NewConcepts News

The US Supreme Court has ruled that race can no longer be considered as a factor in university admissions.

отныне католики не должны пытаться обратить евреев в христианство и заниматься миссионерством в еврейской среде. Вместо этого им предписано признать евреев носителями слова Божьего, прочувствовать их боль в связи с Катастрофой европейского еврейства и бок о бок сражаться с антисемитизмом.

Президент Обама подписал один из самых революционных биллей в новейшей мировой истории – Соединённые Штаты сняли 40-летний запрет на экспорт нефти.

Пару дней назад появилось интересное сообщение об обнаружении нового вида грибов, которые питаются исключительно бананами. Так что же, прощайте бананы? И кто в мире растений следующая жертва грибов?

Исследователи нашли огромный резервуар воды под мантией Земли, на глубине около 600 км. Его размеры настолько огромны, что этой водой можно заполнить три раза все океаны на Земле которые мы знаем.

замаранные сотрудничеством с нацистами, швейцарские банки начали активно сотрудничать с банками союзников, дав им возможность наживаться на награбленном. Это позволило «гномам» оставить себе две трети попавшего к ним нацистского золота.

Они знают точные полные имена, и у них даже есть все фотографии всего боевого расчета этого “Бука”, который сбил Боинг.

Автопроизводитель показал футуристичный электрокар Chevrolet-FNR Компания General Motors показала концептуальный автономный автомобиль будущего – Chevrolet Find New Roads (FNR) с автопилотом и электроприводом.

An experimental Ebola vaccine seems to confer total protection against infection in people who are at high risk of contracting the virus, according to the preliminary results of a trial in Guinea that were announced today and published1 in The Lancet. They are the first evidence that a vaccine protects humans from Ebola infection.

A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally. In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize. The system being honored is called CRISPR/Cas9, and it evolved as a way for bacteria to destroy viruses using RNA that matched the virus' DNA sequence. But it's turned out to be remarkably flexible, and the technique can be retargeted to any gene simply by modifying the RNA. Researchers are still figuring out new uses for the system, which means there are papers coming out nearly every week, many of them difficult to distinguish.

IF NASA PLANS to send robots to other planets, it’s going to need some new designs: ones that are easy to land, easy to move around, and easy to fix. That means they probably won’t look like a bipedal T-1000 chasing the one hope for mankind. They probably won’t even look like the four-legged galloping critters Boston Dynamics is building. Nope. Those robots will look like a hexahedral tent stripped of its fabric.

The values of two inherent properties of one photon – its spin and its orbital angular momentum – have been transferred via quantum teleportation onto another photon for the first time by physicists in China. Previous experiments have managed to teleport a single property, but scaling that up to two properties proved to be a difficult task, which has only now been achieved. The team's work is a crucial step forward in improving our understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and the result could also play an important role in the development of quantum communications and quantum computers.

Ask "the invisible". They appeared in a hit list of Islamic terrorism alongside the director of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, killed in his Paris'office. They are cartoonists, journalists and intellectuals involved in the publication of the cartoons. Today, most of them have become ghosts, untraceable, living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or have retired to private life to defuse the fatwa that branded them, victims of an understandable self- censorship. Yesterday, the director of the Independent, Amol Rajan, had the courage to confess that he decided not to republish the cartoons. "Too risky," wrote the journalist who heads one of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon liberal chattering classes

Macmillan have released an interesting press release, announcing that all research papers published in their 49 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, including Nature, will be made free to read online, via one of Digital Science’s pet projects, ReadCube (note that Digital Science is also owned by Macmillan). These articles can be annotated in ReadCube, but not copied, printed, or downloaded. This is not open access*, and NPG have been very careful and explicit about stating this. What is the reason for this move, then, when we have a globally shifting environment towards open access? Well, academics love to break rules. We share papers freely, and often illegally, with our colleagues all the time. It’s a sort of passive rebellion against paywall-based publishers. A great example of this is #icanhazpdf on Twitter, whereby articles are requested, and then hopefully shared privately by someone else. This kind of activity is what NPG are calling ‘dark social’, like some terrible name for an evil media organisation. By this, they simply mean sharing, but out of their control. This new initiative seems to be a way of controlling, and legitimising this sort of ‘peer-to-peer’ practice.

Как заявил министр иностранных дел Канады Джон Бэрд: "Канада не будет стоять за Израилем в Организации Объединенных Наций. Мы будем стоять прямо рядом с ним. Всегда можно начать совершать правильные поступки".

Walk through the archives of any academic library and you will find dusty shelves of scientific journals dating back to the early 20th century and sometimes beyond. It’s hard to know the last time many of these volumes were opened or whether the information they contain has long been forgotten. That’s in stark contrast to the way most scientists access scientific papers today; in a matter of seconds after a straightforward web search. Never has it been so easy to look up a circuit diagram, learn about gene therapy or read the latest papers about black holes. That’s why many scientific publishers have digitised their archives to make the entire history of their publications available online and as easy to search as modern papers. That raises an interesting question—if old papers are now as easy to find as modern ones, are they having as great an impact? Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Alex Verstak and pals at Google. These guys have studied how often older articles are cited in modern papers and how this has changed since the advent of electronic publishing in the 1990s. Their conclusion is that older papers are having an increasingly important impact on modern science—that the distinction between old and new, between the historical and the modern, no longer creates a division in science.

Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.

Alcohol is good for more than making memories—it’s also good for keeping them. (Photo by John Rowley/Digital Vision/Getty Images) Good news for cocktail lovers: Despite alcohol’s reputation as a brain-cell assassin, new research suggests that drinking daily in moderation after age 60 may actually help preserve your memory. In the study, published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, the researchers tracked the alcohol intake of 664 people, assessed their cognitive functioning with a handful of tests, and performed scans of their brains. During the first phase of the study, participants’ average age was 42; by the end of the study, it was 75. What they found: Imbibing later in life — as long as it was at a light to moderate level — was associated with better episodic memory, or the ability to remember specific events, compared to abstaining. This is a significant finding, since episodic memory is the type of recall that usually disappears with dementia. “Over time, you don’t necessarily lose memory for [how to do] things, like driving or having coffee,” said study author Faika Zanjani, an associate professor of behavioral and community health at the University of Maryland. “You usually lose memory of events — memories that you have to retrieve, instead of just use. It’s not just forgetting your keys. It’s forgetting key moments in your life.”

Summary Points. Currently, many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85% of research resources are wasted. To make more published research true, practices that have improved credibility and efficiency in specific fields may be transplanted to others which would benefit from them—possibilities include the adoption of large-scale collaborative research; replication culture; registration; sharing; reproducibility practices; better statistical methods; standardization of definitions and analyses; more appropriate (usually more stringent) statistical thresholds; and improvement in study design standards, peer review, reporting and dissemination of research, and training of the scientific workforce. Selection of interventions to improve research practices requires rigorous examination and experimental testing whenever feasible. Optimal interventions need to understand and harness the motives of various stakeholders who operate in scientific research and who differ on the extent to which they are interested in promoting publishable, fundable, translatable, or profitable results. Modifications need to be made in the reward system for science, affecting the exchange rates for currencies (e.g., publications and grants) and purchased academic goods (e.g., promotion and other academic or administrative power) and introducing currencies that are better aligned with translatable and reproducible research.

Maybe its because we don't understand time, that we keep trying to measure it more accurately. But that desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The next generation of clocks will not tell time in a way that most people understand.

The digital health revolution is still stuck. Tech giants are jumping into the fray with fitness offerings like Apple Health and Google Fit, but there’s still not much in the way of, well, actual medicine. The Fitbits and Jawbones of the world measure users’ steps and heart rate, but they don’t get into the deep diagnostics of, say, biomarkers, the internal indicators that can serve as an early warning sign of a serious ailment. For now, those who want to screen for a disease or measure a medical condition with clinical accuracy still need to go to the doctor. Dr. Eugene Chan and his colleagues at the DNA Medical Institute (DMI) aim to change that. Chan’s team has created a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. Known as rHEALTH, the technology was developed over the course of seven years with grants from NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On Monday, the team received yet another nod (and more funding) as the winners of this year’s Nokia Sensing XChallenge, one of several competitions run by the moonshot-seeking XPrize Foundation.

"Scientists can make these clocks into exquisite devices for sensing a whole bunch of different things," O'Brian says. Their extraordinary sensitivity to gravity might allow them to map the interior of the earth, or help scientists find water and other resources underground.Even though time is such a fundamental part of our experience, the basic laws of physics don’t seem to care in which direction it goes. For example, the rules that govern the orbits of planets work the same whether you go forward or backward in time. You can play the motions of the solar system in reverse and they look completely normal; they don’t violate any laws of physics. So what distinguishes the future from the past? “The problem of the arrow of time has been boggling minds forever,” said Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. If that wasn’t mind-bending enough, the events that occur before the particles clump—that is, before the Big Bang—orients a second direction of time. If you play the events backward from this point, the particles will appear to disperse from the clump. Because complexity is increasing in this backward direction, this second arrow of time also points into the past. Which, according to this second time direction, is actually the “future” of another universe that exists on the other side of the Big Bang. (Deep stuff, right?)

Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter. “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.” Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

Multi-linguals are more perceptive to their surroundings and better at focusing in on important information. It’s no surprise Sherlock Holmes was a skilled polyglot.

As a rule, spiders are antisocial. They hunt alone, zealously defend their webs from other spiders, and sometimes even eat their mates. “Cannibalism and territoriality comes naturally to Arachnida, even during sex,” said Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Pittsburgh. But a handful of the more than 40,000 known arachnid species on the planet have learned to rein in that aggression. Like ants or bees, they cooperate for the good of the group. For example, so-called tangle-web spiders form bands of 1,000 or more to spin webs that stretch for hundreds of yards, entrapping flies, small birds and “virtually any invertebrate imaginable,” Pruitt said. Smaller groups of a few dozen work together “like a pride of lions,” he said; some of the spiders hunt for prey, while others rear the colony’s young. The spiders present a puzzle to evolutionary biologists. According to ordinary Darwinian natural selection, only the fittest individuals will pass on their genes. But if that’s the case, why do tangle-web spiders act in ways that might conflict with an individual’s drive to outcompete its neighbors? A spider that defends the nest might put itself at personal risk, jeopardizing its chances of producing offspring. And a spider that rears the young might have to wait to eat until the hunters are sated, so it might go hungry. These are not behaviors that would be expected to enhance an individual’s fitness.

Since the 1930s scientists have been searching for particles that are simultaneously matter and antimatter. Now physicists have found strong evidence for one such entity inside a superconducting material. The discovery could represent the first so-called Majorana particle, and may help researchers encode information for quantum computers. Physicists think that every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart with equal mass but opposite charge. When matter meets its antimatter equivalent, the two annihilate one another. But some particles might be their own antimatter partners, according to a 1937 prediction by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. For the first time researchers say they have imaged one of these Majorana particles, and report their findings in the October 3 Science.

Modern critics would probably hail the up and coming rock artists that once inhabited Indonesia. About a hundred caves outside Moras, a town in the tropical forests of Sulawesi, were once lined with hand stencils and vibrant murals of abstract pigs and dwarf buffalo. Today only fragments of the artwork remain, and the mysterious artists are long gone. For now, all we know is when the caves were painted—or at least ballpark dates—and the finding suggests that the practice of lining cave walls with pictures of natural life was common 40,000 years ago. A study published today in Nature suggests that paintings in the Maros-Pangkep caves range from 17,400 to 39,900 years old, close to the age of similar artwork found on the walls of caves in Europe.

В рейтинге мировых центров высоких технологий, Тель-Авив занял второе место в мире после Кремниевой долины в Калифорнии. Здесь второе по абсолютному показателю количество Start-Up-компаний. Известно, в развитых странах мира - США, Великобритании, Австралии, даже в Японии, а в последнее время - и в Китае, очередь на приобретение израильских компаний сферы HighTech.

так ли это, как заявляют и обещают? Если так, то это, разумеется, революция. Если же не более чем реклама - что ж, и такое бывает

A handful of girls seem to defy one of the biggest certainties in life: ageing. Virginia Hughes reports on the families wrestling with a condition they can’t explain, and the scientist who believes that these children could hold the key to immortality.

There is a special, valuable communication that occurs between teacher and student, which goes beyond what can be found in any textbook or raw data stream.

Throughout the 544 million or so years since hard-shelled animals first appeared, there has been a slow increase in the number of plants and animals on the planet, despite five mass extinction events. The high point of biodiversity likely coincided with the moment modern humans left Africa and spread out across the globe 60,000 years ago. As people arrived, other species faltered and vanished, slowly at first and now with such acceleration that Wilson talks of a coming “biological holocaust,” the sixth mass extinction event, the only one caused not by some cataclysm but by a single species—us. Wilson recently calculated that the only way humanity could stave off a mass extinction crisis, as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would be to set aside half the planet as permanently protected areas for the ten million other species. “Half Earth,” in other words, as I began calling it—half for us, half for them. A version of this idea has been in circulation among conservationists for some time.

Московский государственный университет имени М.В. Ломоносова (МГУ) занял первое место среди российских вузов: он улучшил свои показатели на шесть позиций и поднялся на 114-е место. На втором месте среди отечественных высших учебных заведений находится Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет (СПбГУ): этот вуз QS поставила на 233-е место. Всего в рейтинг вошли 863 вуза, из них 21 — российский. Впервые в него попали Национальный исследовательский ядерный университет МИФИ, Национальный исследовательский технологический университет «МИСиС» и Национальный исследовательский Саратовский государственный университет. Высшие строки в списке, составленном QS, занимают американские и британские образовательные учреждения. Первое место, как и год назад, досталось американскому Массачусетскому технологическому институту (MIT). За ним следуют Кембриджский университет (Великобритания), Имперский колледж Лондона (Великобритания), Гарвардский университет (США), Оксфордский университет (Великобритания).

Изобретения, разрушившие стереотип, что двигатель прогресса — это мужчина.

Испанская компания Union Fenosa ведет переговоры о покупке 20% газа израильского месторождения «Тамар», являющегося сейчас главным поставщиком энергоносителей в еврейское государство. Предполагается, что газ будет поступать в Египет, где испанцы вместе с итальянской компанией ENI построили завод по сжижению газа для отправки его в Европу. Строился он ради египетского газа, но добыча газа в этой стране так и осталась в зачаточном состоянии, несмотря на гигантский потенциал долины Нила. Согласно газете «Глобс», если сделка состоится, товарищество по разработке «Тамар» получит ежегодный доход в размере 1,3 млрд долларов. «Тамар является вторым по размеру израильским месторождением с 9-10 триллионами кубических футов газа. Объемhttp://polpred.com/?ns=1&cnt=57§or=8 газа в «Левиафане» почти в 2 раза больше, и относительно этого месторождения ведутся переговоры с турецкой компанией Turcas.

На мировом нефтяном рынке уже несколько недель подряд продолжают падать цены,констатирует известная немецкая газета деловых кругов Handelsblatt, и это несмотря на то, что случились украинский кризис, израильско-палестинский конфликт, а исламские радикалы, захватив часть Сирии и Ирака, объявили о создании собственного государства. В прежние времена очаги международной и региональной напряженности обычно играли роль допинга для цен на нефть, сейчас же наблюдается стабильное снижение. Так, баррель норвежской нефти сорта Брент опустился на этой недели ниже 100 долларов, что отмечалось лишь в июне прошлого года. И если эта тенденция сохранится, как полагают специалисты, то нефтедобывающие страны, в том числе и Россию, ожидают серьезные экономические трудности.

Scientists have taken a major step forward in the production of hydrogen from water which could lead to a new era of cheap, clean and renewable energy. Chemists from the University of Glasgow report in a new paper in Science today (Friday 12 September) on a new form of hydrogen production which is 30 times faster than the current state-of-the-art method. The process also solves common problems associated with generating electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind or wave energy.

We know how important it is to keep in touch with friends and family, especially when they’re spread around the world. Hangouts already makes it easy to send a quick message, or start a group video chat. But sometimes it’s best to just call to say “I love you,” and with the new version of Hangouts you can. Starting today you can make voice calls from Hangouts on Android, iOS and the web. It’s free to call other Hangouts users, it’s free to call numbers in the U.S. and Canada, and the international rates are really low. So keeping in touch is easier and more affordable than ever. To get started on Android, just grab the new version of Hangouts (v2.3, rolling out over the next few days), then install theaccompanying dialer to turn on voice calls. On iOS and the web, voice calls will be available the next time you open the app.

Sodium has long been labeled the blood-pressure bogeyman. But are we giving salt a fair shake? A new study published in theAmerican Journal of Hypertension analyzed data from 8,670 French adults and found that salt consumption wasn’t associated with systolic blood pressure in either men or women after controlling for factors like age.

Is there a revolution coming along in mathematics? A shift that will fundamentally change the way in which mathematicians work? In the near future, will computers rather than humans reliably verify whether a mathematical proof is correct? According to Julie Rehmeyer, a blogger for the popular science magazine Scientific American, the Russian mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky (*1966) has developed an approach that could indeed revolutionize mathematics and its foundations: He has been able to show in principle that homotopy theory, which deals with the deformation of geometric objects, expresses the same ideas as the theory of programming languages and mathematical logic, only in a different language (homotopy theory plays a major role in Voevodsky’s work on the Milnor conjecture which earned him the prestigious Fields medal in 2002). Voevodsky, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, wants to bring together two streams of development of today’s mathematics. ETH has invited him to present his ideas in Zurich as a speaker of the 2014 Paul Bernays Lectures in September. Giovanni Felder, the director of the ETH Institute for Theoretical Studies (ITS), will introduce his research to the lecture audience at ETH. He says: “Voevodsky is developing a new theory which places mathematics on a new foundation. The questions he raises concern the foundations of mathematics as well as those of computer science and logic.” This theory is called Scientific American: “Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT)”, and “Univalent Foundations of Mathematics” is the computer-oriented project in which it is being investigated.

Recent experiments offer tentative support for time travel's feasibility—at least from a mathematical perspective. The study cuts to the core of our understanding of the universe, and the resolution of the possibility of time travel, far from being a topic worthy only of science fiction, would have profound implications for fundamental physics as well as for practical applications such as quantum cryptography and computing.

[2014-09-01] Neurons in human skin perform advanced calculations, previously believed that only the brain could perform. This is according to a study from Ume University in Sweden published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Here's more fodder for the great paper vs. e-book debate. A new study has found that readers using an e-reader were "significantly" worse than print book readers at remembering when events occurred in a story, The Guardian reports.

Крупномасштабная структура Вселенной является одной из самых обсуждаемых тем в современной астрофизике. Непосредственные наблюдения далеких объектов затруднены из-за поглощения в плоскости Млечного Пути, поэтому одним из основных методов исследования стало моделирование. Такой способ сопряжен сразу с несколькими проблемами: огромный диапазон масштабов, необходимость учета различных процессов, невероятно большое количество точек в симуляции. 29 июля 2014 года была опубликована первая статья о новом моделировании EAGLE. ПостНаука попросила астрофизика Сергея Пилипенко объяснить сложность задачи и последние достижения в этой области.

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The chip, or processor, is named TrueNorth and was developed by researchers at IBM and detailed in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. It tries to mimic the way brains recognize patterns, relying on densely interconnected webs of transistors similar to the brain’s neural networks.

В одной из своих книг, The Singularity is Near («Сингулярность приближается»), опубликованной в 2005 году, знаменитый футурист предсказал, что люди скоро «преобразуют биологию» и будут существовать во вселенной в качестве бессмертных киборгов.

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the need for an underlying global theory on a par with calculus to enable researchers to become better curators of big data. In the same way, the various techniques and tools being developed need to be integrated under the umbrella of such a broader theoretical model. “In the end, data science is more than the sum of its methodological parts,” Vespignani insists, and the same is true for its analytical tools. “When you combine many things you create something greater that is new and different.”

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