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Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.

seems nice, but would be a lot of work to implement and we already have something operational... It would add the search module and article in html (what about the compatibility with latex...?). For now I think we should focus on the next issue of acta futura !

This is the guy of Luzy's joke: "Dear, this is not what it seems. I can explain EVERYTHING!"

yeah an interesting theory, definitely worth following. But it is far from being mature, and a lot of work remains before saying that it is viable or not... I posted something on this some time ago (http://www.diigo.com/user/pacome/horava_theory) and proposed to do smthing on it in the idea storm (our new creative game...), which didn't have a lot of success... I like also the idea of matrix gravity (see Matrix general relativity: a new look at old problems, Ivan G Avramidi, CQG 21, 103)

you are among what???

very nice approach ...

The link didn't work for me. Try that one: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/18/0907390106.abstract?sid=348d3f4f-cc68-47e8-9099-a3310134ae68

still only a few percent of conversion efficiency but very promising since working at reasonably focussing and unpolarised light; they announce the publication of a first design of such a system .... to be followed!! Duncan: you wanna have a closer look at it?

99% house advertising, 1% scientific results. I think this is still a conservative guess... And I'm sure this "completely new" effect that you don't see when "staring at the equations of motion" (doggone, how I love this USish "I-am-better-than-the-rest-of-the-world" jargon) certainly has been predicted at least 50 years ago by some smart USSR researcher!!

This is really cool. I know one of the authors and he is a good guy... the only thing that leaves me unsatisfied is that if the whole issue is related to thermal effects one should have seen the Pioneer effect all the time and not only at about 10 AU... ...or is there some thermal process that kicked in only at this distance?

Here's an update on this theory: NASA Releases New Pioneer Anomaly Analysis "The mysterious force acting on the Pioneer spacecraft seems to be falling exponentially. That's a strong clue that on-board heat is to blame, says NASA." Heat emission 'most likely cause' of pioneer anomaly "What's more interesting is that, contrary to the original analysis conducted all those years ago, the deceleration does seem to be decelerating at an exponential rate -- just as one might expect from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, which powers the two spacecraft. Turyshev concludes, "The most likely cause of the Pioneer anomaly is the anisotropic emission of on-board heat.""

smart!

"And according to his calculations, improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today's ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. "

Dejan please have a look at this also ...

while the nuclear reaction seems to be sound at first view, I am not so sure how this would work: "Electromagnetic forces push the target and the alpha particles in the opposite directions, and the particles exit the spacecraft through a nozzle, providing the vehicle's thrust. "

Interesting competition: predicting the future of editing activity on Wikipedia

I doubt that this can work...

Good to solve the Landing problem!!!! No skew due to perspective and gimballed by definition

Very very nice idea! Unfortunately samples show they still have quite some work to do on the image processing side... which is interesting because there are very good open-source solutions for stitching.

a group of scientists in the US has formulated a set of basic rules that could help understanding how particles interact at the nanoscale

The most trivial application is to triple the bandwidth capability of an antenna.... working on some more exotic stuff...

"Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: What are you working on?" Have you tried it yet?

Tokyo has a very large population and one of the smallest crime rates in the world, in fact Tokyo is known to be the safest big city in the world (w.r.t. crime). It is hard to believe that the crime rate in L.A. is in the same order of magnitude.

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Is positive news definitely, but when it comes to fusion energy being skeptic is the wisest course of action. On the back of a truck basically means that the energy density of the device is such that the surface energy of a (steady state) plasma is beyond currents materials limits. It is probably a pulsed (ignitor-type) device, which are prone to instabilities. That could therefore refer to their breakthrough claim, of which they hardly say anything though. Lets see

Since there were already a lot of false alarms on the field, one should definitively be careful about it. However not a single detail about its structure or how it works in this new... Here http://www.fusenet.eu/node/400 you can find a bit more of information about it.

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").

pretty impressive stuff!

LSTMs: that was also the first thing in the paper that caught my attention! :) I hadn't seen them in the wild in years... My oversight most likely. The paper seems to be getting ~100 citations a year. Someone's using them.

There are a few papers on them. Though you have to be lucky to get them to work. The backprop is horrendous.

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

In a work published on Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/nature14090.html#affil-auth) a new DFT based simulation of convection in Earth's Core iron shows that electron-electron scattering has a similar contribution to electron's thermal vibration. The outcome is that using the old dynamo theory the simulation matches the Earth magnetic field experimental results, solving an 80 years old puzzle.

Yay to science! I'm always intrigued by related experiments that try to measure material properties at the GPa range. Especially, the efforts of reaching 'metallic hydrogen' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen), requiring pressures above 25GPa at which hydrogen becomes conductive. It is thought that gas giant planets could have such a core, but no-one has been able to produce/verify this theory as off yet.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.

Ever wondered what radiation looks like? If you have, I bet you didn't think it would look as cool as this. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission....

Once I saw a DIY spark chamber in LIP (CERN associated laboratory). It was the work of a bunch of BSc students, they made it all from scratch, so it seemed to be not that difficult to have one at home. Yet another project for the future 'Experimental Physics' stagiare maybe :)