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Google asks: Are you a Supermodel(er)? Show us.

interesting new agency for renewable energy .... (view from Eurosolar)

A good occasion to get the idea out of the idea pool...?

I just like this phrase: "It is remarkable that two designers working on their own could create gloves that meet the requirements for spaceflight - a task that normally requires a large team of experts,"

an analysis of implications of the Falcon Heavy announcement

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

At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December, he reported an average figure that was between 0.005 and 0.008 per cent greater than the value for Earth's mass established by the International Astronomical Union. A disc of dark matter around the equator 191 kilometres thick and 70,000 km across can explain this, he says. Harris has yet to account for perturbations to the satellites' orbits due to relativity, and the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. Maybe relativistic GPS could improve this even further? As a side note however, the Juno spacecraft flyby showed an gravity acceleration which matched the calculations, casting doubts on the earlier calculations.

"As you read this, your neurons are firing - that brain activity can now be decoded to reveal the silent words in your head TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That's no longer the case - researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time. The achievement is a step towards helping people who cannot physically speak communicate with the outside world." Or alternatively, a step towards snooping into individuals' privacy.

Soon we'll be able to see movies about our dreams!

Only if you are willing to have a chip implanted into/onto your brain though ^^

very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."

any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?

"Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA

Research in active-matter systems is a growing field in biology. It consists in using theoretical statistical physics in living systems such as molecule colonies to deduce macroscopic properties. The aim and hope is to understand how cells divide, take shape and move on these systems. Being a crossing field between physics and biology "The pot of gold is at the interface but you have to push both fields to their limits." one can read

Maybe we should discuss about this active matter one of these days? "These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world - among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. They are increasingly being made in the laboratory: investigators have synthesized active matter using both biological building blocks such as microtubules, and synthetic components including micrometre-scale, light-sensitive plastic 'swimmers' that form structures when someone turns on a lamp. Production of peer-reviewed papers with 'active matter' in the title or abstract has increased from less than 10 per year a decade ago to almost 70 last year, and several international workshops have been held on the topic in the past year."

interns at NASA are looking into soft robot actuators

An international team of scientists led by Liang-shi Li at Indiana University has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials.

At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.