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First paper I know of that seems to confirm what we see with our daughters since they are born ... Would this also be observable with astronauts? We should have some data from the ISS it seems to me...

Sottos, White, Moore, and their team created 3D vascular networks-patterns of microchannels filled with healing chemistries-that thread through a fiber-reinforced composite. When damage occurs, the networks within the material break apart and allow the healing chemistries to mix and polymerize, autonomously healing the material, over multiple cycles.

Basically quantum entanglement, or more accurately the dispersal and expansion of mixed quantum states, results in an apparent flow of time. Quantum information leaks out and the result is the move from a pure state (hot coffee) to a mixed state (cooled down) in which equilibrium is reached. Theoretically it is possible to get back to a pure state (coffee spontaneously heating up) but this statistical unlikelihood gives the appereance of irreversibility and hence a flow o time. I think an interesting question is then: how much useful work can you extract from this system? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2811) It should for macroscopic thermodynamic systems lead to the Carnot cycle, but on smaller scales it might be possible to formulate a more general expression. Anybody interested to look into it? Anna, Jo? :)

What you propose is called Maxwell's demon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) thermodynamics is VERY robust. I guess if you really only want to harness AND USE the energy in a microscopic system you might have some chance of beating Carnot. But any way of transferring harvested energy to a macroscopic system seems to be limited by it (AFAIK).

doesn't look very ambitious with such choices!

1) it has to actively work and produce a result that's what you intended 2) the design must be robust. 3) it should be efficient 4) it should minimize unintended consequences. "But we have to establish a formal, mathematically precise mechanism to measure complexity and adaptability . . . [where] adaptability means the system elements have sufficient margin, and can serve multiple purposes." "We need to break the paradigm of long cycles from design to product" some interesting questions....

what is the outcome of the CDF study ? I think actually that optimisation is not at all the key point. As it is stressed in this news, it is robustness (points 2 and 4). This is something we should think about ...

SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS, SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS!!! :-D

Let's go to Titan !!!

I bet we'll find there a black monolith which will take us to the stars... No, wait, was it that moon?

Prices in UK oscillate between 200 and 300 GBP

nice idea to bring some structure to the list of IT novelties ...

see especially the personal cycle lane, would be useful here !

These features lead to a high heat-to-electricity energy conversion efficiency of 5.7% when cycled between 10 and 60 °C, opening a promising way to utilize low-grade heat.

he new SR-72 will use a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) that will employ the turbine engine at lower speeds, and use a scramjet at higher speeds. A scramjet engine is designed to operate at hypersonic velocities by compressing the air through a carefully designed inlet, but needs to be traveling supersonic before it is practical to begin with. So far research projects from NASA, the Air Force and other Pentagon entities have not been able to solve the problem of transitioning from the subsonic flight regime, through hypersonic flight with a single aircraft. Same problem as Reaction Engines is trying to solve, so I am not sure whether they actually cracked it. In any case, nice pictures. Not sure why the exhaust color is purple in color. Its not running on Argon I believe.

Weird article. Intermediate thruster stage (Ramjet) is missing. Scramjet has supersonic combustion and a normal turbine delivers subsonic flows. Even with afterburner - the Scramjet inlet would decelerate the flow down to subsonic velocity with "normal" subsonic combustion. The only thing I can imagine is that the Scramjet stage is bi-functional and covers both, subsonic and supersonic combustion. But the article doesn't say anything about it.

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/