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A space croissant for breakfast ?

To survive the winter in the north.

A database with biological models that can be downloaded or run in the web-browser!

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company ...

Having Google backing it will certainly help, even though they are presenting it as a "system level" (i.e., hard-core) language, and in that domain it is much more difficult to bullshit your way to a position of relevance. Look at Java: Sun pushed it like hell and it is certainly widely used in many contexts (corporate, web and embedded markets mostly), yet it completely failed to win the hearts of "open-source" developers (or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision).

"or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision" completely agree with that!!

Maybe one of these new world host some kind of life... ??

a chance of intelligent life at least there :-)

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.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

A new, sponge-like material developed engineers at MIT can convert water to steam using just 1% of the sunlight required by conventional steam-producing solar generators.

An unusual signal picked up by a European space observatory could be the first direct detection of dark matter particles, astronomers say. The findings are tentative and could take several years to check, but if confirmed they would represent a dramatic advance in scientists' understanding of the universe.

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/

Astronomers have observed up to three newborn planets evolving from a disk of gas and dust particles circling a distant Sun-like star. While 1,900 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, these are the first to be seen that are still forming.

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor. Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth-very close in astronomical terms-the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space. The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns. Lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. "The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," he said. Professor Staveley-Smith said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s. "We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," he said. "We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour." The research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).

After a series of rapid developments, the researchers claim their fluid can now hold 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is double the the energy capacity of Tesla's Powerwall batteries, according to the NBC.

Interesting research. Bit hyped in the article though. The actual paper says the promising stuff is in the 83-160Wh range. So maybe not double Tesla's Powerwall batteries?

The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of engineering such a migration over a long time period. (via Nina)