Einstein's Fridge: Who knew the history of thermodynamics was so much like high school?
Almost 50 years ago I had the misfortune to take two statistics classes at the same time. One was a required introduction to statistics and the other was econometrics. Don’t ask why I took them both -- I don’t remember. But I do remember one day in the Intro to Statistics class when another student asked about this distribution plot (above).
"What was it? What did it indicate? What could it be used for?" they asked. "It’s nothing," said the TA. "It’s useless." But I had seen that shape before, in econometrics, where they called it a split normal distribution. that was said to be good for displaying time-series data. So not useless at all.
Researchers create a way to visually sort blood cell data
For more than five decades, researchers wanting to learn more about cellular composition and cellular physiology used a process called flow cytometry to examine the physical and chemical aspects of blood and other kinds of fluid. It involves passing the substance through at least one laser.
Any fluorescent molecules that are present emit fluorescence, while other particles show light-scattering properties.
Scientists discover a new way to use DNA as a storage device
The future of technology is about more than just increasing raw processing power and embracing the likes of quantum computing -- storage is also a serious concern. We already generate huge amounts of data, and the amount we need to store is only going to increase.
Just as processors have developed in new and exciting ways over the years, so there have been great strides made in the field of storage. But variants on the current methods of storage are simply not going to cut it for much longer. Thankfully, scientists in Ireland may have come up with a solution -- storing data in DNA.