Content about Images

Some kids can make anything cute, and these ones are no exception.

Image of the Week - Elegance of darkness When galaxies collide. Original courtesy Argonne National Laboratory What you see is the collision of two galaxies over billions of years, albeit virtually. As physicists at CERN investigate the smallest particles in the universe, US scientists are studying the behavior of the largest cosmic structures in existence. A team at the University of Chicago Flash Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used an Argonne National Laboratory Supercomputer to identify elusive dark matter. The researchers simulated the motion and collision of galactic clusters — some of the largest structures in the universe — to infer dark matter’s influence, as it cannot be observed directly. Dark matter greatly influences gas and galaxies over trillions of light years.  Furthermore, these collisions more accurately predict the interaction of both normal and dark matter (it is thought dark matter constitu

Feature - Ultra-fast networks: The Final Frontier A network researcher in awe of the billions of dark matter particles simulated on 15 ultra-high definition monitors. Image courtesy Freek Dijkstra Researchers from Holland have demonstrated a network infrastructure that could potentially help scientists save time and even transform the movie business. This could be done without the need for large computer clusters or grids, just off-the-shelf hardware components combined with human ingenuity and one of the world’s fastest research networks. The team were from SARA, a Dutch supercomputing and e-science support center. Threshold The SARA researchers wanted to show the practicalities of streaming video between two institutions (from SARA, Amsterdam to CERN, Geneva) at 40Gb/second (5GB/s). This link, if successful, would be 16 times faster than the TEIN3 network, which streamed Malaysian dancers over 9,000 kilometers away to a live orchestra performance in Stockholm at 2.5 Gb/s. Th

Link of the Week: Physics for Poets

Woodblock print of ‘The Sea off Satta,’ from ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ by Hiroshige Utagawa. Image courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license

At the scifaiku website, fans of science fiction can express their passion for time travel, spaceships and aliens in haiku.
The rules of this ancient Japanese poetic form are relatively simple: each poem is composed of a maximum of three lines, with 5 syllables on the first line, 7 on the next, and 5 on the last.
But while traditional haiku make a reference to nature; “scifaiku” call for a science fiction reference, such as:
Asteroids collidewithout a sound . . . We maneuver between fragments.
It seemed unfair that science fiction fans should have all the fun, so we tried our hands at this art, focusing on the theme of computing. This can be a challenge, given the distressing number of syllables in phrases such as “distributed computing infrastructur

Link of the Week - Nobel Prize follows Ig Nobel

Artist's impression of a graphene transistor. Image courtesy physorg

A first has just occurred in the world of Nobel Prize awards: Andre Geim, a Russian-born physicist, who was previously awarded an Ig Nobel for using magnets to levitate a frog, received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments on a 2-D substance called ‘graphene.’ Graphene, which is one-atom thick and entirely made from carbon, comes from the ‘lead’ in a pencil.
 
The substance is made up of a handful of atoms in a honeycomb lattice, akin to atomic scale chicken wire. At this scale,  its properties truly shine as Andre and his team discovered that the material conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon. Possible future applications of this material could be for the creation of ultra-fast transistors for the next generation of computers, electronics, smart displays and quantum-dot computers.
 
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Image of the Week - Death of a star

Ever wonder what the collapse of an inspiralling neutron-star binary looks like? Now you can see one rendtion, in this vizualization. For more information, click here.
Copyright: Ralf Kähler (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/Zuse Institute Berlin) Numerical Simulation: Bruno Giacomazzo, Luciano Rezzolla (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics). Used with permission.

EGI Video Answers All

(Click on image above to go to YouTube video.) Original courtesy BELIEF-II

Do you still find yourself trying to get a better sense of EGI and EGI.eu, even after the Technical Forum last week?
Then check out this video from the BELIEF-II project.

iSGTW in Amsterdam

Image courtesy GridTalk. (Click on image for large, PDF version)

Coming to you from Amsterdam is the EGI Technical Forum, the first event after taking over the reins from EGEE. Thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast, you can now get (nearly) the same experience as those attending in person.You will be able to get the latest via twitter, see and hear events by podcast, and enjoy the highlights .Held from 14- to 17- September, this event promises to showcase grid technologies and connect developers, users and newcomers to distributed computing. The major theme of the meeting, achieved through technical sessions, a demonstration and exhibition area, networking space and events, will be to establish collaborations between the new and the current European Distributed Computing Infrastructure projects to meet the needs and requirements of the research community.
Can’t make it in person? With GridCast, you can be there in virtual form to catch the latest &mdas

Image of the Week: Rubik’s Cube question solved?

Image courtesy stock.exchng

Articles in the technology press say that researchers have solved the age-old question of the minimum number of moves needed to unscramble a Rubik’s Cube. This minimum has jokingly been referred to as “God’s number.”The answer? 20 moves or less.Which sounds an awful lot like the answer to Douglas Adams’ science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the answer to life, the universe and everything is . . . 42.Hmmm.One thing we're curious about is how the researchers came up with the answer. According to a BBC interview with one of the researchers, “. . . the team had planned to process the batches on a supercomputer. ‘Then Google stepped forward and offered to run the computation,’ he said. ‘We still don't know what machinery they used.’ ”And in both its US and UK editions, Wired said that Google do

Video of the week - Learning with multi-touch

Multi-touch technology has been around longer than you might think; experimental implementations have been surfacing since the early 1980s. This technology really hit the big time, however, when Apple released the first iPod Touch.
In 2008, the Renaissance Computing Institute at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill unveiled a multi-touch table that has since become an invaluable tool in the scientific visualization toolbox. At the same time, learning scientists, computer scientists, and psychologists from Virginia Tech and the University of Chicago formed itemL – interactive technologies for embodied mathematics Learning – and began investigating how young children (three to eight-years-old) interact with a multi-touch play table.
“We are collecting extensive data on the commercially available SMART Table while developing our own technology, TanTab,” explained Michael Evans, assistant professor of learning science and technologies at Vir

Image of the Week - What the Planck Telescope found

A new view of the Milky Way. (Click on image to enlarge.) Image courtesy European Space Agency

Last summer, iSGTW did a story on the launch of the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope into orbit. (See Countdown! World’s most sophisticated thermometer blasts off into space). Their goal was to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.After six months of collecting data and assembling a map, the 700-million euro observatory created the first full-sky image. It shows what is visible beyond Earth, on instruments sensitive to light at wavelengths much longer than human beings can see.In the foreground are large segments of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The bright horizontal line running the full width of the picture is the galactic plane, in which the sun and Earth reside. Above and below the galactic plane are streamers of cold dust, thousands of light-years long.“It's a spectacular picture; it’s

Image of the Week: Digital, in both senses of the word

Information at your fingertips — and between them. Image courtesy Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University

Jieh Hsiang, director of the Research Center of Digital Humanities at the National Taiwan University, likes to draw an important distinction between the goal of digital archives, which is to store information, and that of digital humanities, which is to discover new research issues buried in the digits. As an example, he points to studies of old land deeds in Taiwan. His research center has recovered over 32,000 such land deeds from before 1900. With the right tools, it is possible to extract from them insights into the social and economic evolution of the time, and even gleen the state of race relationships between the aboriginal Taiwanese and Chinese originating from the mainland at that time. The land deed pictured here has information stored between the digits in a quite literal sense. Chinese charac