Group items tagged

Where Carlo will give his award lecture.

Velcro made of steel, capable of sustaining 800Celsius.

sleeping and driving on the highway

"The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle." .... what or who is defining a professional driver? one of the always overly tired truck drivers?

Maybe the prediction that "all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=2) is true after all...

Did you know about this Weather Modification Office? Promising or dodgy?

Yes. In China it happens apparently quite often that weather is regionally modified, e.g. in order to have good weather conditions during certain events (like olympics in Beijing). But also in other countries weather modification is applied, for reasons of agriculture, pollution, skiing, etc. Obviously, one wonders on the environmental impact of such an artificial cloud feeding process with silver iodide. I just googled, stumbling upon this report http://www.weathermodification.org/AGI_toxicity.pdf which published the result: no environmentally harmful effects...

and w.r.t. ur question: I mean different weather conditions which we experience locally (like droughts or other extreme weather events) are (often) due to large-scale/global climatic changes. Hence, cloud seeding just describes a local, short-term mitigation of these events. However, there is a geoengineering proposal (so climate modification) which also suggests to seed clouds above the sea (i.e. increase cloud coverage, e.g. by using seaspray as cloud condesation nuclei), thereby increasing the planetary albedo (Earth reflectance) and reducing the energy reaching the Earth surface. If this idea is promising or not, I couldn't judge upon, but for sure it is worthwhile to take a closer look at.

See, I told you smashing things around in the solar system is useful!

Agree, but they knew from before..... see last post

nice article sent by Andrés ...

an interesting comic about maths, ideas etc. Co-written by a greek mathematician / writer and a Berkeley computer science professor, sold out in Greece and since its international release a couple of months ago is occupying the top selling comics lists of Amazon etc. also: http://www.logicomix.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=53

btw I just ordered it from Amazon, so if you want after I finish it I can lend it

impressive, particularly if it works like it does in the video the whole time. paper here http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/

Well, impressive indeed... have to try it out...

Instead of classifying galaxies (image analysis), this new project asks the public to try to recreate collisions

nice tool ... but apparently not open source :-(

already posted further down the page

We're all here about inventiveness and creativity, so here you go... Story of a guy who's life's motto has been "Gold lies on the streets and you just need to dig it up with ideas. Ideas are like the shovel" Add to it Monte Carlo, Marlene Dietrich and, say, King Farouk and you get quite an amazing story... And most of all, after reading this you'll know the value of knowing how to ski.

nice story indeed ...

Loretta and Cynthia please have a close look on what is new with respect to our reference article

any reaction already? Loretta? Cynthia?

The UK-led Beagle 2 Mars lander, thought lost on the red planet since 2003, has been found partially deployed on the Martian surface. New images show that it successfully touched down on the planet's surface in 2003 but failed to deploy all four of its solar panels, thereby allowing no communication with scientists on Earth.

I'm sure Leo will love it. Yet another argument not to have a facebook account or a smartphone.

Ditched? I never had either! But then on the other hand a recent Dilbert summarised me pretty well...

so you also don't have a mobile phone? I thought I knew only one person of my age who does not have one yet ... congratulations

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience.

Finally! Nowadays blacks were always too bright for my taste...

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." I will keep waiting for my darkness-emitting diodes...

A good idea for a card in one of our ACT magic decks!!! In his words AI is "our biggest existential threat" - lol

the "even" in your comment is the key word

Edge.org recently had an interesting piece that ties into all of this recent AI fear mongering: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai