More details emerged this week about the deal that lured California-based SpaceX into choosing southern Texas as the site of its commercial space launch facility. According to a short write-up by the Brownsville Herald, SpaceX representatives have an agreement in hand that would exempt the facility, located in Cameron County, from paying county taxes for ten years.
Additionally, the Herald says that SpaceX will also accept $13 million in state funds from Texas’ Spaceport Development Trust Fund (along with $2.3 million in additional monies from the Texas Enterprise Fund), which will help offset the $85 million that SpaceX expects to spend developing the site.
The final details of the agreement won’t be released to the public until SpaceX formally signs off, which Cameron County officials expect will be some time next week.
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Physicists have identified a mechanism that may help explain Zipf’s law – a unique pattern of behavior found in disparate systems, including complex biological ones. The journal Physical Review Letters is publishing their mathematical models, which demonstrate how Zipf’s law naturally arises when a sufficient number of units react to a hidden variable in a system. “We’ve discovered a method that produces Zipf’s law without fine-tuning and with very few assumptions,” says Ilya Nemenman, a biophysicist at Emory University and one of the authors of the research. The paper’s co-authors include biophysicists David Schwab of Princeton and Pankaj Mehta of Boston University. “I don’t think any one of us would have made this insight alone,” Nemenman says. “We were trying to solve an unrelated problem when we hit upon it. It was serendipity and the combination of all our varied experience and knowledge.” Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. “It’s a simple mechanism,” Nemenman says. “If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf’s law will kick in.” That insight could aid in the
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