• A great/long paper about a well-documented book titled “A natural history of beer“, by George Scialabba.
• A very serious analysis by the very scientific MIT Technology Review to answer the eternal question of “Does tapping the bottom of a beer can really stop it fizzing over?”

Drink less, drink better. Or, at least, drink with a clear head.

So, I was left collecting a few knowledge bits about this, that I would like to share with you here. It won’t blow your mind (with one exception identified below), but I think it could help us all.

Note: The articles listed below with an [en] mark, are written in English; Those listings starting with [fr] are in French.

• [en] First, the definitions of Quantum Computing, thanks to Wikipedia.
• [en] John Horgan, staff writer at Scientific American, interview of Peter Shor, of Shor’s Algorithm fame (“Quantum Computing for English Majors“) is trying to separate the hype from reality.
• [en] There are people in the QC community who are afraid of the consequences of over-hyping the whole QC field. They fear that it could bring some kind of “winter” when the field would become frozen when people and organizations start to think that the whole hype was no more than blown air, stopping the real underlying scientific effort (like it happened during the “Winter of AI” for 20 years after the initial efforts in the ’80s.
  ComputerWorld talks about the QC bullshit-sniffers at @BullshitQuantum (on Twitter).
• [en] Finally, here comes the real hardcore: Quantum Computing for the very curious. This paper does not try to make things easy; It makes sure that you learn the fundamentals. One consequence: this is a long paper and you’d better take your time to read it.
• [fr] Enfin, voici une introduction en bon français mais dense. Pas très récent (2006) mais “Introduction à l’information quantique” (PDF, Bellac Le. Introduction à l’information quantique. 2006. ￿cel-00092955￿) est d’actualité.
• [fr] Encore un peu plus ancien (2002), un article du même titre (“Introduction à l’information quantique“), peut-être légèrement plus simple.

Normally, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is interesting only the physicists for its uses in scientific research and the physicians for the fabulous pictures it gives of the insides of the human body.

An MRI scanner will allow to display fine cuts of the body of the patient laid into the machine, but what is to be seen when the human guinea pig is replaced with fruits or vegetables? We discover the new face of these friends of our everyday food. And when the pictures are animated, this gives something like:

Impressed? Go and check the others on http://insideinsides.blogspot.com/.

I hope they will sell the poster somewhere.

If you’re not a scientist and you don’t understand these, there is no shame to feel. Some scientists are just wondering what this is all about…

Source: Brian Malow on Fora.tv.

The tracks are made of traditional magnets and the train contain a big super-conducting magnet (cooled down by liquid nitrogen to maintain its super-conducting characteristics). Everything is relying heavily on magnetic fields. So, not surprisingly, these fields can be observed in the real train. The following video — shot on the Rokko Liner in Kobe, Japan — shows metal paper clips dancing on the stray magnetic fields of such a Maglev train, going through the floor of one of the passenger cars.

Don’t drop your credit card (or an age-old floppy disk) on the floor for fear of seeing it quickly erased.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.