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For the first time, researchers have shown that they can capture CO2 from the air, and convert it directly into methanol, which can then be used as an alternative fuel, as well as for hydrogen storage, in fuel cells, or as a building block for plastic.

Solar power to suck out co2 during the day and make it fuel finally solves global warming?

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

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Awesome :) It's even got skifree!

After the Go, real-time RPG as Hendrik alluded?

From the section Science & Environment Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity. They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

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).

A nanolaser, a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

Super lol for all those who abused of the law in their slides / opinions / decisions ..

I used the law in some slides :-)! This sentence is more or less the summary "The end of Moore's law is not a technical issue, it is an economic issue,". As Moore's himself recognized last year, the Moore's law itself is a pretty wild extrapolation of one exponential growth when there were only 5 experimental points. It is remarkable however how the semiconductor industry grabbed this and made every single effort to make it true. This effort was rewarded by turning semiconductor industry into one of the most important industries worldwide. Now these are challenging times indeed, and "when tide is gone, we realize who was swimming naked"...

The "law" is one of the most successful concrete predictions of the technological future... Still very impressive and a lot more long-lived than Moore had probably ever dreamed of :)

Microsoft project Natick deploys cloud servers inside a vessel under seawater. A cool story about crossing competences of different people around an innovative solution. "In my experience the trick to innovating is not coming up with something brand new, but connecting things we've never connected before, pairing different technology together."

the quote could come from ACT ...

Soft Robots Scientists from Cornell University and the Italian Technology Institute in Pontedera have developed an elastic robotic skin that is able to stretch up to five times its size, change colors, and even detect pressure. The luminescent skin, partly funded by the Army and Air Force's research wings, is comprised of different kinds of specialized silicone, making it flexible and soft.

related video here: http://imgur.com/gallery/q57U40Y

Collisionless electrostatic shocks (CES) are the dominant process in heating a plasma when using high power lasers. It turns out that ion-ion collisions actually only play a small role. The ability to create small regions of very high ion energy density on time scales shorter than that of hydrodynamic expansion will be of interest in attempts to understand the processes involved in inertial confinement fusion.

Inspired by the work that was done at the ACT, I continued working on optical flow landing at TU Delft. Today Bio & Bio published my article on a new theory that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. It shows that drones approaching an object with an insect-inspired vision strategy become unstable at a specific distance from the object. Turning this weakness into a strength, drones can actually use the timely detection of that instability to estimate distance. The new theory will enable further miniaturization of autonomous drones and provides a new hypothesis on flying insect behavior. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm7SMJp8EA4&feature=youtu.be Article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016004

Not a science related article but rather an in depth look at what makes a team succeed.

Shorter version available here, highlighting the 5 key points: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

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)

Bio-hacking/cyborg: implanting rare-earth magnets into your fingers to sense magnetic fields. At the same time quite awesome and quite extreme.

"Over the past couple of decades, the research literature has filled up with endless new nature-based metaphors for algorithms. You can find algorithms based on the behaviour of cuckoos, bees, bats, cats, wolves, galaxy formation and black holes. (...) All researchers have been doing is wasting time on developing new approaches that are probably little better than existing ones. And the language of each metaphor then invades the literature, distracting people from using the already sufficiently expressive terminology of mathematics and, above all, working together to find the best way forward." The golden era of fireworks-like algorithm is about to end

Lies, lies, all lies. They will never go away. Papers need to be published.

Prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity (reward for unfamiliar states). Learns some games without any extrinsic reward!

Fun failure case: agent gets stuck in front of TV.

Not read this article but on a related note: Curiosity and various metrics for it have been explored for some time in robotics (outside of RL) as a framework for exploring (partially) unfamiliar environments. I came across some papers on this topic applied to UAVs when prep'ing for a PhD app. This one (http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~yogesh/publications/crv2014.pdf) comes to mind - which used a topic modelling approach.

first science results reported in Nature (as far as I know) from the Yutu-2 and Chang'e mission .... and they look very good!

Sure they are very useful! It will be even better if they manage to fit the data to modeled circulation of the lunar magma ocean that was formed posterior to the "Theia" body collision with Earth. The collision was the cause of the magma ocean in the first place. The question now is how this circulation pattern of the lava-moon "froze" in time upon phase transition to solid. Because, what crystallizes last in sequence, is more rich in "incompatible" with the crystal structure, elements, we might combine data+models to predict their location. Those incompatible tracers are mainly radioactively decaying elements that produce heat (google publications about lunar KREEP elements (potassium (K), rare earth elements(REE), and phosphorus(P)). By knowing where the KREEP is: - we know where to dig for them mining (if they are useful for something, eg. Phosphorus for plants to be grown on the Moon) - we avoid planning to build the future human colony on top of radioactives, of course. The hope is that the Moon, due to lack of plate tectonics, has preserved this "signature of the freezing sequence". Let's see.

thanks Nasia! very interesting comment

IBM for the first time ever is making quantum computing available to the public, providing access to a quantum processor via the cloud. Users can create algorithms and run experiments and get inspired by the possibilities of a quantum computer.

Looks interesting.. Have you tried it?

Mathias Troyer from ETH Zurtich gave a talk in Leiden where he showed what he wants to be the replacement to this IBM programming or the best ally of it - program quantum computers with, for instance, python code. Nice developments coming from the quantum coding field, besides the fact we are ages away from a practical quantum computer.