<< A giant impact formed the Moon, and lunar rocks provide insight into that process >>
Alessandro Morbidelli et al., Oxygen isotopic evidence for vigorous mixing during the Moon-forming giant impact. Science 29 Jan 2016: Vol. 351, Issue 6272, pp. 493-496
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad0525
<< The old adage "what goes up must come down" even applies to an immense cloud of hydrogen gas outside our Milky Way galaxy >>
<< The Smith Cloud is following a ballistic trajectory and will plow back into the Milky Way's disk in about 30 million years. When it does, astronomers believe it will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation, perhaps providing enough gas to make 2 million suns >>
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/04
Andrew J. Fox, Nicolas Lehner, et al. On the metallicity and origin of the smith high-velocity cloud. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 816, Number 1.
<< A major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades >>
<< The DeepMind system, dubbed AlphaGo, matched its artificial wits against Fan Hui, Europe’s reigning Go champion, and the AI system went undefeated in five games witnessed by an editor from the journal Nature and an arbiter representing the British Go Federation >>
<< It happened faster than I thought >>
Cade Metz. In a huge breakthrough, google’s AI beats a top player at the game of go. Jan 27, 2016.
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles-ai-beats-a-top-player-at-the-game-of-go/
<< the models won’t be smiling. In spite of some hasty claims that happy faces are now de rigeur, a blank expression is a perennial trait of model behaviour >>
<< To be emotionally controlled also suggests elevation above earthly concerns, access to higher knowledge and – in the modern world – an ability to be “unshakeable”. This is even more impressive in what theorist Erving Goffman called “fateful situations” – situations in which you or your dignity and composure are at greater than average risk >>
<< and just hope they don’t trip over >>
Vanessa Brown. Why fashion models don’t smile. January 26, 2016 3.46pm GMT
https://theconversation.com/why-fashion-models-dont-smile-53658
<< The researchers found that weak long-range van der Waals (attractive or repulsive forces between molecules or atomic groups that do not arise from interactions due to a covalent bond or electrostatic force) yielded the largest contribution to the molecule-surface interaction >>
A self-assembling molecular nanoswitch
A possible future molecular memory device. January 18, 2016
http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-self-assembling-molecular-nanoswitch
<< We find that on both substrates, the adsorbate-substrate interaction is dominated by attractive van der Waals forces >>
Moritz Müller, Katharina Diller, et al. Interfacial charge rearrangement and intermolecular interactions: Density-functional theory study of free-base porphine adsorbed on Ag(111) and Cu(111). The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2016; 144 (2): 024701 DOI: 10.1063/1.4938259 (open access)
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/144/2/10.1063/1.4938259
<< We used a rodent analog of the Iowa Gambling Task to determine whether the addition of audiovisual cues would affect choice preferences. Adding reward-concurrent cues significantly increased risky choice. This is the first clear demonstration that reward-paired cues can bias cost/ benefit decision making against a subject's best interests in a manner concordant with elevated addiction susceptibility >>
Barrus MM, Winstanley CA. Dopamine D3 Receptors Modulate the Ability of Win-Paired Cues to Increase Risky Choice in a Rat Gambling Task. J Neurosci. 2016 Jan 20;36(3):785-94. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2225-15.2016.
<< There are many, many repositories out there for scientists to store their research, and although this is great, searching for one thing across them all is not possible. Mike Taylor introduces a new project aiming to overcome this issue, The One Repo >>
http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2016/01/22/world-needs-one-repo/
