space mining and science would both be served well by decoupling from each other. We should treat outer space like we do Antarctica. That icy landscape is humankind’s common heritage, where we encourage scientific investigations and conservation and forbid territorial claims. If some organizations want to mine asteroids, then we should take the time to develop and establish an international framework to regulate it properly.

      #espace #extractivisme #privatisation

  • How Do You Say “Life” in Physics ? - Issue 34 : Adaptation
    http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics

    “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
 —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaption,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned (...)

  • Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/your-brains-music-circuit-has-been-discovered

    Before Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of people,” he says. With his club days behind him, McDermott now ventures into the effects of sound and music in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2015, he and a post-doctoral colleague, Sam Norman-Haignere, and Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, made news by locating a neural pathway activated by music and music alone. McDermott and his colleagues played a total (...)

  • Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon - Issue 32 : Space
    http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/beauty-is-physics-secret-weapon

    We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws. Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering, with David Gross and H. David Politzer, equations that govern one of the fundamental forces in physics, the strong interaction, which holds together quarks and gluons, and makes protons and neutrons. Their discovery of “asymptotic freedom” showed that as quarks get closer to each other, the charge between them (...)

  • Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/extreme-heatwaves-could-push-gulf-climate-beyond-human-endurance-study-

    “Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant [carbon cuts], is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future,” said Prof Jeremy Pal and Prof Elfatih Eltahir, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Nature Climate Change.

    They said the future climate for many locations in the Gulf would be like today’s extreme climate in the desert of Northern Afar, on the African side of the Red Sea, where there are no permanent human settlements at all. But the research also showed that cutting greenhouse gas emissions now could avoid this fate.

    • The scientists used standard climate computer models to show that the fatal wet bulb temperature extremes would occur every decade or two after 2070 along most of the Gulf coast, if global warming is not curbed. Using the normal measure of temperature, the study shows 45C would become the usual summer maximum in Gulf cities, with 60C being seen in places like Kuwait City in some years.

      #climat #santé

  • Obama must end support for Israeli apartheid against Palestinian scholars
    4 septembre | Radhika Balakrishnan et al |Tribunes

    US President Barack Obama, in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, reaffirmed his support and love for Israel because, as he claims, “it is a genuine democracy and you can express your opinions.”

    He further expressed his commitment to protecting Israel as a “Jewish state” by ensuring a “Jewish majority.”

    The US government’s support for the “Jewish state” has always been far more than rhetorical, backed by billions of dollars of military funding and consistent pro-Israel vetoes at the UN Security Council.

    We are a group of US-based academics, representing diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds, as well as a range of national origins, who recently visited Palestine. We were able to gain firsthand exposure to what Obama described in the interview as Israel’s “Jewish democracy” and to what kinds of infrastructure our tax dollars help to support — walls, checkpoints and modern weaponry.

    We had the privilege of traveling through part of the occupied Palestinian territories — the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — where we met with Palestinians.

    Double standards

    We feel compelled to share a few examples of what we witnessed during our visit with Palestinian scholars, policy makers, activists, artists and others working in the West Bank. We observed numerous double standards with regard to Palestinians’ rights that prompt us to question the claim that Israel is a genuine democracy.

    We believe that our government’s assertions that Israel is a democracy obscures the conditions it imposes on the Palestinian people through the occupation and beyond with conditions that amount to apartheid under settler colonialism.

    Our concerns began even before we arrived, as a search of the US State Department website for information about travel to Israel returned sobering results.

    The US government warns travelers to back up their computers because Israeli border control officials can erase anything at will. This indeed happened to one of us upon leaving Tel Aviv to return to the US.

    The site also warns travelers that their personal email or social media accounts may be searched, and so travelers “should have no expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices or in their accounts.” Equipment may also be confiscated.

    The State Department further acknowledges that US citizens who are Muslim and/or of Palestinian or other Arab descent may have considerable trouble entering or exiting through Israeli-controlled frontiers. And this too happened to one of us who had mobile phone contacts searched immediately on entering Tel Aviv.

    Profiling

    Concerns in entering and exiting pale in comparison to the restrictions placed on US citizens of Palestinian origin, along with all other Palestinians who hold identification documents from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

    Before traveling, most of us did not understand that for Palestinians under occupation, there are several types of identification and profiling and each comes with its own restrictions on mobility.

    Palestinians from Jerusalem have identification cards they must carry in a blue booklet while those living in the rest of the occupied West Bank hold an ID card in a green booklet, issued to them from the Palestinian Authority with the permission of the Israeli government.

    People possessing that identification generally cannot enter Jerusalem or present-day Israel without prior permission, even for a visa interview to attend an academic meeting in the US. Many people we met had only visited Jerusalem, home to many holy sites, once in their lives despite being mere minutes away by car.

    In the rest of the West Bank, a US citizen of Palestinian origin who wants to live there long term has to obtain a visa that says West Bank only. They are not allowed to travel in and out of the West Bank and are subject to the same checkpoints as other Palestinians. They cannot leave the occupied territories as a US citizen, as the State Department warns on its website.

    A Palestinian in the West Bank who holds US citizenship cannot simply catch a plane from Tel Aviv like any other US citizen simply because he or she is Palestinian and holds a Palestinian ID card. This fact is stamped into the US passport.

    They are not allowed to enter the checkpoints into Jerusalem or any other checkpoints as other people with a US passport can. This restriction is not at all applied to the Jewish settlers who are growing in number — thousands of them US citizens who are choosing to live in the occupied West Bank inside illegal settlements financed in part by US tax-exempt organizations.

    Academic freedom

    As scholars, among the many disturbing things we witnessed was the limited academic freedom and freedom of speech imposed on Palestinians (and many Israelis, whose travel in the West Bank is restricted) by the Israeli government.

    We learned that there is a prohibition on most books published in Syria, Iran and Lebanon even though Beirut is a central publishing hub of Arabic literary materials in the region. Regardless, banning books is, in our view, a profoundly anti-democratic act.

    Israel’s wall that surrounds the West Bank including Jerusalem — and which snakes deep inside the West Bank in many locations — also functions to limit academic freedom.

    One of the starkest examples is in Bethlehem, where the wall cuts through the city, making access to education at Bethlehem University very difficult for those who happen to be on the wrong side of the wall’s many twists and turns.

    Additionally, the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University is completely surrounded by the wall, making travel to and from the campus incredibly arduous despite it being in Jerusalem.

    An academic colleague described to us the difficulties she experiences getting to campus on a typical day. She must pass through roadblocks and endure searches and myriad forms of harassment by Israeli soldiers. In the West Bank, we were shocked to witness separate roads for Palestinians and Israelis based on the color of one’s license plate and identity card.

    In theory, these roads exist for the protection of Israeli settlers living on settlements built in the West Bank illegally according to international law. In practice, these roads create an apartheid travel system where Palestinians encounter several checkpoints on a given day, some of which may be mobile, unpredictably placed “flying checkpoints.”

    As our colleague explained to us, what used to be a very short trip between her village and the university now often takes more than an hour and a half and she is expected to cross through at least three checkpoints. She is often late to teach her classes and some days she is unable to make it to work or back home at all.

    Her students are often arrested and jailed using the legal cover of administrative detention — detention without charge or trial for an indefinite amount of time — for their participation in any political activities, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We heard that this process is intensified at exam periods.

    This creates an extraordinarily stressful academic environment when on any given day Israeli soldiers might detain students and faculty who are simply traveling to class.

    Impunity

    We recognize every people’s desire to be secure — and Israel’s supporters will defend its policies and actions in the name of its national security. What we witnessed during our visit is that “security” was offered as a rationale for almost any troubling behavior or policy.

    What we witnessed was a slow but deliberate expansion of Israel’s occupation, increased settlements, the taking over of agricultural land and the spread of industrial parks in the West Bank including substantial parts of East Jerusalem — all in the name of “security.”

    The United States, as a settler colonial state with its own occupations, police violence, carceral injustice, de facto apartheid and its own brand of border brutality — certainly has its own failings as a democracy, failings we continue to address in our intellectual and political work.

    We thus claim no moral high ground. But an ethnocracy is not a democracy ; the State of Israel imposes violent domination of the Palestinian people through colonialism, occupation and apartheid — three prongs of brutal oppression that are the very antithesis of democracy.

    As academics, watching attempts to stifle criticism of Israel — as in the case of our colleague, Professor Steven Salaita — and visiting the West Bank has prompted us to speak out publicly about Israel’s injustices. Doing so is imperative.

    We implore President Obama to reconsider his rhetoric and policies — and budget appropriations — that support Israel with impunity.

    Radhika Balakrishnan is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

    Karma R. Chávez is associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

    Ira Dworkin is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.

    Erica Caple James is associate professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is associate professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

    Doug Kiel is assistant professor of American Studies at Williams College.

    Barbara Lewis is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

    Soraya Mekerta is director of the African Diaspora and the World Program, and associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Spelman College.

    http://www.aurdip.fr/obama-must-end-support-for-israeli.html

    L’AURDIP (Association des Universitaires pour le Respect du Droit International en Palestine) est une organisation française d’universitaires créée en liaison avec la Campagne Palestinienne pour le Boycott Académique et Culturel d’Israël PACBI et avec l’organisation britannique BRICUP.


  • Je commence un fil sur la « Plaque de Pioneer ». Merci d’avance à tous pour vos contributions !
    Et on commence par Wikipédia, avec deux articles :
    Plaque de Pioneer
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaque_de_Pioneer

    La plaque de Pioneer est une plaque métallique embarquée à bord de deux sondes spatiales lancées en 1972 et 1973, Pioneer 10 et Pioneer 11, sur laquelle un message pictural de l’humanité est gravé à destination d’éventuels êtres extraterrestres : un homme et une femme représentés nus, ainsi que plusieurs symboles fournissant des informations sur l’origine des sondes.

    Il s’agit en fait d’une sorte de « bouteille à la mer interstellaire », les chances pour qu’elle soit retrouvée étant extrêmement faibles.

    Les sondes Pioneer furent les premiers objets construits par des humains à quitter le système solaire. Les plaques sont attachées aux sondes de manière à être protégées de l’érosion des poussières interstellaires ; si bien que la NASA s’attend à ce que la plaque (et la sonde elle-même) survive plus longtemps que la Terre et le Soleil.

    Un message plus détaillé et évolué, le Voyager Golden Record, est embarqué sous la forme d’un disque vidéonumérique par les sondes Voyager, lancées en 1977.

    Le Voyager Golden Record
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

    Le Voyager Golden Record est un disque embarqué à bord des deux sondes spatiales Voyager, lancées en 1977. Ce disque de 12 pouces contient des sons et des images sélectionnés pour dresser un portrait de la diversité de la vie et de la culture sur Terre, et est destiné à d’éventuels êtres extraterrestres qui pourraient le trouver.

    Tout comme son précurseur la plaque de Pioneer, il s’agit d’une « bouteille à la mer interstellaire », les chances pour que ces disques soient retrouvés étant extrêmement faibles. De plus, s’ils l’étaient, ce serait dans un futur très lointain : les sondes Voyager ne se retrouveront pas à moins de 1,7 année-lumière d’une autre étoile avant 40 000 ans. Donc, plus qu’une tentative sérieuse de communication avec des extraterrestres, ces disques ont un sens symbolique.

    Sur le couvercle du vidéodisque est gravé le schéma explicatif du mode de lecture ainsi que les symboles inscrits sur la plaque de Pioneer. Le disque lui-même comprend de nombreuses informations sur la Terre et ses habitants, allant des enregistrements de bruits d’animaux et de cris de nourrisson, jusqu’au bruit du vent, du tonnerre, ou d’un marteau-piqueur. Sont aussi compris les enregistrements du mot « Bonjour » dans une multitude de langues, des extraits de textes littéraires et de musique classique et moderne.

    Une source d’uranium 238 (choisi pour sa période radioactive de l’ordre de 4,5 milliards d’années) est également embarquée à bord des sondes, permettant de déterminer le temps écoulé depuis le lancement par datation radioactive.

    The Voyager Interstellar Record
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rat2vEMojeM&feature=youtu.be&list=PLA5Z0m2JKyVJUgkMG08WP8KsAvLrjfkj


    Avec plus précisément le titre The Sounds of Earth : https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/the-sounds-of-earth-the-golden

    Et les images envoyées dans l’espace.
    116 Images of the Voyager Golden Record – a Message for Extraterrestrial Life
    http://webodysseum.com/art/116-images-of-the-voyager-golden-record

    #Plaque_de_pioneer
    #Voyager_Golden_Record
    #Pioneer_10
    #Pioneer_11
    #Sounds_of_Earth
    #Epistémologie
    #Histoire_des_Sciences
    #STS
    #Esthétique

    • http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_11
      On the Critique of Scientific Reason de P. K. Feyerabend
      Dans une note :

      Carl Sagan, surely one of the most imaginative scientists alive warns us not to unduly restrict the possibilities of life, and he mentions various types of ‘chauvinism’ (oxygen-chauvinism: if a planet has no oxygen, then it is uninhabitable; temperature chauvinism: low temperatures such as those on Jupiter and high temperatures such as those on Venus make life impossible; carbon chauvinism: all biological systems are constructed of carbon compounds) which he regards as unwarranted (The Cosmic Connection, New York 1975, Ch. 6). He writes (page 179): “It is not a question of whether we are emotionally prepared in the long run to confront a message from the stars. It is whether we can develop a sense that beings with quite different evolutionary histories, beings who may look far different from us, even ‘monstrous’ may, nevertheless, be worthy of friendship and reverence, brotherhood and trust”. Still, in discussing the question whether the message on the plaque of Pioneer 10 will be comprehensible to extraterrestrial beings he says that “it is written in the only language we share with the recipients: science” (18; cf. p. 217: messages to extraterrestrial beings “will be based upon commonalities between the transmitting and the receiving civilization. Those commonalities are, of course, not any spoken or written language or any common, instinctual encoding in our genetic materials, but rather what we truly share in common — the universe around us, science and mathematics.”) In times of stress this belief in science and its temporary results may become a veritable maniac-making people disregard their lives for what they think to be the truth. Cf. Medvedev’s account of the Lysenko case.

      #Plaque_de_pioneer
      #Relativisme
      #Feyerabend
      #Épistémologie

    • Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan
      Saturday, December 07, 1985

      Lloyd Moss talks to Pulitzer-Prize-winning astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan and his wife, author Ann Druyan, about their ten-year collaboration and their upcoming book, Comet. They discuss the Voyager Interstellar Record Project and the collection of culture and music that was curated for it. They discuss the five musical selections which were culled from the twenty-seven works used in the Voyager project.

    • Et un projet similaire de la même veine, plus récent (2012)
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EchoStar_XVI

      The Creative Time was launched with EchoStar XVI into outer space an archival disc created by artist Trevor Paglen called The Last Pictures. Made of ultra-archival materials, the disc is expected to orbit the Earth for billions of years affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite. A silicon disc has one hundred photographs selected to represent modern human history.

      http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-last-pictures-launches-with-echostar-xvi-satellite
      The Last Pictures launches with EchoStar XVI satellite

      http://creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures

      Since 1963, more than eight hundred spacecraft have been launched into geosynchronous orbit, forming a man-made ring of satellites around the Earth. These satellites are destined to become the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly floating through space long after every trace of humanity has disappeared from the planet.
      Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures is a project that marks one of these spacecraft with a visual record of our contemporary historical moment. Paglen spent five years interviewing scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers to consider what such a cultural mark should be. Working with materials scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paglen developed an artifact designed to last billions of years—an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs and encased in a gold-plated shell. In Fall 2012, the communications satellite EchoStar XVI will launch into geostationary orbit with the disc mounted to its anti-earth deck. While the satellite’s broadcast images are as fleeting as the light-speed radio waves they travel on, The Last Pictures will remain in outer space slowly circling the Earth until the Earth itself is no more.

      #Echostar
      #The_Last_Pictures

    • http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.gate3.inist.fr/doi/10.1002/2013EO400004/pdf
      Nick Sagan Reflects on Voyager 1 and the Golden Record

      © 2013. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
      Eos
      , Vol. 94, No. 40, 1 October 2013
      Nick Sagan Reflects on Voyager 1
      and the Golden Record
      When scientists confirmed on 12 September that NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft had entered
      interstellar space (
      Eos, 94
      (39), 339, doi:10.1002/ 2013EO390003), the probe was acknowledged
      as the first human- made object to travel into that realm. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, each
      carry a 12-inch gold- plated copper disk, known as the Golden Record.
      The Golden Record is a time capsule containing images, music, and sounds from planet
      Earth that were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
      The Golden Record includes greetings to the universe in 55 different languages. The greeting in
      English was recorded by then 6-year-old Nick Sagan, son of Carl Sagan and NASA Pioneer
      spacecraft plaque artist Linda Salzman.
      When it was confirmed that Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space,
      Eos
      contacted Nick
      Sagan, now 43 and a writer and producer, for his comments.

    • La Nasa met en ligne les messages de Voyager aux extraterrestres
      http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/rue89-culture/2015/08/04/les-messages-voyager-extraterrestres-mis-ligne-nasa-260603

      [C]omme le faisait remarquer l’un des membres du comité réuni par Sagan :
      « Les chances que la plaque soit vue par un seul extraterrestre sont infinitésimales. Par contre, elle sera vue par des milliards de Terriens. Sa vraie fonction est donc d’en appeler à l’esprit humain et d’œuvrer à son expansion, et de faire de l’idée d’un contact avec une intelligence extraterrestre une expansion désirable de l’humanité. »