The second installment of the weekly science news roundup for the rest of us is burrowing into the collective unconscious like one of those mind-control worms from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan — catch it at SlateV.
In an age when even Gawker has figured out how awful most science reporting is, isn’t it time you turned your friends on to the good stuff? Go - do it now. We’ll wait.
In this episode: The untold story of the race between the two fastest supercomputers on earth, the epidemiology of viral videos, and sticking a fly inside a Max Headroom synopticon locked into a feedback loop with a robot… for SCIENCE!
Awesome theme song Comrade Elvis courtesy Hilotrons and Kelp Records, awesome co-host Christie Nicholson courtesy Scientific American
0201 - 10 Fast/10 Furious (that’s binary…)
Last week Los Alamos National Lab’s Roadrunner held on to its crown as the world’s fastest supercomputer — a title it’s held since June of this year, when it became the first electronic brain in the world to break the petaflop barrier (that’s one quadrillion calculations per second).
Or DID it?
In an exclusive interview with Grand Unified Weekly, world-famous computer scientist Jack Dongarra revealed that were it not for the failure of but one of its 100,000 cores (that’s “processors” to you civilians out there) 15 minutes short of the finish of its 28 hour run at the prize, the upstart Jaguar supercomputer located at Oakridge National Laboratory could very well have taken the title.
“To have a computer of this size and complexity stay up for 26 hours, especially when the machine is very new — that’s a difficult task,” Jack told GUW and no one else (because in this age of press releases and blog posts, reportage is for the most part dead).
“It died as a result of node failure and they never got a chance to re-run it. They had to go with slower problem, and it ran with less performance as a result of that.”
Which makes the home-town newspaper’s premature declaration that the Jaguar is the world’s fastest supercomputer sound a little less like sour grapes.
- Time lapse video of the assembly of Roadrunner
- Jaguar has a long line of scientists queued up to use it for everything from climate change modeling to nanotech, but the exact function of Roadrunner is classified. But everyone knows it’s used to simulate atomic blasts so we don’t have to violate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in our quest to care for our aging arsenal and/or develop exotic new forms of nuclear weapons.
0202 - The Epidemiology of Viral Videos
Believe it or not, the point of this paper was not to find out what makes videos go viral — everyone knows how to do that — it was to conceive of an entirely new engine for recommending content:
The take-home here is that at either end of the spectrum of audience behavior, there are two kinds of videos that become popular on YouTube — the kind that editors promote to the homepage that don’t actually have audience appeal, and the kind that make it there all by themselves because people can’t stop forwarding them to their friends at work. And the way you tell them apart is: the ones that are “truly viral” evidence increases in daily views that build up to the huge spike in traffic that appearing on the homepage of YouTube inevitably engenders. The other kind of videos get a bunch of juice from being on the homepage of a site that clocks 80 million visitors a month, but as soon as they’re off the homepage, their traffic nosedives. It’s physics, people!
- The original papers
- …and the inevitable attention from blogs that focus on the industry
0203 - Fruit flies - 20 minutes into the future
Really? Is anyone still reading? Anyone who gets this far, leave your number in the comments and I’ll sing Puff the Magic Dragon into your answering machine.
Following in the footsteps of robocockroach and robomouse, robofly uses a living system — in this case a fly — as the sensorimotor ‘brain’ of a semi-autonomous robot. Translation: robots modeled on animals, or even cyborg animals, that DARPA will be happy to transform into the spies of the future.
- As usual, New Scientist splits the journalistic ground asunder by lightly editing the university’s original VNR on the subject, but sort of redeems itself in print.
- Before it was a robot, robofly was a fly flight simulator.
- The local CBS affiliate removes its tongue from its cheek long enough to capture a few fascinating details of the experimental procedure on video.
Related:
- Scientists recreate the first ‘living’ molecule, testosterone causes economic bubbles, and tiny robot hands are coming to a bloodstream near you (Episode
- Eco-Friendly Bombs, China Wants Its Scientists Back, and How Pollution Helps (Episode 10)
- Episode 1 - Obama, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mouse Mind, and Science Hype
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