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Less impressive than the headline, since they actually just tested their conversion system at suboptimal conditions on an existing reactor setup, but still since done within six month and with less than 1M€ ...

NASA has tested a prototype of a new design for a small uranium reactor as a power source for deep space exploration. In principle this should pose a smaller radiation danger during launch and more energy per mass compared to RTGs.

1mm atomic bundle teleported !!!!

An acoustic analogue of the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) has been demonstrated for the first time.

The Florida team generated a specially shaped laser beam that could self-accelerate, or bend, sideways.

very nice!!! read this e.g. "In addition to this self-bending, the beam's intensity pattern also has a couple of other intriguing characteristics. One is that it is non-diffracting, which means that the width of each intensity region does not appreciably increase as the beam travels forwards. This is unlike a normal beam - even a tightly collimated laser beam - which spreads as it propagates. The other unusual property is that of self-healing. This means that if part of the beam is blocked by opaque objects, then any disruptions to the beam's intensity pattern could gradually recover as the beam travels forward."

Computer simulations by researchers in the US and China could lead to solar cells that work efficiently across a broad range of the solar spectrum.

doubt that this would work ...

Water ice on mercury!!!

Its a big one!

Sorry, did not see your entry when posting mine ...

how the us intelligence community forecasts tech development into 2030

interesting stuff ... I like this quote "When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars-sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific-you need to find another diagnosis. That's the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There's a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they're embarking on isn't really that risky. They're wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong-to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary-no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new."

any clue how? "With the peel-and-stick process, we integrated hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) TFSCs on paper, plastics, cell phone and building windows while maintaining the original 7.5% efficiency. The new peel-and-stick process enables further reduction of the cost and weight for TFSCs and endows TFSCs with flexibility and attachability for broader application areas. We believe that the peel-and-stick process can be applied to thin film electronics as well"

So... who is in?

nice comment Johannes ... if you add a bit of Kleopatre, e.g. why bathing in milk helped her fool Marcus Antonius, your comment would be fully interdisciplinary :-)

you mean it would include History or Psychology? I would understand why Marcus Antonius might get fooled by a bathing beauty - but milk? DONKEY MILK?!? That's just wrong... :-[

have a look ... article from Claudio

Scientists have developed artificial genetic molecules with different structural backbones (XNA, TNA) and/ or a different nucleic acid alphabet. (from April 2012)

"Roughly one quarter of all the water that humans take from the planet goes into food that nobody eats"... and such

Weird...

Cooool!

interesting, long article ... a bit optimistic in my view

my best Pakistani friend's blog (I recommend to follow it)

Nice. Though would have liked a better example ..

this is a parody on the Norvig-Chomsky debate that has been going on for the last year or so. You can read more about it here: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html