Group items tagged

See Also: Matter & Energy Nanotechnology Optics Physics Materials Science Graphene Organic Chemistry Reference White gold Electromagnetic radiation Nanomedicine Nanoparticle Any use for the smell project? "We have demonstrated resonant antenna-enhanced single-particle hydrogen sensing in the visible region and presented a fabrication approach to the positioning of a single palladium nanoparticle in the nanofocus of a gold nanoantenna,"

wow ... nice project ... and very simple indeed!

sweet! That's a convincing biomimetic study :) Especially when it falls and survives...

nice and good work, as usual from this lab. however, biomimetic is only the name, as usual from this lab.

What would you do if you owned the world's most powerful laser? The US government is hoping to use it to achieve the ignition of thermonuclear fusion in the lab for the first time. Nature Photonics spoke to Edward Moses of the National Ignition Facility t

any new findings in there?

remember that I wanted to do this at a University lab course! ...LS

A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

like this particularly and would even go one step further: take one day or one half day during the week internet free - just unplug the cable. We did this during my PhD in our lab and it really helped! LS

Cyano bacteria to shield from radiation. An idea from italians flying to the Moon via Team Indus

Nice idea, but is it really new: resistance of cyanob. to UV radiation has been known but studies have been inconclusive as to under what resource limitations it works, but according to what we see from evolution: on Earth it works, since they survived pre-ozone atmosphere! some papers from a quick google search: 1999 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09670269910001736392 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25463663

anybody of you already playing around with this open source toy?

My son Patrick has done his training period in MIT on this NAO. type "NAO Bechon" and you will get some results including a nice video...

Roughly half of the researchers in robotics I know work on Naos, including those in my lab...

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.

interesting, long article ... a bit optimistic in my view

Perhaps when you think of bacterial communities you think of a flask full of rapidly dividing E. coli. But in non-lab conditions, bacteria grow in complex, heterogeneous communities composed of diverse microscopic organisms. In these communities, bacteria need a means to communicate with their kin, and they do this through a language known as quorum sensing (QS), where bugs secrete and detect factors that tell them whether they're surrounded by kin (and if so, how many there are).

I hate scorpions, but this could be a nice subject for a future Ariadna study! This north African desert scorpion, doesn't dig burrows to protect itself from the sand-laden wind (as the other scorpions do). When the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage.

Nice research, though they have done almost all the work that we could do in an Ariadna, didnt they? "To check, they took further photographs. In particular, they used a laser scanning system to make a three-dimensional map of the armour and then plugged the result into a computer program that blasted the virtual armour with virtual sand grains at various angles of attack. This process revealed that the granules were disturbing the air flow near the skeleton's surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do. Having tried things out in a computer, the team then tried them for real. They placed samples of steel in a wind tunnel and fired grains of sand at them using compressed air. One piece of steel was smooth, but the others had grooves of different heights, widths and separations, inspired by scorpion exoskeleton, etched onto their surfaces. Each sample was exposed to the lab-generated sandstorm for five minutes and then weighed to find out how badly it had been eroded. The upshot was that the pattern most resembling scorpion armour-with grooves that were 2mm apart, 5mm wide and 4mm high-proved best able to withstand the assault. Though not as good as the computer model suggested real scorpion geometry is, such grooving nevertheless cut erosion by a fifth, compared with a smooth steel surface. The lesson for aircraft makers, Dr Han suggests, is that a little surface irregularity might help to prolong the active lives of planes and helicopters, as well as those of scorpions."

What bugs me (pardon the pun) is that the dimensions of the pattern they used were scaled up by many orders of magnitude, while "grains of sand" with which the surface was bombarded apparently were not... Not being a specialist in the field, I would nevertheless expect that the size of the surface pattern *in relation to* to size of particles used for bombarding would be crucial.

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

:-)

Well, it's not yet confirmed... That error would be worse than the magnetic moment of the muon about 10 years ago. There, it was "at least" a conflict of conventions used in the computer codes!

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show. CERN's statement says OPERA scientists are studying the "potential extent of these two effects" but doesn't indicate which source of error (if either) is likely to outweigh the other. However, Lucia Votano, director of the Gran Sasso laboratory, says the "main suspicion" focuses on the optical-fiber connection. She adds that OPERA researchers deserve credit for "having tenaciously followed this particular evidence via checks completed in the last few days." The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.

RMIT University researchers in Melbourne, Australia, have developed the world's first liquid metal enabled pump, a revolutionary new micro-scale device with no mechanical parts. The unique design will enable micro-fluidics and lab-on-a-chip technology to finally realise their potential, with applications ranging from biomedicine to biofuels.

Pretty cool - and pretty addictive to play :-D

Quite intriguing!

this is fantastic! If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team3. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity4. Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. "It's interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab," he says. "This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely."

At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.