Browsing Archive: May, 2014

Bionic Arms Approved

Posted by on Friday, May 30, 2014, In : Medical 
This week our society got a little closer to the world of Star Wars, as a result of the DEKA project and inventor Dean Kamen. After eight years of development and testing, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. (and presumably soon other regulators around the world) have approved the first prosthetic arm that can be controlled entirely by signals from the brain. 

This project was funded by DARPA (and therefore the Pentagon) as a means of aiding veterans and other amputees to regain usage...
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Extreme Exoplanets

Posted by on Sunday, May 25, 2014, In : Astronomy 
A few weeks ago I wrote about the interesting discoveries by the Kepler probe and by ground based telescopes of planets outside of our own solar system that seem to be similar to the Earth. They are interesting places to explore, as they could quite possibly support life similar to the diversity found on our own world.

Now a team of astronomers from the University of Montreal have announced a truly extreme exoplanet at the other end of the spectrum. They have just announced the discovery of a ...

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Amateur Astrophotography Filters

Posted by on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, In : Astronomy 
Let me begin by stating that this article will be quite different from the usual content. Instead of reporting on some major news item, or some interesting piece of mathematics, or explaining some theory from modern physics, today's entry is the result of a simple experiment that I performed last night, which has very little importance but may help to answer a question that appears to be unanswered on the internet. 

As I have written in the past, I like to indulge in some very simple astrophot...
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The Higgs Machine-Learning Challenge

Posted by on Monday, May 19, 2014, In : Particle Physics 
For anyone looking for something fun to do over the summer months, while classes are out and many research projects are stalled for a variety of reasons, the people at Kaggle are hosting an interesting competition this summer.

The Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge is a contest to develop better methods of using machine learning methods, such as decision trees and neural networks, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of particle physics experiments. Competitors will be provided with simula...
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About Me


Dr. Chris Bird I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.

   

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