Group items tagged

paywall skipping: http://www.ncmis.cas.cn/kxcb/jclyzs/201202/W020120203526011739796.pdf

Does not seem to be in any way of any use for space but more than 100% efficiency always sounds ...(cool/stupid/ridiculous/ignorant/headline catching...)

...Covering about a third of the sky, the new image contains 10 times as many objects as the Palomar Survey, or about half a billion. The higher resolution scan is a goldmine for astronomers and is expected to lead to discoveries "for decades to come"...

This is almost word for word the title Andrés gave to the first presentation of the team to DG ten years ago ...

There's a whole series of futuristic articles, may be worth having a look: http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future

Ionic fluids in thrusters for microsatellites. Here also a link to a paper on the topic: .pdf

...I told you we had to hurry up with our Ariadna! btw, they studied the coiling at the cellular level (but I am scared to read the paper to see if there is something left for us..)

We managed to convince ESA it was a good idea after all :)

"Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding?"

"For the first time, researchers have determined virtually the entire genome of a fetus using only a blood sample from the pregnant woman and a saliva specimen from the father."

Hilarious!!! This is stupid / useless in so many ways, I cannot even start listing them ....

Physicists in the US have made the first ultrathin flat lens. Thanks to its flatness, the device eliminates optical aberrations that occur in conventional lenses with spherical surfaces. As a result, the focusing power of the lens also approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Really nice indeed! The new flat ultrathin lens is different in that it is a nanostructured "metasurface" made of optically thin beam-shaping elements called optical antennas, which are separated by distances shorter than the wavelength of the light they are designed to focus. These antennas are wavelength-scale metallic elements that introduce a slight phase delay in a light ray that scatters off them. The metasurface can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle and spacing between the nanoantennas. "The antenna is nothing more than a resonator that stores light and then releases it after a short time delay," Capasso says. "This delay changes the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would." The lens surface is patterned with antennas of different shapes and sizes that are oriented in different directions. This causes the phase delays to be radially distributed around the lens so that light rays are increasingly refracted further away from the centre, something that has the effect of focusing the incident light to a precise point.

High energy gamma rays are shown to be bent slightly by specialized lenses. The effect is likely due to pair-creation close to the atomic nuclei in the material.

why am I not surprised .....

http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...

unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas

And the actual paper link with some graphs: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012000037

Oh those bloody physicists... someone forgot to turn off the lights and now they have a 400 times better conductive crystal. If science was always that easy, I would light a candle every day.

Apparently this was not the first discovery of this effect involving SrTiO3. In an article from 2012 a conductance increase of 5 orders in magnitude is described (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn203991q). But indeed many large impact discoveries are accidental...

I thought we all knew already that science is just another form of directed random search :)))

We must get one of these. They had a goal of 50.000$ but got, instead more than 3,000,000$ !!

Really bad market analysis on their part...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable-professional-3d-printer?ref=live i think this is the one I was talking about the other day. ~3M$ from 100k$ target in 2012. I think I remembered it though cos they got sued for patent infringement and it was the first time kickstarter had been included in the lawsuit. I may even have posted the story on diigo...

I am also looking into this idea since some time and it seems NASA is already ahead, awarding two contract to investigate magnetoshell aerocapture. This could be interesting for probes that want to enter eg Marsian atmospheres at relatively high velocity. Or for multiple re-entry s/c at Earth. The idea of the experiment, The satellite will carry a copper coil, powered by a lithium-ion battery, that generates a magnetic field around the probe. As it descends, the spacecraft will eject a small amount of plasma. This gets trapped in the magnetic field, creating a protective bubble that stops air molecules colliding with the craft and producing heat.

A few years back Mimmo has worked on this, rather from the theory side if I remember well ...

The power requirements for such a thing must be HUGE!