Group items tagged

How would you like to have the ability to play the piano downloaded into your brain?

you also get one step closer to the moon when climbing a mountain - though you will never reach it this way ...

Researchers in the US and UK say they have invented a new microscopy technique for imaging live tissue with unprecedented speed and resolution. The technique involves using the tiny tip of an atomic force microscope to tap on a living cell and analysing the resulting vibrations to reveal the mechanical properties of cell tissue. The team says that the technique could have widespread applications in medicine. However, another expert in the field suggests that the group has not demonstrated the superiority of the technique to those already available.

see papers I have just sent you this afternoon ...

The Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars nearly eight years ago, has discovered a thin, bright mineral vein along the rim of a huge crater called Endeavour. This mineral is almost certainly gypsum that was deposited by liquid water billions of years ago, researchers said.

Again, amazing insects! Scientists have discovered that Polistes fuscatus paper wasps can recognize and remember each other's faces with sharp accuracy, a new study suggests.

amusing take on innovation A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

The idea has been around for already some time (2008) but I like it despite the challenges/trade-off: visible vs IR photovoltaics, black leaves would be better... Piezo + classical PV would already be great... Optimizing the leave shape & distribution for both wind and sun energy harvesting could be interesting...

Sometime in the last few billion years, disaster struck one of Earth's nearest neighbours. Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today. A similar catastrophe is almost certain to strike Earth in about 2 billion years, as the Sun increases in luminosity.

the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1593 just wondering if their conclusion that the long term solution is to change the orbit of Earth is really the ultimate wisdom ...

wow impressive. Could be super useful for astronauts !

from the abstract: "Using a novel imaging and analysis technique on experimental data we estimated pheromone concentrations at all spatial positions in the experimental arena and at different times. Then we derived the response function of individual ants to pheromone concentrations by looking at correlations between concentrations and changes in speed or direction of the ants." [...] "agent based simulations based on the Weber's Law response function determined experimentally produced results compatible with those reported in the literature and reproduced the formation of trails."

Nice article!

I am a bit surprised by the number of critical comments to this article there ..

But the comments are not critical, it's just bullshitting.

exciting news ... especially now that apparently Obama proposes to cut the mars exploration programme ...

a bit of an overstatement. the trial is only at mice stage, but nevertheless interesting for its future application.

Biologists have long wondered how our organs all grow at the same rate. Now theoretical physicists think they've found a clue in the special way sandpiles grow

Quantum processes shouldn't survive in hot, wet biological systems and yet a growing body of evidence suggests they do. Now physicists think they know how

Yes, because our bosses forced us to write strategic reports on "system of systems" :-)

Oh these terrible ignorant slave masters .... Would love to see your "reports on system of systems" :-)

An out-of-this-world gallery... Can my camera do bessel beam super-resolution structured illumination microscopy too??

Cool - reminds me of the cockroach ARIADNA study see the videos in supplementary material

trajectory calculations by no-brainers ... Newton known to primitive fishes? (can we use it for space? :-)