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the only downside is that you have to launch it before it can run... :)

Hmm.. but how would you make it such that it can stand up? Maybe launch it somehow forward?

I can imagine a system with 2 retractable support legs to stand it up and raise it a bit above the floor. Then make it run and retract the legs abruptly.

Quote: "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding"

Judging by the color it probably contains a lot of melanin. ;-)

Is love just an epigenetic mechanism?

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

Amazing! :-D Makes you forget how hard it is to detect individual atoms at all.

While amazing indeed, it makes me wonder how much longer we will still have to wait until all this nanotechnology stuff will deliver something actually useful (say super-efficient/super-small transistors in my cell phone, camera, computer, etc.)? So far it seems to excel mostly in marketing...

Slime powered transistors with memory.

"Applications for the film extend beyond getting rid of wrinkles, though. It can safely deliver medications for 24 hours at a time as well as protect the user's skin, particularly over wounds. Additionally, the XLP material can reduce moisture loss. "

"A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions" Machine Ethics is basically the return of philosophy through code. Here you can learn a bit about it, and help the MIT collect data on how humans make choices when faced with ethical dilemmas, and how we perceive AIs making such choices.

"But beyond its beautiful aesthetic, the pigment could help make buildings more efficient. This is because the pigment reflects a large amount of infrared light. As a result, a roof painted with YLnMn blue could help to keep buildings cool, thus conserving energy."

The only way to study the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics is to test them over enormous distances in space. And physicists are already making plans

Treating materials like complex networks leads to substances with extraordinary counterintuitive properties, say physicists

Researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada and KAUST in Saudi Arabia have made a solar cell out of colloidal quantum dot (CQD) films that has a record-breaking efficiency of 7%. This is almost 40% more efficient than the best previous devices based on CQDs.

CubeSats + 3D printing... for space. I'm surprised this isn't an ACT project :) more info: SpiderFab: Process for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures

$100,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to hammer out a design and figure out whether spacecraft self-construction makes business sense .... I can answer for 0$ ..... NO Infact the question is just stupid: a) spacecraft self-construction exist: then it is a no brainer to decide wether it makes business sense b) it does not: then there is no business

The famous paradox of Schrödinger's cat starts from principles of quantum physics and ends with the bizarre conclusion that a cat can be simultaneously in two physical states - one in which the cat is alive and the other in which it is dead. In real life, however, large objects such as cats clearly don't exist in a superposition of two or more states and this paradox is usually resolved in terms of quantum decoherence. But now physicists in Canada and Switzerland argue that even if decoherence could be prevented, the difficulty of making perfect measurements would stop us from confirming the cat's superposition.

A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken.

"...scientists in Germany have built a device that can effectively make objects invisible to sound waves. The performance of the acoustic "invisibility cloak" exceeds that of existing electromagnetic devices and could open up new ways of manipulating waves, including the development of shields against seismic waves."

shit.... they are a few months ahead of us it seems ... :-( what is the impact on our ariadna??

Funny article .... Reminds me a bit of Luzi :-) And look at this phrase: am I in good or bad company ? "Sergey Brin, a founder of Google, rarely leaves home without his Vibram FiveFingers nylon shoes." In the article it is mentioned as a sign of particularly bad taste :-)

But there should be a second article on sandals! And finally one on the synthesis: socks with sandals... :-)

A new imaging technique able to make movies of light moving!!! There is a trick, of course, but is a rather clever one and does not preclude innovative applications .....

:-)

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.