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Its in italian sorry ... but its worth trying to understand ..basically its how an important italian news channel (TG4) gave the rosetta news ... WOW ... middle ages Basically they say ESA spoilt the magic of comets (jesus birth and similar stuff) revealing to the world that it is just a rock and nothing more spending 100 Meuros in the process.

A pearl of the italian national news channels. A comet is nothing more than a dusty rock. Wow, brilliant, such level of understanding of what is happening! Can we use the typhoon control or some other project to get rid of them? They're so confused and ignorant that it's not even clear what their point is, apart from "spoiling the magic of comets", which is not the case.

Hilarious critique to a quite important paper from Stanford trying to push the agenda of global warming .... "You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect."

also good overview: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

just a footnote here, that climate warming aspect is not derived by an agenda of presenting the world with evil. If one looks at big journals with high outreach, it is not uncommon to find articles promoting climate warming as something not bringing the doom that extremists are promoting with marketing strategies. Here is a recent article in Science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26612836 Science's role is to look at the phenomenon and notice what is observed. And here is one saying that the acidification of the ocean due to increase of CO2 (observed phenomenon) is not advancing destructively for coccolithophores (a key type of plankton that builds its shell out of carbonates), as we were expecting, but rather fertilises them! Good news in principle! It could be as well argued from the more sceptics with high "doubting-inertia" that 'It could be because CO2 is not rising in the first place'', but one must not forget that one can doubt the global increase in T with statistical analyses, because it is a complex variable, but at least not the CO2 increase compared to preindustrial levels. in either case : case 1: agenda for 'the world is warming' => - Put random big energy company here- sells renewable energies case 2: agenda for 'the world is fine' => - Put random big energy company here - sells oil as usual The fact that in both cases someone is going to win profits, does not correllate (still not an adequate statistical test found for it?) with the fact that the science needs to be more and more scrutinised. The blog of the Statistics Professor in Univ.Toronto looks interesting approach (I have not understood all the details) and the paper above is from JPL authors, among others.

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.

Another underestimated source of CO2, are turbulent waters. "The stronger the turbulences at the water's surface, the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The combination of maps and data revealed that, while the CO2 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are lower than assumed, those from rivers and streams are three times as high as previously believed." Alltogether the emitted CO2 equates to roughly one-fifth of the emissions caused by humans. Yet more stuff to model...

Nasia, I thought about your statement carefully - and I cannot agree with you. Water is not a greenhouse gas. It is instead a liquid. Also, I can't believe you keep feeding the troll! :-P But on a more topical note: I think it is an over-simplification to call water a greenhouse gas - water is one of the most important mechanisms in the way Earth handles heat input from the sun. The latent heat that you mention actually cools Earth: solar energy that would otherwise heat Earth's surface is ABSORBED as latent heat by water which consequently evaporates - the same water condenses into rain drops at high altitudes and releases this stored heat. In effect the water cycle is a mechanism of heat transport from low altitude to high altitude where the chance of infrared radiation escaping into space is much higher due to the much thinner layer of atmosphere above (including the smaller abundance of greenhouse gasses). Also, as I know you are well aware, the cloud cover that results from water condensation in the troposphere dramatically increases albedo which has a cooling effect on climate. Furthermore the heat capacity of wet air ("humid heat") is much larger than that of dry air - so any advective heat transfer due to air currents is more efficient in wet air - transporting heat from warm areas to a natural heat sink e.g. polar regions. Of course there are also climate heating effects of water like the absorption of IR radiation. But I stand by my statement (as defended in the above) that rain cools the atmosphere. Oh and also some nice reading material on the complexities related to climate feedback due to sea surface temperature: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006%3C2049%3ALSEOTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2

I enjoy trolling conversations when there is a gain for both sides at the end :-) . I had to check upon some of the facts in order to explain my self properly. The IPCC report states the greenhouse gases here, and water vapour is included: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html Honestly, I read only the abstract of the article you posted, which is a very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of regulating sea surface temperature, but it is very localized to the tropics (vivid convection, storms) a region of which I have very little expertise, and is difficult to study because it has non-hydrostatic dynamics. The only thing I can comment there is that the authors define constant relative humidity for the bottom layer, supplied by the oceanic surface, which limits the implementation of the concept on other earth regions. Also, we may confuse during the conversation the greenhouse gas with the Radiative Forcing of each greenhouse gas: I see your point of the latent heat trapped in the water vapour, and I agree, but the effect of the water is that it traps even as latent heat an amount of LR that would otherwise escape back to space. That is the greenhouse gas identity and an image to see the absorption bands in the atmosphere and how important the water is, without vain authority-based arguments that miss the explanation in the end: http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarchords.com/uploaded/82/87-33833-450015_44absorbspec.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.solarchords.com/agw-science/4/greenhouse--1-radiation/33784/&h=468&w=458&sz=28&tbnid=x2NtfKh5OPM7lM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__KldteWbV19nVPbbsC4jsOgzCK6E=&docid=cMRZ9f22jbtYPM&sa=X&ei=SwynUq2TMqiS0QXVq4C4Aw&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAw

All the satellite-related systems (except for the rocket to launch it) are DIY programs -- designed so that regular people may also have the chance of developing and eventually launching their own.

I was saying that mainly because of some flaws - the piggy-pack installation, no dedicated stage, the limited control, ... It is so far very funny, but once he can fill all the gaps, it should be an excellent initiative - although careful about the debris if anyone has its own ;p

his quote: "when art becomes practical, we call it technology; when technology becomes useless, we call it art" ... this is probably the later one ....

It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.

and how can we use this?

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Doesn't really sound sexy, but this is of utmost importance for next generation grids for renewable energy.

I agree on the significance indeed - a small boost also for my favourite Desertec project ... Though their language is a bit too "grandiose": "ABB has successfully designed and developed a hybrid DC breaker after years of research, functional testing and simulation in the R&D laboratories. This breaker is a breakthrough that solves a technical challenge that has been unresolved for over a hundred years and was perhaps one the main influencers in the 'war of currents' outcome. The 'hybrid' breaker combines mechanical and power electronics switching that enables it to interrupt power flows equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station within 5 milliseconds - that's as fast as a honey bee takes per flap of its wing - and more than 30 times faster than the reaction time of an Olympic 100-meter medalist to react to the starter's gun! But its not just about speed. The challenge was to do it 'ultra-fast' with minimal operational losses and this has been achieved by combining advanced ultrafast mechanical actuators with our inhouse semiconductor IGBT valve technologies or power electronics (watch video: Hybrid HVDC Breaker - How does it work). In terms of significance, this breaker is a 'game changer'. It removes a significant stumbling block in the development of HVDC transmission grids where planning can start now. These grids will enable interconnection and load balancing between HVDC power superhighways integrating renewables and transporting bulk power across long distances with minimal losses. DC grids will enable sharing of resources like lines and converter stations that provides reliability and redundancy in a power network in an economically viable manner with minimal losses. ABB's new Hybrid HVDC breaker, in simple terms will enable the transmission system to maintain power flow even if there is a fault on one of the lines. This is a major achievement for the global R&D team in ABB who have worked for years on the challeng

Latest update: the European Space Agency says their experts "confirm there is no link between the meteor incidents in Russia and asteroid 2012DA14 flyby tonight". How did they find this? As they did not see this one coming, how could they come to that conclusion that early!

yes, now i get my 100% certainty with the reconstructed orbits nothing else (http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Watch%20the%20Skies/posts/post_1361037562855.html) ... I still think that esa anouncemement was highly premature but with a high probability of being right...

Some more results on the topic (link to an arxiv article inside): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21579422

Maybe it is not yet too late for ESA to stop our plans of outsourcing IT ... Sometimes it is good to be late :-)

hey! This is essentially the Probabilistic Computing Ariadna

The link is there but my understanding of our purpose is different than what I understood from the abstract. In any case,the authors are from Palma de Mallorca, Balears, Spain "somebody" should somehow make them aware of the Ariadna study ... E.g somebody no longer in the team :-)

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers has demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans.

Was just about to post it... :) It seems after transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS) the receiving person actually sees 'flashes of light' in their peripheral vision. So its using your vision sense to get the information across. Would it not be better to try to see if you can generate some kind of signal in the part of your brain that is connected to 'hearing'? Or would this be me thinking too naive?

"transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS)" How is this "direct"?

Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!

You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.

The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.

Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.

I will try my best. In a nutshell: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100714/full/466310a.html

*you* tried *your* best .... ??

Just read some of the samples of text generated with their neural networks, insane.

It's really lucky that it was OpenAI who made that development and Elon Musk is so worried about AI. This way at least they try to assess the whole spectrum of abilities and applications of this model before releasing the full research to the public.

They released a smaller model, I got it running on Sandy. It's fairly straight forward: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2

not a surprise though still bad to read ....

On a side note, it's hilarious to read an article on something repeatedly referred to as being secret...

quite self-explanatory described though: "The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant's customers. That's why it is unlawful for any record-keeper to disclose it has received a so-called National Security Letter. But under a deal brokered with the President Barack Obama administration, Google on Tuesday published a "range" of times it received National Security Letters demanding it divulge account information to the authorities without warrants. It was the first time a company has ever released data chronicling the volume of National Security Letter requests. National Security Letters allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and has even been reprimanded for abusing them. The NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and businesses like Google to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more as long as the FBI says the information is "relevant" to an investigation." and ""You'll notice that we're reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations. We plan to update these figures annually," Richard Salgado, a Google legal director, wrote in a blog post. Salgado was not available for comment. What makes the government's position questionable is that it is required by Congress to disclose the number of times the bureau issues National Security Letters. In 2011, the year with the latest available figures, the FBI issued 16,511 National Sec

The partnership brings together leading IT providers and three of Europe's leading research centres, CERN, EMBL and ESA in order to provide computing capacity and services that elastically meet big science's growing demand for computing power.

Helix Nebula provides an unprecedented opportunity for the global cloud services industry to work closely on the Large Hadron Collider through the large-scale, international ATLAS experiment, as well as with the molecular biology and earth observation. The three flagship use cases will be used to validate the approach and to enable a cost-benefit analysis. Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed.

This game-changing strategy will boost scientific innovation and bring new discoveries through novel services and products. At the same time, Helix Nebula will ensure valuable scientific data is protected by a secure data layer that is interoperable across all member states. In addition, the pan-European partnership fits in with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and its strategy for cloud computing on the continent. It will ensure that services comply with Europe's stringent privacy and security regulations and satisfy the many requirements of policy makers, standards bodies, scientific and research communities, industrial suppliers and SMEs.

Initially based on the needs of European big-science, Helix Nebula ultimately paves the way for a Cloud Computing platform that offers a unique resource to governments, businesses and citizens.

"Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed." And here I was thinking cloud computing was old news 3 years ago :)

NASA answer to the big data hype

"The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.

They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.

what an interesting personality ... very symathetic Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 7

And the follow up by Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals

interesting one - Luzi will like it :-)

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.