Huge particle accelerators like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in the US don’t run themselves – it takes a team of highly-skilled technicians and engineers to keep the lights on. Back in 2015, LCLS operators monitored the time they were spending on managing the machine and realized that the beam-tuning process was ripe for automation.
This is just one example of how automation is being used to keep accelerators up and running – and protecting them when something goes wrong. You can read more about how accelerators could become more autonomous in “The future of particle accelerators may be autonomous” by Caitlyn Buongiorno.
What is the optimum cast size in a blockbuster superhero film? Matthew Roughan, Lewis Mitchell and Tobin South at the University of Adelaide in Australia have devised a “Shannon-entropy based metric” that they say provides the answer. The trio have uploaded a preprint to arXiv that uses data from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to test their hypothesis. They conclude that their metric provides a “useful predictor of ‘success’ for films in the MCU”.
You can read more in “How the Avengers assemble: Ecological modelling of effective cast sizes for movies”.
