Group items tagged

This is too funny...

How I wish I would have been tougher with the guy when he showed up here ....

you should have told him that we're very into it, if they could only make a small deposit in our account and we'll send them a lot of money later

NASA is setting a $2.25 million competition to design and build a 3-D printed habitat for deep space exploration - new task for the future architect of the team?

I kind of like Thijs's space mirror ablation method as a way of printing :))

Apparently this cart settled some longstanding physics dispute... Would there be a way to think of something similar using solar wind? *no clue*

the counterintuitive aspect in my view is not the travelling against he wind but the faster than wind travelling with the wind, where the simple trick of having the wheels power the propeller flips the mind to understand it easily ... (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/downwind-faster-than-the-wind/)

But from that point of view it should also be counter-intuitive that it travels against the wind at twice the speed of the wind...

innovating has its risks :)

They forgot to mention that Jimi Heselden, the owner of Segway Inc., died by falling of the cliff... of course while riding a Segway.

Zivile can you order this for me?

I will get one as soon as they put it in a spherical dome like that of Darth Vader's...

@Johannes: The Japanese version will definitely have a toilet included, of course with health analysis, automatic appointment making with the doctors, life time estimation, diet planning, etc.

165000 people have applied and the founders of Mars One still seem enthusiastic. Wouldn't it be great if they actually could pull it off..?

Something for the Parrot to aim for

Parallel processing in computing --- Brainet The team sent electrical pulses to all four rats and rewarded them when they synchronised their brain activity. After 10 training sessions, the rats were able to do this 61 per cent of the time. This synchronous brain activity can be put to work as a computer to perform tasks like information storage and pattern recognition, says Nicolelis. "We send a message to the brains, the brains incorporate that message, and we can retrieve the message later," he says. Dividing the computing of a task between multiple brains is similar to sharing computations between multiple processors in modern computers, "If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal."

My girlfriend... She must be an archaeological nerd...

Great Scott, Leo! Honest answers?? I was kinda expecting Francesco's score, but this...

New 3D printed macro structure exhibits selective buckling open the way for custom shape-memory materials found our neighbor scientists from the Lorentz Institut of the Leiden University. Wonder if it can be applied for self-assembled deployment of structures.

Quoting Elon Musk, "it does seem kinda wrong"...

Is it just me but isn't this just needlessly complicated? I mean, you can design the plug on the car, its horizontal and symmetric. Why not just translational motors. Probably because its boring and one wants to make a metal Dr. Octavius tentacle of course

Precisely!

In case you are looking for inspiration for a new piece of ACT's meeting room furniture... "This is almost an example, not of mathematics but how mathematics changes when it becomes physics"

Cool study about measuring antineutrino emissions in order to prospect composition of Earth's crust and mantle.

It's official. But note the clause: *Dutch* cyclists...

"In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) Jérôme Duplat and Emmanuel Villermaux developed a method to generate centimeter-sized vacuum bubbles in water with miniature laser-driven explosions, and observed the flash of light produced as the bubble collapsed a not-fully-understood phenomenon known as sonoluminescence." Amazingly they concluded that the temperatrue inside the bubble as it collapses is about 26000 K. At this temperatures some (not me) argue for nuclear fusion... Intriguing stuff!!! Check the videos! Yet another test for the 'Experimental Physics Stagiare' :-)?

For sure no fusion, that starts appr. from about 20keV, not 20kK. Between both there is still a factor of 11500. What I would rather expect is that the conditions are not appropriate to work with Maxwellian distribution functions. If certain fusion products should be measurable, than this would rather confirm (but not proof) the hypothesis that they do not have Maxwellians but something close to monoenergetic. But most probably they will not measure fusion products, hence no fusion, hence no confusion.

Seems like astrologists were somehow right... Ptolemy would be proud.

Greetings from July :-) On an unrelated note... this chart made me suddenly realise I've been always thinking of the year as passing counter-clockwise and starting at the bottom. Very strongly. Seems like some tempo-spatial association. Anybody has a similar feeling?

Octopus and optoelectronics camouflage, light bugs and LEDs, or spider webs and touch screens, ... a whole cool bunch of biomimetic stuff

See also the referred work "Light-extraction enhancement for light-emitting diodes: a firefly-inspired structure refined by the genetic algorithm" - quite cool! https://pure.fundp.ac.be/portal/files/11946897/paper89.pdf

Following a discussion with Kzrystof, where he came up with gravity anomaly reasons for why Dutch people are so tall. Funny to see this fact gathers scientific attention as well.

We solved this darwinian riddle years ago. They must be tall in order to find their partners above the fog and thus reproduce in the dutch weather.

Next great step for humankind. "... and we're standing by now for the first consumption of one of these red romaine lettuce leaves ..." :-)

I'm sure Francesco will love it... perhaps of use for ACT's Google calendar/docs?

is there an easy way (easy for Francesco I mean) to retrieve the citation number of papers in google scholar automatically (e.g. for act papers)?

It seems like google scholar is not supported yet.