Group items tagged

Sounds good!

well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?

well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...

Sante, Luzi have a look at this???!!!

Leo, you mean that they measured 3 years? That's not a point to criticize: since the only interaction of neutrinos with matter is the Weak Interaction (which is indeed very, very weak), it is extremely hard to get a reasonable statistic. By the same reason, it's essentially impossible to shield the experiment from the background. And this background (solar neutrinos, cosmic radiation neutrinos) is huge.

for sure a result to be taken seriously. It makes a buzz in my lab... but always be cautious with this kind of declaration, that hugely violates all physics we know and even most of the reasonable alternative theories... Remember the Pionneer anomaly for which it took almost ten years to set up that finally its a thermal effect.

I sit really possible/desirable?

It is possible, and NEOs may offer interesting ressources, but there is nothing in that paper. Why do they use the Sun-Earth system and not the Earth-Moon? The condition C>C1 is very weak and would have been much better had it been applied to the Earth-Moon system.

looks interesting - though not sure I would understand the full paper - do you have it?

aren't these the creatures that also Christos bred not so long ago? (like the phrase: forget the zombies .. this is the real threat!")

just read that too, the paper is here (I think that is the one at least): http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/139388/files/PNAS-2009-Mitri-0903152106.pdf

Is this bullshit or really useful?

Extending quantum communication to space environments would enable us to perform fundamental experiments on quantum physics as well as applications of quantum information at planetary and interplanetary scales. Here, we report on the first experimental study of the conditions for the implementation of the single-photon exchange between a satellite and an Earth-based station. We built an experiment that mimics a single photon source on a satellite, exploiting the telescope at the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory of the Italian Space Agency to detect the transmitted photons. Weak laser pulses, emitted by the ground-based station, are directed toward a satellite equipped with cube-corner retroreflectors. These reflect a small portion of the pulse, with an average of less-than-one photon per pulse directed to our receiver, as required for faint-pulse quantum communication. We were able to detect returns from satellite Ajisai, a low-Earth orbit geodetic satellite, whose orbit has a perigee height of 1485 km.

hello Jose! Interesting it was proposed to do the same with the ISS as part of the ACES experiment. I don't remember the paper but i can look if you're interested

Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online....

well - none of the two examples that they have given show much imagination - don't think that any of these will be better than just using the full screen pdf, my preferred way after printing and reading on paper ... btw: Kevin: are you still around? could we meet?

If electronics are soft and rubbery, would they maybe also tolerate launch- or landing-related vibrations better? Could we pack things more robust? Probably things get too fluffy for space engineers?

very interesting article indeed - good basis for our own assessment! check especially this part: "At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering." do you have the references?

I found the abstracts for this meeting online (http://www.iop.org/EJ/toc/1755-1315/6/45). I'm also looking for the papers which relate to the different talks. These could be helpfull too.

you can find the original paper here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.full.pdf (not sure until when though)

This is about biological and technical hygromorphs, i.e. structures that change shape according to humidity. Next to pine cones, there is also a cool study on wheat awns which drill themselves into the soil just by daily variance of air humidity. Biomimetics would be passively controlled acutators or humidity driven valves in space station to open/close dehumidification devices.

Interesting, but only an abstract... do you have the full paper ?

Not yet. There is also some other nice mechanism of wheat awns and how they use changes in humidity to anchor in soil. Would maybe fit with the above mentioned work of oisin.

The study doesn't seem relevant to us - but the name of the method is just marvellous!

Cockroaches accept little robots that smell like cockroaches. Cockroaches like it dark. Cockroaches explore but stay with cockroaches once they meet. Even if they are robots. If robots like it bright, cockroaches go with them.

Strange geometrical bodies and their application by turtles. Reverse biomimetics...