Month: January 2017

Enlarge / The electrons density of a buckminster fullerene molecule, calculated using density functional theory. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientific research teams often use a computational model to understand their system better. In many fields, building these computational models is a full-time job, one that provides people with long careers. These models can require a sophisticated understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, and they often require careful and informed tradeoffs between accuracy and computational speed.

This is especially true in chemistry, where the electrons that make everything work are governed by the quantum mechanical wave function. Computing for anything but the simplest atoms is impossible, yet we often want to understand what electrons are up to in complex bulk materials.

Over the last few decades, researchers have built a variety of algorithms meant to produce an approximate result, typically based on concepts collectively termed "density functional theory." But researchers have now shown that the most recent generations of algorithms have gotten extremely biased; they continue to get better at estimating the energy of the electrons, but they may be getting worse at getting their geometry right. Ironically, the problem may be an increased reliance on empirical data for developing the software.

Enlarge / Langley Research Center's space program mathematician Katherine Johnson was pivotal in sending John Glenn to space. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

There is probably nothing that lifts my spirits more than a movie about heroic scientists sending astronauts into space. Apollo 13 did this masterfully, and The Martian gave it a futuristic twist. And now Hidden Figures has revitalized this quintessentially American tale again, with great success, by focusing on the true story of a group of early NASA mathematicians who plotted Project Mercury’s vehicle flight paths in the 1950s and 60s.

Hidden Figures is the perfect title for this film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s exhaustively researched book of the same name. It deals with an aspect of spaceflight that is generally ignored, namely all the calculations that allow us to shoot objects into orbit and bring them back again. But it’s also about the people who are typically offscreen in sweeping tales of the white men who ran the space race. What Hidden Figures reveals, for the first time in Hollywood history, is that John Glenn would never have made it to space without the brilliant mathematical insights of a black woman named Katherine Johnson (played with what can only be called regal geekiness by Taraji Henson from Empire and Person of Interest).

Johnson was part of a group of “colored computers” at Langley Research Center in Atlanta, black women mathematicians who were segregated into their own number-crunching group. They worked on NASA’s Project Mercury and Apollo 11, and Johnson was just one of several women in the group whose careers made history.

What happens at CES, ends up in a video montage. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas tries to get consumers (and the media) excited for the new year with a treasure trove of new devices. Most of the big names in computing, gaming, fitness tech, smart home, and more show off some of their newest products that will come out later in the year. And until they hit shelves (if they hit the shelves), CES is the only way to get a glimpse of them.

While the show's vastness results in a lot of seemingly useless hardware and even some vaporware—Ars UK has intel on the smart hairbrush, LG wants to make sure no one ever has to open a fridge manually again—there are always a few products that stick out and manage to get us genuinely excited for the year ahead.