Animal Cognition, Online First™ - SpringerLink: "A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus), able to quantify sets of eight or fewer items (including heterogeneous subsets), to sum two sequentially presented sets of 0–6 items (up to 6), and to identify and serially order Arabic numerals (1–8), all by using English labels (Pepperberg in J Comp Psychol 108:36–44, 1994; J Comp Psychol 120:1–11, 2006a; J Comp Psychol 120:205–216, 2006b; Pepperberg and Carey submitted), was tested on addition of two Arabic numerals or three sequentially presented collections (e.g., of variously sized jelly beans or nuts). He was, without explicit training and in the absence of the previously viewed addends, asked, “How many total?” and required to answer with a vocal English number label. In a few trials on the Arabic numeral addition, he was also shown variously colored Arabic numerals while the addends were hidden and asked “What color number (is the) total?” Although his death precluded testing on all possible arrays, his accuracy was statistically significant and suggested addition abilities comparable with those of nonhuman primates."

Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom - NYTimes.com: "Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.  The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today’s silicon-based machines."

The End of the Mainframe Era at NASA: "This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA’s last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe.  For my millennial readers, I suppose that I should define what a mainframe is.  Well, that’s easier said than done, but here goes -- It’s a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful.  They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices. "

Why Adele's 'Someone Like You' Makes Everyone Cry - WSJ.com: "Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura."

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow."

The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash | Science | The Observer: "It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream."

Expert Available to Talk About Spatial Reasoning and the Mathematical Mind: "Most people believe that mathematics is numbers, symbols and notations. Dr. Jonathan Brendefur, professor of mathematics education at Boise State University, explains that mathematics is also about spatial reasoning – the ability to visually manipulate stimuli, to break apart and put together 2-D and 3-D shapes, to take these ideas and twist and turn them or to not be confused when an object’s orientation changes. This ability is one of the best predictors of later success in mathematics, and can be learned through a variety of different methods and practices. It also helps people develop fluency with operations in arithmetic and strengthens measurement concepts."

The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians: "It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower-quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the pre-existing American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications."

Rice, UT rank among top 10 schools in Princeton Review | khou.com Houston: "Two Texas universities are topping the list when it comes to getting your money’s worth. Rice University and the University of Texas are included in the Princeton Review’s top ten best valued schools in the nation. Rice was fifth on the private school list and UT was 10th on the public schools list."

Indian claims finding new cube root formula: "Agra: It has eluded experts for centuries, but now an Indian, following in the footsteps of Aryabhatt, one of the earliest Indian mathematicians, claims to have worked out a simple formula to find any number's cube root.

Nirbhay Singh Nahar, a retired chemical engineer and an amateur mathematician, claims he has found a formula that will help students and applied engineers to work out the cube roots of any number in a short time.

"Give me any number - even, odd, decimals, a fraction...and I will give you the cube root using a simple calculator to just add and subtract within a minute and a half. We do have methods and patterns, but no formula at the moment. Even the tables give cube roots of 1 to 1,000, not of fractions or of numbers beyond 1,000, for which people have to use scientific calculators," Nahar, who retired as an engineer from Hindustan Salts Ltd at Sambhar (Rajasthan), said."

Who Owns Your Personal History? | Fast Company: "One day in December 1955, former President Harry Truman, who had been living in Independence, Missouri since leaving the White House in 1953, arrived home and found his wife Bess at the fireplace, burning a pile of his letters to her.   “Think of history,” he said. "I have," she replied. And she let the letters continue to burn. Today, we no longer have the option of burning our letters. Our digital tracks are everywhere--in email messages, tweets, text messages, social networking postings, and the visit histories of Internet sites. They are in the hands of family members, friends, acquaintances, current and former coworkers, people we barely remember, and people we prefer to forget. Our movements are logged through mobile devices, and our images are stored in the surveillance archives of retail stores, office buildings, taxis, and transit systems."

Wolfram Blog : Happy 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321 !: "A quick check with Mathematica verified that, yes indeed, 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321 = 2012. Wow! How in the world did anyone discover that rare factoid? And how long will it be until another year arrives that can be similarly expressed?"

Computing: Improving security in the cloud: "Less and less of today's computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in "the cloud" without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered."

Computer simulations shed light on the physics of rainbows: "Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows -- primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days -- by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach even yielded realistic simulations of difficult-to-replicate "twinned" rainbows that split their primary bow in two."

‘Game of Thrones’ Season 2 Trailer - SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog: "Game of Thrones Season 2 is based on A Clash of Kings, the 2nd book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire series."

Star Trek Bridge | eBay: "This is the ultimate buy for the ultimate Trekkie! A full sized, fully operational Star Trek bridge themed party room! The room comes with a working main screen, computer consoles, automatic sliding doors, and a hidden fridge. This one-of-a-kind buy even features surround sound and a "depressurization" chamber! The set was originally constructed for a well know celebrity for 1.5 million dollars but can now be yours for only a fraction of that at $200,000. The room can be shipped to you upon purchase so that you can be the proud owner of a federation star ship that your neighbors will drool over! For more information and a better look at this amazing piece of fan construction please look at this video of Fox's interview with the builder. Enjoy your new lift and "live long and prosper!"

Hublot painstakingly recreates a mysterious, 2,100-year-old clockwork relic - but why?: "Why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist? It barely tells the time, and it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook. In fact, very few people would have the faintest idea what it is, or why you'd want one at all. But for those that do recognize its intricate gears and dials, this tiny, complex piece of machinery tells a vivid and incredible tale. It's a story of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death. A story of amazing intellect, lost riches and impossible chance - a sunken treasure that Jaques Cousteau once described as "more valuable than the Mona Lisa" - and it's connected with an ancient celebrity whose star shone so brightly that he's still a household name more than 2200 years after his death... Read on!"

Studying random structures with confetti: " Chance and probability play a natural role in statistical physics. Inspired by confetti, researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, are gaining better understanding of random phenomena and refine the tools that can be used to study them.  "The result of small disturbances to random systems can be illustrated by throwing confetti. If simple rules are constructed at a small scale, it is possible to study the characteristics at a broad level. Small changes at local level can result in widely differing phenomena at global level," says Daniel Ahlberg at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Gothenburg."

'Space Hurricane': Huge Solar Storm Is Pounding Earth Now | Solar Storm, Solar Flare & Coronal Mass Ejection | Space Weather, Sun Cycle & Sun Storm | Space.com: "A wave of charged particles from an intense solar storm is pummeling the Earth right now, which may trigger stunning aurora displays and cause minor disruptions to satellites over the next two days, NASA scientists say.

The storm began when a powerful solar flare erupted on the sun yesterday (Jan. 23), blasting a stream of charged particles toward Earth. This electromagnetic burst, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), hit Earth at about 9:31 a.m. EST (1430 GMT), according to scientists at the Space Weather Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md."

International Slide Rule Museum: "The ISRM is dedicated to the Students, Educators, Scientists and Engineers of the Past and Those Still Present, and to promote the lost art of Numeracy by providing resources and slide rules for education and other historic institutions. ISRM is a member of the American Association of Museums and the Association of Northern Front Range Museums."

A New Faster Fourier Transform Can Speed One of IT's Fundamental Algorithms | Popular Science: "An algorithm called the fast Fourier transform is one of the most important aspects of your digital life that you never think about. It’s a core concept in information technology, making possible the signal processing, image and audio compression, and other complex mathematics necessary for you to cram every episode of Breaking Bad onto your mobile device alongside every track Jay-Z ever made, and then play it all back without a hitch. Basically, the Fourier transform turns irregular signals into pure frequencies, so the fluctuating voltage signal traveling through a wire from your MP3 player to a set of speakers can be translated on the fly into the sounds you want to hear. The algorithm does this so quickly it earned the name “fast” (as in “fast Fourier transform,” or FFT). And it’s about to get faster."