The Washington Post: With all systems go for a 2:01 p.m. launch of the space shuttle Atlantis on the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, a key fact keeps popping up: The Hubble is not a single instrument. It’s an agglomeration of instruments. It’s a big, cavernous spacecraft capable of housing an ensemble of devices.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.