Ninjazzon

Terence Tao, who has been called the “Mozart of Mathematics,” wrote an essay in 2007 about the common ingredients in “good” mathematical research. In this episode, the Fields Medalist joins Steven Strogatz to revisit the topic.

Some version of this has been floating around the Internet since 2007, probably earlier. This tweet is pretty emblematic of posts about this claim: it’s stated as pure fact, with no supporting evidence or explanation. We’re meant to just accept that a single PDF can only cover about half the area of Germany, and we’re not given any reason why 381 kilometres is the magic limit.

I started wondering: has anybody made a PDF this big? How hard would it be? Can you make a PDF that’s even bigger?

A few years ago I did some silly noodling into PostScript, the precursor to PDF, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve never actually dived into the internals of PDF, and this seems like a good opportunity.

Let’s dig in.

An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.

Specifically, Ramlan created a display inside of a cell wall made entirely of E. coli bacteria. The 32x48 1-bit display may not win any resolution awards, but who cares, right? It’s Doom running on bacteria. The researcher dosed the bacteria with fluorescent proteins to get them to light up just like digital pixels.

Together, the 100 most valuable brands in the world are worth more than $5 trillion.

Brands play an important role in driving shareholder value, yet pinpointing how much a brand is worth can be challenging. Investments in brand could pay dividends for many decades, but because those financial benefits are fairly open to interpretation, most financial regulators don’t usually accept brand assets on balance sheets.

To look at it another way, Apple is missing one of its most valuable assets on its financial reporting—a brand worth $516.6 billion.

This visualization ranks the top 100 brands by brand value, based on the annual global ranking from Brand Finance.

Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction.

When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there?

Europe's aviation safety body is working with the airline industry to counter a danger posed by interference with GPS signals - now seen as a growing threat to the safety of air travel.

Interference with global navigation systems can take one of two forms: jamming requires nothing more than transmitting a radio signal strong enough to drown out those from GPS satellites, while spoofing is more insidious and involves transmitting fake signals that fool the receiver into calculating its position incorrectly.

According to EASA, jamming and spoofing incidents have increasingly threatened the integrity of location services across Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years.

PDFs are ubiquitous in life, and choosing the right PDF reader for your phone can minimize the frustration of reading, signing, editing, and sharing these documents. While PDFs can be opened and read in any browser, a dedicated app has all the necessary functionality to make managing these documents a breeze.

We've collected the best PDF readers for Android together so you can find one that best fits your needs. Many of these are also compatible with our top Chromebooks for every budget so that you can edit your PDFs from your laptop. If you need to turn a paper document into a PDF file, here's how to clearly scan your documents on your Android device.

In 1966, the Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka conceived of a type of magnetism produced by a seemingly unnatural dance of electrons within a hypothetical material. Now, a team of physicists has spotted a version of Nagaoka’s predictions playing out within an engineered material only six atoms thick.

The discovery, recently published in the journal Nature, marks the latest advance in the five-decade hunt for Nagaoka ferromagnetism, in which a material magnetizes as the electrons within it minimize their kinetic energy, in contrast to traditional magnets. “That’s why I’m doing this kind of research: I get to learn things that we didn’t know before, see things that we haven’t seen before,” said study coauthor Livio Ciorciaro, who completed the work while a doctoral candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich’s Institute for Quantum Electronics.

Do you have an old PC lying around gathering dust? How about a small-capacity USB flash drive sitting, unloved in a drawer? You can reuse your old computer and a USB flash drive by installing a tiny Linux distribution.

Mini Linux distros are great as they require fewer system resources than other options yet still deliver a whole operating system experience, and we have nine of the smallest Linux distros for you to choose from.

Giant exploding craters only known to exist on Russia's permafrost-covered Yamal and Gydan peninsulas may result from a specific set of conditions not found elsewhere in the Arctic.

Moody’s Analytics has found 21 million “red flags” associated with shell companies that could be used to enable financial crimes, from ancient directors to dubious addresses.

For instance, more than 2,200 companies have directors aged 123 years and above, despite the fact that the oldest known human lived to 122, said Richard Graham, a director at Moody’s Analytics, in research published Monday. One listed director — at 942 years old — would have been born in the 11th century.