Month: September 2016

Why are there two high tides? Why is one of those high tides on the opposite side of the earth as the moon.  This video explains that, jump to the 2 minute mark if you just want the diagrams.

For the first time, astronomers have clearly observed at infrared wavelengths what happens after a black hole eats a star: it burps back up a brilliant flare of light that echoes through space.

via Scientists caught black holes swallowing stars – and burping energy back up.

http://xkcd.com/1732/

DeepMind is changing the way speech synthesis is handled by directly modeling the raw waveform of human speech. The very high-level approach of WaveNet means that it can conceivably generate any kind of speech or even music. Listen above for an example of WaveNet’s voice synthesis. There’s an almost uncanny valley quality to it.

via Google’s DeepMind develops creepy, ultra-realistic human speech synthesis | Science! | Geek.com.

Tumors also differ among patients with the same type of cancer.  An interdisciplinary team from the Pennsylvania developed software called Canopy.  It infers the evolutionary track of tumor cells by surveying two types of mutations.  They demonstrated the approach on samples from leukemia and ovarian cancer.
Canopy is an open-source software so oncologists will be able to use it to identify potential biomarkers for different cancer cell populations within tumor specimens that are associated with drug resistance and invasive malignancy, among other characteristics.

via Penn software helps to identify course of cancer metastasis, tumor ‘evolution’.

When a planet passes in front of star, the star’s brightness usually dips by around 1 percent, but KIC 8462852 has been experiencing dips of up to 22 percent, suggesting that something huge is zooming past. And now a second star with strange dips in brightness has been identified.

via Researchers just found a second ‘Dyson Sphere’ star – ScienceAlert.

The funny thing about the discovery of Proxima b – the closest planet to our Solar System, which is also rocky, Earth-sized, and potentially habitable – is that nobody has actually seen it.

http://www.sciencealert.com/the-earth-next-door-may-have-a-breathable-atmosphere-and-we-could-find-out-in-just-2-years

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6618

In 2011, the Khan Academy has over 2200 videos and over 1 million students a month.  This site is for everyone who can use a computer for self paces, validated learning.  I can’t recommend this enough, for you and your kids.