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Lost in space

In the darkness, I get turned around and upside down. I can see only what’s immediately in front of my face, like a scuba diver in murky waters, and it’s completely disorienting. Everything looks unfamiliar in the dark. I start to head in a direction I think is the right one, then realize it’s wrong, but I can’t tell whether I’m upside down or right side up. I read some mile markers—numbers attached to the handrails—to Megan [in Mission Control], hoping she can help tell me where I am. “It looks much different in the dark,” I tell Megan. “Roger that,” she says. “Did I not go far enough aft?” I ask. “Let me go back to my safety tether.” I figure once I find the place where my tether is attached I’ll be able to get my bearings. “We’re working on cuing up the sun for you,” Megan jokes, “but it’s going to be another five minutes.” I look in the direction I think is Earth, hoping to catch a glimpse of some city lights 250 miles below in the darkness to get my bearings.If I just knew which way Earth is, I could figure out where I am on the truss. When I look around, all I see is black.

'Multi-dimensional universe' in brain networks: Using mathematics in a novel way in neuroscience, scientists demonstrate that the brain operates on many dimensions, not just the 3 dimensions that we are accustomed to -- ScienceDaily

Using algebraic topology in a way that it has never been used before in neuroscience, a team from the Blue Brain Project has uncovered a universe of multi-dimensional geometrical structures and spaces within the networks of the brain. The research, published today in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, shows that these structures arise when a group of neurons forms a clique: each neuron connects to every other neuron in the group in a very specific way that generates a precise geometric object. The more neurons there are in a clique, the higher the dimension of the geometric object. "We found a world that we had never imagined," says neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project and professor at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, "there are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions." Markram suggests this may explain why it has been so hard to understand the brain. "The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly."

Bezos built Fire phone for himself

Bezos’s guiding principle for Amazon has always been to start with the needs and desires of the customer and work backward. But when it came to the Fire Phone, that customer apparently became Jeff Bezos. He envisioned a list of whiz-bang features, and the Tyto team started experimenting with a slew of promising technologies: near-field communication for contactless payments, hands-free interactions to allow users to navigate the interface through mid-air gestures, and a force-sensitive grip that could respond in different ways to various degrees of physical pressure. Perhaps most compelling was Dynamic Perspective, which uses cameras to track a user’s head and adjust the display to his or her vantage point, making the on-screen image appear three-dimensional.
Internationally, the 3D printer market is already dominated by the United States and Germany, with 75 percent and 15 percent market share, respectively. Japan's share is just 0.3 percent.However, there is substantial growing room, figures from Wholers Associates, a U.S. consultancy and authority on the market, suggest. It sees the global market in 3D printers and related services growing to almost $11 billion by 2021 from $2 billion in 2012.