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one more step in the right direction for thermoelectrics ...

once more ... the Romans did it already 2000 years ago! this time: burning so much wood that they increased the methane level in a way we can still measure it in ice cores ...

Extremely charged Xe ions by stripping off more electrons than previously thought possible ...

interesting power source ...

looks like some backwind for all the cold fusion believers ...

I just answered something very similar to Franco, except the conclusions: I don't think that there is a good reason for us or anybody else in ESA to get involved at this stage.

I agree - if this device would work it there would be other interest groups (like the energy sector) with a much more concrete stake in the technology.

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

The Robobee takes off without guide wires! It is still powered via a wire, and the control is done with the help of a VICON system and on an external computer, but this still is an amazing feat!

The way they make this thing is just as impressive. The manufacturing technique is "pop-up book" folding, a method that has been developed by the same group and that allows a two dimensional monolithic MEMS structures to be easily assembled into a 3D structure. I actually put this as an item of the "Technology List 2020" on the wiki this morning.

I agree, manufacturing is the amazing thing here ..... as soon as the power-consumption/density problem is solved these things will really take off :)

Impressive ...

Nice modelling research on geo engineering options ...

Abstract: The "Magnificent Seven" (M7) are a group of radio-quiet Isolated Neutron Stars (INSs) discovered in the soft X-rays through their purely thermal surface emission. Owing to the large inferred magnetic fields ($B\approx 10^{13}$ G), radiation from these sources is expected to be substantially polarised, independently on the mechanism actually responsible for the thermal emission.

Julius von Bismarck is only 28 years old, but his artistic resume is already several pages long. He's currently taking time off from school to be the new artist in residence at CERN ? the world's biggest particle physics research facility, home of the Large Hadron Collider.

Perhaps a new role for the ACT!?

very good idea - one that already Andrés had way back and a few years ago I was in contact with a group in Amsterdam who was interested but it never materialised ... any good recommendations? this Bismark guy seems to be a nice chap to have around in the office according to the photo on the site: long beard, a bottle of wine in the office and steering out of the window in search for ideas ... give the ugly office he might even want to swap it with our nice semi open space! :-)

Much faster than the Fast Fourier Transform if the signal's frequency content is sparse, which is commonly the case for many real signals.

isn't it strange that one single gene mutation can enable or disable such a complex behavioural pattern? anything to take advantage of in our gate study (Guido?)

Sorry ,here now the right link to the nature paper ...in english

Plenty of other earths ....

of relevance to this discussion: Koomey's Law, a Moore's Law equivalent for computing's energetic efficiency http://www.economist.com/node/21531350 http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/2148202/whither-moores-law-introducing-koomeys-law

For all the AI guys (Christos, Marek, Ed, Markus and co ...) and of course Luiz, Sante ... You will like this one :-)

Quite a lot of blabla, some usual misconceptions (like QT the source of randomness in nature), but a -- from my point of view -- very true (though in the text somehow hidden) conclusion: Free will, creativity etc. from the point of view of fundamental physics are just randomness! Many physicists won't like this conclusion, though, and in this respect also the title is rather misleading!