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looks nice at least .... 

the fastest supercomputer seems to be in China now!

Interesting! I like the quote "Maybe China would allow that to be a one-way trip but, in Japan, it would have to be a return ticket" talking about a human mission ....

University Alliance for Low Carbon Energy   Three universities, including Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have fostered up an alliance on November 15, 2009 to advocate low carbon energy and climate change adaptation The alliance will mainly work on 6 major areas: clean coal technology and CCS, homebuilding energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable transport, biomass energy and other renewable energy, advanced nuclear energy, intelligent power grid, and energy policies/planning. A steering panel made up of the senior experts from the three universities (two from each) will be established to review, evaluate, and endorse the goals, projects, fund raising activities, and collaborations under the alliance. With the Headquarters at the campus of Tsinghua University and branch offices at other two universities, the alliance will be chaired by a scientist selected from Tsinghua University.   According to a briefing, the alliance will need a budget of USD 3-5 million, mainly from the donations of government, industry, and all walks of life. In this context, the R&D findings derived from the alliance will find its applications in improving people's life.

interesting article - a lot of speculation though ...

Did you know about this Weather Modification Office? Promising or dodgy?

Yes. In China it happens apparently quite often that weather is regionally modified, e.g. in order to have good weather conditions during certain events (like olympics in Beijing). But also in other countries weather modification is applied, for reasons of agriculture, pollution, skiing, etc. Obviously, one wonders on the environmental impact of such an artificial cloud feeding process with silver iodide. I just googled, stumbling upon this report http://www.weathermodification.org/AGI_toxicity.pdf which published the result: no environmentally harmful effects...

and w.r.t. ur question: I mean different weather conditions which we experience locally (like droughts or other extreme weather events) are (often) due to large-scale/global climatic changes. Hence, cloud seeding just describes a local, short-term mitigation of these events. However, there is a geoengineering proposal (so climate modification) which also suggests to seed clouds above the sea (i.e. increase cloud coverage, e.g. by using seaspray as cloud condesation nuclei), thereby increasing the planetary albedo (Earth reflectance) and reducing the energy reaching the Earth surface. If this idea is promising or not, I couldn't judge upon, but for sure it is worthwhile to take a closer look at.

FEM modelling of bone structures in woodpeckers combined with high speed video of pecking motion etc headgear? shock absorbing structures? low mass hammering penetrators? Lizhen Wang1,2, Jason Tak-Man Cheung3, Fang Pu1, Deyu Li1, Ming Zhang2*, Yubo Fan1* 1 Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, 2 Department of Health Technology and Informatics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 3 Li Ning Sports Science Research Center, Beijing, People's Republic of China Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries.

Is this the future of blockchain?

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.

130 km2 as next step will be quite an area

Found this on Twitter ;-) This is also a test to see if Diigo titles get processed correctly as re-tweets...

Yes. Worked.

one more, France will have one officially by July, so who's next?

As discussed during lunchtime...

"Development work that requires an Internet connection is transferred across the border to China." What are programmers doing 'while the code is compiling'? Play table tennis?

fantastic ... I particularly like: "Kim Jong Il, the de-facto leader of the country, declared people who couldn't use computers to be one of the three fools of the 21st century. (The others, he said, are smokers and those ignorant of music.)"

nice link from toby .... it contains some of the things that I have been saying to the wind!!

"Do something only you would come up with-that none of your friends or family would think of." - according to them, this is one of their success recipes .... a recipe for the team?

>Get moving. I always said that fitness test should be included in the recruitment process!!!

Some issues with internet. Let's invent the future internet ...

bit confused about what they actually have achieved so far but sounds like it might turn out to be interesting. "The scientists first infiltrated the leaves of Anemone vitifolia -- a plant native to China -- with titanium dioxide in a two-step process. Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, the scientists were then able to confirm that the structural features in the leaf favorable for light harvesting were replicated in the new TiO2 structure. Excitingly, the AIL are eight times more active for hydrogen production than TiO2 that has not been "biotemplated" in that fashion. AILs also are more than three times as active as commercial photo-catalysts. Next, the scientists embedded nanoparticles of platinum into the leaf surface. Platinum, along with the nitrogen found naturally in the leaf, helps increase the activity of the artificial leaves by an additional factor of ten."

breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.

indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.

"Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)