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Sea Level Rise and the Future of the Netherlands ....no comment

must view video from Nina ...

Maxwell remains the great unsung hero of human progress, the physicists' physicist whose name means little to those without a scientific bent. His life's work [....] is among the most enduring scientific legacies of all time, on a par with those of his more widely acclaimed peers, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

An opinion piece by an ex-Googler, talking, among other things, about how corporate culture is creeping into Google. I've highlighted some snippets which I've found eerily familiar :)

an analysis of implications of the Falcon Heavy announcement

what's your take on these ...

Most important news: Kurzweil postponed his Singularity to 2054. I think this is the postponed postponement of the postponed postponement. Perhaps it will happen shortly after the experimental proof of the existence of the hydrino state and of antigravity in rotating superconductors...

Singularity is like fusion and commercial space travel: always 50 years away.

"Switchable nanomaterials-materials that can change their properties and/or function in response to external stimuli-have potential applications in electronics,..."

Greenwich could lose its place at the centre of global time if a move to "atomic time" is voted in by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in January 2012.

Haha this is really a British article... Already since 1972 we don't use GMT but UTC, which is based on atomic clocks. However British continue to call it GMT... The question is to drop the leap second in UTC, and France is definitely for this change (for scientific motives of course...;) I don't see how this is connected to winter time however... And they shouldn't worry Greenwich is still the beginning of the world with 0 degree longitude !

"the end of GMT as an international standard could accelerate the move to keep British Summer Time into the winter, letting us have lighter evenings." As I understand it, if GMT looses its "prestigious" status, then it would be easier to push through all-year BST in UK.

Positioning via accumulated accelerometer data used to stabilize cold trapped atoms. Current systems are not very reliable for submarines, which cannot use GPS underwater. To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force - and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.

To right that appalling wrong, here we attempt to explain the apparently erratic seasonal changes in the world of G.R.R.M. A natural explanation for such phenomena is the unique behavior of a circumbinary planet. Thus, by speculating that the planet under scrutiny is orbiting a pair of stars, we utilize the power of numerical three-body dynamics to predict that, unfortunately, it is not possible to predict either the length, or the severity of any coming winter.

Quantum internet will enable perfectly secure communications, but the technology and means to build the required quantum memories and routers are still many years distant. The proposal here is to store qubits and send them in containers over the oceans. Researchers claim that it is possible to send information at bandwidths measured in teraahertz outperforming the predictions of a quantum router internet. It can be thought in space systems as well. Then the problem is still for how long are we able to store a qubit, without dephasing... PS: As a curiosity, you can find a very interesting book about containers and how in some way they changed our world: Mark Levinson's book 'The Box' http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9383.html Maybe they will do it again

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On the one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This paper gives overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures.

True! Half the Phd Positions offered are in studying eddy variability. It links to resolving the - yet another holy grail - problem of turbulence.

not sure what to make of this. seems like an odd change of direction "Spaceports will be key to us opening up the final frontier of commercial space travel," said Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander at the announcement of the new sites. Mr Alexander hinted that the plans could lead to Scotland becoming the home of the UK's commercial space ambitions, even as the Scottish government warns that only independence will secure a successful space industry for the country.

A good idea for a card in one of our ACT magic decks!!! In his words AI is "our biggest existential threat" - lol

the "even" in your comment is the key word

Edge.org recently had an interesting piece that ties into all of this recent AI fear mongering: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

There is actually a windows program called flux, that changes the temperature on your screen to match normal light cycles. When the sun sets it switches to a "warmer" more reddish tint on your screen to promote sleepiness. The typically bright blue/neon white settings of most pc settings is quite "awakening" and keeps your brain running for longer. This impacts your sleeping patterns and all the consequences of that. Amazingly, this flux thing does have an effect. That being said, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it all on PC/artificial lighting time. Sedentary lifestyles, etc can very well place one in a position of long term pc/phone usage so it's quite hard to draw a causal link.

nice - also exists for MAC btw: https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/mac/

First really strong evidence that the vestibular system affects sleep architecture, sleep stability and sleep spindles. If there is an effect due to a changing acceleration there might also be an effect of no gravity vector. We'll find out when I get the space shuttle data.