A Year in 12 Posts

This Magnus Carlsen is amazing. Beating a 12 year-old world record at only 22 is a huge achievement (Kasparov was 41 when he set the previous record). Magnus become world #1 at 19.

The origins of chess are unclear but the game has been played for about 1500 years. Go was born in China and has been around twice that long. Both are great challenges for computer programmers (in Go, humans still rule, though - but not for long).

As strategic games, both chess and go are interesting metaphors for politics, business and even Internet Marketing. Major difference between Go and Chess? In chess you destroy your opponent set position. In go you conquer an empty space.

Drones have been in the news since the gulf wars. They became a hot topic on 2013. Military, police, entertainment, delivery (well, not quite yet, Amazon, but PrimeAir certainly was a communication hit), they are everywhere. In April, the Scientific American review started to warn against the impact of drones on our privacy. To be read in the perspective of PRISM and other scary initiatives. Democracy, beware.

And insect drones are coming! (from Miguel Prazeres's beautiful Biomimicry topic).

Moving further to a connected world, 2013 was also the year of the Internet of Things (IoT). Its impact will be felt in the economy, health care, media, energy, transport... in all our life, hopefully for the better. Major stake. Special praise to rising stars Arduino (a topic on the Italy-born open source popular platform) and Sigfox, the first IoT dedicated network.

Prism, Drones, IoT, Big Data, Robots... seems like 2013 heralds a new era where the Internet as we know it was just a humble start to immense control and power given to machines and computers. I think it's time to watch Terminator again! And to be careful.

Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Youtube, AOL, Facebook, Skype, Verizon, ...: the NSA is spying on US (and perhaps not only US) citizen with a data mining program called PRISM, revealed in June.

Edward Snowden gave this interview. Getting closer and closer to 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell. Blurred boundaries between democracy, freedom and security... How afraid are you? I'm impressed by the power of the program... I'm also very impressed by Snowden's position. Must watch.

Meanwhile, China reclaimed top spot in the TOP500 list (most powerful supercomputers). [geek alert] Tianhe-2: 33.86 petaflop/s, more than 3 million cores. 30 times more powerful than the most powerul supercompters from 5 years ago. That's lots of power for data mining... 

Moebius reach was so wide: US comics, Japanese mangas and even movies (Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element). A creator of universes, a rare artist.

Also in March, Putin's come back. Back to the cold war days, Russia was the bad soviet guy. Now it's more complex: Russia embrassed capitalism but embarasses with its positions on Iran, Syria, democracy.

And if your software crashed with no good reason, you might have an excuse: the biggest solar storm in 5 years. Stronger storms expected in 2013!

Of course: Oscar Pistorius, Felix Sanchez, Michael Phelps, Usan Bolt (and his TPM record: more than 80.000 Tweet per minute), but ...

My prefered stories: Dong Hyun setting a new world record in archery although he is ... blind! And Hamadou Djibo Issaka: was given a wild card and 3 months to train to rowing... that's the olympic spirit!

Also from the Olympics but much less glorious: the scandal of censorship.

But there was something bigger in July 2012: The Higgs boson has almost certainly been discovered!

The Higgs boson was a "missing particle", predicted by the standard model of physics 50 years ago, but never so far observed. A mega device, the Large Hadron Collider (cost: $1B+) has been build just for it. Electroweak interactions, symmetry-breaking scalar fields... poetry!

Irony? Same month, a diamond planet is discovered! More good news from the stars.

Ok, it's summer time. Let's relax and forget the bad news. Everybody should have watched these two wonderful time lapse videos (1 & 2). Full screen, breath, and travel. Life is good :)

Beautiful ending for 2011.

And a last message of hope - or dream -, Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the habitable zone.

A meteor hit Chelyabinsk in Russia in February.

Relatively small (20m), it came undetected. It travelled at 60.000 km/h and exploded when it entered the atmosphere, 23km above the ground. The generated air burst was 20 times more powerull than the bomb of Iroshima; it damaged buildings and injured people tens of miles away.

It tells a lot about kinetic energy, and why scientifics and movie makers are so interested in asteroids. Meteors are also a favorite end-of-world scenario for would be Nostradamuses. Speaking of which, I could not find his predictions for 2014 but an interesting curation by Business Insider.

The smallest exoplanet was also detected this month. With around 1000 alien worlds detected so far, the search for Earth-like, life-capable planets is hotter than ever! More good news from the stars.

What a milestone! Entering your worst sci-fi nightmares, or opening the door to personalized medicine? Expect interesting debates on ethic, risk, manipulation and the rest. Great achievement nevertheless.

This makes me optimistic: just one step closer to #cloneAlly (@Ally Greer, Scoop.it Community Manager with Super powers).

Browse the science interest for more. I'm specially fond of Dr Stephan Gruenwald's Amazing Science.

5 Oscar, including best actor for Jean Dujardin. And first best-picture award for a silent film since first ceremony in 1929. A Touching film, with daring choices (black and white, silent) and great actors. And also probably a superb marketing campain.

Google get clearance for its $12.5B bid on Motorola. Seems to me like Google went into mobile just yesterday. The pace at which the mobile world is reshaping is amazing ; the Android v. Apple battle is epic.

And for the geekiest : IBM getting closer to Quantum Computing! (can someone please explain this ?).

Solar Impulse, the Swiss project, completed the world first solar-powered intercontinental flight from Spain to Morocco. An important technical achievement when energy is one of the world next big challenges.

The plane was piloted by Bertrand Piccard, who was also the first to complete a non stop balloon flight around the world.

Less mediatic than a Richard Branson or Felix Baumgartner, but interesting family: his father Jacques was the first (with Don Walsh) to explore the deepest point of the oceans (Mariana Trench, - 36.000 ft) and his grand father Auguste set altitude records in balloon and invented the bathyscaphe. 

After a  352 million miles, 253 day journey from Earth, Nasa's heavy-weigth (1 ton) rover Curiosity lands on the red planet! One of the mission is to collect data for a manned mission!

Paul Doherty has a great video explaining what (Carbon) - and how - the rover is searching. Must watch.

Things to know when planning your next trip to Mars.

And if you want more good news from the stars, discover Guillaume's topic. And keep traveling!

On the business front, it was decision time for the Apple v. Samsung patent trial. Apple won.

I love the design of Apple's products. And I believe that patent rights are a necessary protection of R&D investments. But things are getting absurd. E.g. a "rectangle with rounded corners"; or "a tap is a zero-length swipe". Come on Apple, please...

Amazing feat, scientific achievement, egotistic trip? Whatever. We all watched and were thrilled. Congratulation Felix Baumgartner.

Records he set: first man to break the sound barrier with no engine (834 mph or Mach 1.24), highest jump ever (120.000 feet; previous record was 102,800 feet by Joe Kittinger back in 1960!). But also the most watched live video on Youtube (8 millions).

Here is a cool list of 15 speed records.

On a more dramatic note, Sandy hit on Oct 2012. Nasa has analysis and pictures. Impressive.