Dr. Roman Polyak is a fortunate man. In mathematics, his area of research, few get to see their discoveries translated into actual applications during their lifetime.

Yet more than two decades after he first developed his theory and published it, Polyak watched a conference presentation that showed how his mathematics had translated into a device to help treat cancer.  

“In the presentation, they showed a photo of a boy,” said Polyak, smiling as he recalled the image of a young patient helped by this new technology.  “I was in heaven.  I never dreamed, 25 years ago, that rather abstract mathematics could be used for cancer treatment.”   

Polyak, who holds a joint appointment in operations research and mathematical sciences at George Mason University, works in the field of mathematical optimization. Optimization, as the name implies, involves making something as effective as possible.

“People have been working on optimization since the ancient Greeks learned that a string encloses the most area when it is formed into the shape of a circle,” he said

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PILOBOLUS (pronounced Pil-OB-olus) is a kind of mushroom and gives its name to an American dance group founded in 1971 by four young men studying at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The botanical reference is apt for a dance style dependent on choreography that can only be called organic.

Bodies are often in close contact, enfolded, encircling, clinging, opening out, wrapping around. The seven dancers perform the movement, based on balance and weight-shifting, with ineffable grace and skill.

There is a moment in Symbiosis, the fourth piece in this Adelaide-only Australian debut season, when Jenny Mendez seems to roll from the floor up Manelich Minniefee's legs and body until he catches her in his arms, then swings her gently down and up again, rocking her tenderly. It's done so smoothly and easily that it looks quite natural. The controlled strength hiding the effort behind such actions is even more evident in Jun Kuribayashi's solo Pseudopodia, a terrific set of variations on the somersault. In an extraordinary interval, this tall, lean dancer stands with his legs wide apart but leaning far back, his head, arms and upper body parallel to the floor. Try it yourself sometime.

The opening number, Aquatica, while too long, has a continual flowing rhythm and some attractively evocative groups, the two women poised like ships' figureheads on the pyramids formed by the men.

It contrasts nicely with Gnomen, a series of dances for four men in black trunks, their hunky physiques made glamorous by golden sidelighting. Balance is particularly significant in some sections here: when Kuribayashi is held upside down, stiff and sloping, for instance, or when Andrew Herro is thrown out, alarmingly, towards the audience, then snatched back and forth as if lying face down on a swing.

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Does a bigger brain make you more intelligent?

Do blind people really hear better than sighted people? And why can't you get that irritating tune out of your head?

There are many myths about our brains and as many amazing facts, as revealed in a fascinating new book by SANDRA AAMODT and SAM WANG, two leading neuroscientists.

Here, they explain some of the most surprising secrets of our grey matter...

FACT: You can't tickle yourself
When a doctor examines a ticklish patient, they place one of the patient's hands over their own to prevent the tickling sensation.

Why does this work? Because no matter how ticklish you may be, you can't tickle yourself.

This is because your brain focuses on what's going on in the outside world to prevent important signals from being drowned out in the endless buzz of sensations caused by your own actions.

For instance, this means you're unlikely to notice the texture of your socks, but you would feel a tap on the shoulder.

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In light of Ben Stein’s new movie on intelligent design, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” UC Irvine biologist Dr. Francisco Ayala gave a lecture entitled “Evolution Is a Fact and It Is the Unifying Concept of Biology” on Wednesday, April 30 in Humanities Instructional Building 100.

Sponsored by the Atheists, Agnostics and Rationalists @ UCI, the speech drew on arguments from Ayala’s latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion.” The publication heavily utilizes science to support Ayala’s arguments against proponents of intelligent design.

Ayala first pointed out that evolutionary biology follows the methodology of geology and other sciences. The fossil record, to some extent, mirrors geological evolution. As geologists discovered patterns in rock layers showing millennia of change and development, Darwin and subsequent biologists found organisms that reflected these changes over time.

Contrary to Ayala, intelligent design proponents argue that the theory of evolution is unreliable because the fossil record is missing the intermediates between one species and its evolutionary successor. Acknowledging this opposing view, Ayala’s presentation included a slideshow with photographs indicating that the intermediate species between a modern fish and its oldest ancestors “show characteristics typical of amphibians.”

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After an hours-long crawl, the space shuttle Discovery reached its launch pad on Saturday, in preparation for a May 31 liftoff to add the main piece of a huge Japanese research complex to the international space station.

With the shuttle in position, NASA will conduct a practice launch countdown with the seven-member crew next week. The mission is the third of five planned for this year.

Discovery's crew, led by Mark Kelly, includes five first-time fliers and two veterans. Kelly has made two previous spaceflights, and lead spacewalker Michael Fossum has flown once.

The crew includes Japan's Akihiko Hoshide, who will oversee the setup of Kibo, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's primary contribution to the space station. Also aboard will be pilot Ken Ham, spacewalker Ron Garan, mission specialist Karen Nyberg and space station flight engineer Greg Chamitoff.

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Take this with several grains of Lawry's Seasoned Salt, but the latest rumor going around is that Microsoft will have a Blu-ray version of the Xbox 360 ready to go for this Christmas.

Kotaku reports from a Taiwanese tech news site that a manufacturer in the country has already taken orders from Microsoft for a version of the console with a Blu-ray drive inside.

Since the general wisdom seems to be that the Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3 is driving sales of Sony's console this year, this move would at least make sense.

By way of verifying these claims, I looked at the Chinese original and note that it does say "blue light Xbox," but of course for all I know, it just means that they'll be on sale in Sunday's K-Mart circular.

Okay, so: Let's assume this happens, and they announce it at E3. Good idea? Bad idea? Why? Show your work.

Hewlett-Packard scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will make it possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips. Manufacturers of today’s chips are rapidly reaching the limit on how much smaller chips can be.

The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly.

Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech.

Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.

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Fortune reports that AT&T is preparing to offer a $200 subsidy for buyers of the next-generation iPhone, widely expected to be introduced this summer. It writes that since the new, presumably faster models will start at the same $399 base price as the current iPhones, that will drop the effective price to $199.
I certainly assume that Apple and AT&T are working hard to get the iPhone to a price that puts it within reach of the most people. Fortune writes that AT&T has found that iPhone owners spend twice as much as the average customer because they buy data plans. (This is consistent with what AT&T said to investors on its earnings conference call last week.)
But as reported, there are some bits of the story that don’t make sense. Fortune wrote that AT&T will offer the subsidy to people who buy the phones in its stores, but not to those who buy in Apple stores. I can’t imagine that Apple would want to sell iPhones for even a dime more in its stores than in another store. (Apple keeps exceedingly tight control over its pricing.)
And there is no underlying economic reason for AT&T to offer anyone an incentive to buy the iPhone in its stores. No matter where you buy your iPhone, the only way to use it legitimately is on the AT&T network, which requires a two-year contract. What’s more, Apple has a much greater incentive to get people into its stores where it can try to sell them Macs than does AT&T which has little more to offer than the odd headset and case.

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I am writing this letter to clear up some bad information that is being presented as “facts” to the voters in Richmond County. I have witnessed the actions of the members of the board of commissioners who are running for office and I have seen that they always consider the best interests of the taxpayers of Richmond County.

Promises have been made by a candidate and Commissioner Dillman that, if elected, the candidate and Mrs. Dillman would eliminate the taxes on the elderly. I sincerely wish that the county commissioners had that authority. State law governs who is taxed. Some seniors are given a tax break by the State of North Carolina, but the county is required by law to tax everyone the same.

This same candidate is promising that he would bring a movie theater, an Outback and an Olive Garden to Richmond County. This may happen, but it will depend upon whether the restaurants and the theater decide that they can make money here, not what the commissioners want. Hopefully, the voters understand that if the board could make this happen, it would have already happened. In 2007, this group of commissioners brought in about $750 million in investment and about 250 jobs. Let's be careful when we ask for change.

On April 3, 2007 the headlines of the Daily Journal read ‘Beale Offers Ultimatum’ to the commissioners. With this threat, the commissioners were ordered to build a Judicial Center. On May 7, 2007 there was a vote to move forward with a judicial center. The vote was split but four voted yes. Just so you know, one of these four was Commissioner Dillman.

The European Union launched Giove-B, the second (and last) test satellite in its $5.3 billion Galileo project, on Sunday, according to Reuters.

The first test satellite, Giove-A was launched in December 2005. Giove-B will test the program's high-precision atomic clock and signal transmission, said Reuters.

Galileo is Europe's upcoming satellite radio navigation system, and it's the EU's largest space program. Galileo will eventually become an ultra-precise system of 30 satellites, but it has hit a few bumps along the way.
First off, the project's launch date has been pushed back several times from the original goal of 2008 to the current goal of 2013. And unlike the United States' Global Positioning System, which was designed primarily as a military system with a free public side to it, Galileo was initially conceived of as a largely commercial venture. But the project proved too ambitious to be sustained by the original public-private partnership. After some companies pulled out of the project, the EU voted to put more public funding toward it. Now, even that support isn't guaranteed. Fears that the project might spiral out of financial control prompted some U.K. lawmakers last November to call for a complete review of the U.K.'s involvement in the program.

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