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Here, we show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the event horizon of the supermassive black hole of the background quasar, using the current generation telescopes

A new idea called the "information bottleneck" is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms - and might also explain how human brains learn.

Nice Footage of the solar mission STEREO of NASA put into a movie.

Aronofsky would be proud...

Its a big one!

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

completely new cosmic phenomenon?

The final goodbye of a massive star collapsing to a black hole? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130705101626.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

The idea has been around for already some time (2008) but I like it despite the challenges/trade-off: visible vs IR photovoltaics, black leaves would be better... Piezo + classical PV would already be great... Optimizing the leave shape & distribution for both wind and sun energy harvesting could be interesting...

Physicists have simulated two universes colliding inside a metamaterial--  Now, this is cool (if it is true...)

Hm, they use more or less everything I don't especially like. They are nonmagnetic, so the relation materialGR is already rather weak. Usually, experimentalists prefer nonmagnetic media, since they are cheaper and broadband. At least the broadband is no argument here, since the frequency defines the "mass", which I find a rather strange point of view. And finally, they use strong anisotropy as a model of "time", which is rather problematic. Of course, the spatial direction with eps<0 appears in the wave equation with the same sign as time. But this does not mean that it behaves like time. But to teach material physicists that time is more than just a different sign in the wave equation seems to be as hopeless as to teach them that a black hole is more than something that absorbs all light... SIGHHH

Luzi I miss you ...

Aerographite. This post was originally published on Mashable. German scientists have developed a sturdy material called Aerographite made mostly of air, opening up huge implications for the future development of electronics. The jet-black, non-transparent porous carbon material - which was created by scientists at Kiel University and Hamburg University of Technology - was detailed in the July edition of scientific journal Advanced Materials .

Kirobo, a knee-high talking robot with red boots and a black and white body, has blasted off from Japan for the International Space Station to test how machines can help astronauts with their work.

Reminds me of the Robotic Servant from our brainstorm session :)

The Northeast Blackout of 2003 that forced the shut-down of over 100 power plants and affected 55M people - the largest black-out in US history - was precipitated by a single overloaded transmission line, in Ohio, sagging and touching overgrown vegetation.

Nice wired article on high temp. superconductors. With some quotes by my old material science Prof. Jan Zaanen :-D

Almost in time for the workshop last week! This new Nature paper (e-mail me for full paper) claims training and usage of neural network implemented with metal-oxide memristors, without selector CMOS. They used it to implement a delta-rule algorithm for classification of 3x3 pixel black and white letters. Very impressive work!!!!

For those not that much into the topic, see the Nature's News and View section www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/521037a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150507 where they feature this article.

Recharge in seconds and efficiently store power for weeks between charges. Added bonus is the cheap and abundant components needed. One of the applications they foresee is to attach such a super-capacitor to the back of solar panels to store the power and discharge this during the night

very nice indeed - is this already at a stage where we should have a closer look at it? what you think? With experience in growing carbon nanostructures, Pint's group decided to try to coat the porous silicon surface with carbon. "We had no idea what would happen," said Pint. "Typically, researchers grow graphene from silicon-carbide materials at temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees Celsius. But at lower temperatures - 600 to 700 degrees Celsius - we certainly didn't expect graphene-like material growth." When the researchers pulled the porous silicon out of the furnace, they found that it had turned from orange to purple or black. When they inspected it under a powerful scanning electron microscope they found that it looked nearly identical to the original material but it was coated by a layer of graphene a few nanometers thick. When the researchers tested the coated material they found that it had chemically stabilized the silicon surface. When they used it to make supercapacitors, they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors. Transmission electron microscope image of the surface of porous silicon coated with graphene. The coating consists of a thin layer of 5-10 layers of graphene which filled pores with diameters less than 2-3 nanometers and so did not alter the nanoscale architecture of the underlying silicon. (Cary Pint / Vanderbilt) The graphene layer acts as an atomically thin protective coating. Pint and his group argue that this approach isn't limited to graphene. "The ability to engineer surfaces with atomically thin layers of materials combined with the control achieved in designing porous materials opens opportunities for a number of different applications beyond energy storage," he said.

Seems looking into turbulence is a source of innovative concepts. After the black hole modelling here was found a mathematical expression which describes "how turbulence can alter the shape and course of a flock of birds, a swarm of insects or even an algal bloom (phytoplankton!) and could help us to better predict them". More relevant for motions in air and sea, rather than space, where the fluids are dense enough to exhibit turbulence ; but what about a swarm moving in and exploring an exoplanet's atmosphere?

wow ....

impressive! I'm sure it's connected to the black hole, at some point it must have been active. It shows how it's important to put all observations public !

this is what they speculate ... the original image looks though much less impressive ...

Let's start betting which party Aliens vote: GREEN, BLUE, RED, BLACK?

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ for the moment is down. My bet, the microbe they found notified its cousins and they are currently invading the US

you can still see the rest of it here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html a good link with a summary and discussion on the announcement is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form-bacteria-arsenic