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...Covering about a third of the sky, the new image contains 10 times as many objects as the Palomar Survey, or about half a billion. The higher resolution scan is a goldmine for astronomers and is expected to lead to discoveries "for decades to come"...

Avoiding carbohydrates might make you thinner, but if you want to live longer and healthier, it might not be the smartest thing to do...

Now this is an interesting hypothesis! Would make terraforming a bit easier 

Having an ocean on Mars would solve so many problems... btw, again this guy? Isabelle take a look at that : Tim Lenton is everywhere, last time he wrote half of our literature references on the tipping points study.

theoretical physicists... :) Read the last sentence of the paper...in this way anyone can publish in nature...just make a good story with little evidence Did dark matter kill the dinosaurs? The Solar System's periodic passage through a 'dark disk' on the galactic plane could trigger comet bombardments that would cause mass extinctions.

Hmm.. right.. then again, this is not an actual journal publication but a news broadcast. But you are right that the name Nature is attached to it so the journal is definitely banking on their acquired status.

As people point out in the comments: a bit fake. But nevertheless a good production and a definitely cool advertisement for KUKA! I enjoyed it!

yeah check out the making of, it's a nice movie and what would robotics movies be without movie magic :) somewhere they mentioned a vision system, which I think based on the making-of video they haven't really used for the video shoot

"When a control laser is fired at the crystal, a complex quantum-level reaction turns it the opaque crystal transparent. A second light source is beamed into the crystal before the control laser is shut off, returning the crystal to its opaque state. This leaves the light trapped inside the crystal, and the opacity of the crystal keeps the light trapped inside from bouncing around, effectively bringing light to a full stop." is the simple explanation, but I am not sure how this is actually possible with the current laws of physics

There are two ways to make slow light: material slow light and structural slow light, where you either change the material or the structural properties of your system. Here they used EIT to make material slow light, by inducing transparency inside an otherwise opaque material. As you change the absorption properties of a material you also change its dispersion properties, the so-called Kramers-Kronig relations. A rapid positive change in the dispersion properties of a material will give rise to slow light. To effectively stop light they switched off the control beam, bringing back the opaque state. Another control beam is then used to retrieve the probe pulse that was 'frozen' inside the medium. Light will be halted according to the population lifetime on the energy level (~ 100s). They used an evolutionary algorithm to find an optimal pulse preparation sequence to reach close to the maximum possible storage duration of 100s. Interesting paper!

So it is not real storage then in a sense, as you are stimulating an excitation population which retains the phase information of your original pulse? Still it is amazing that they could store this up to 100s and retrieve it with a probe pulse, but light has never been halted.

Making the Mona Lisa with a lot of paintballs. Not sure, what is cooler...?

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood

Sarah Harrison is a lawyer that has been staying with Snowden in Hong Kong and Moscow. She is a UK citizen and her family is there. After the miranda case where the boyfriend of the reporter was detained at the airport, can Sarah return safely home? Will her family be pressured by the secret service? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23759834

Video shows how easy the process is and how cool the results look. Does anybody know a potential scientific application for such image processing?

this is very impressive indeed ... looks like the manual steps they are doing could be automatised, can't they?

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.

Invented in 2002!! A disruptive invention to illuminate shanty towns and beyond .... Makes also sense for space habitats ... paper? anyone?

And a nice video ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhHKXxEN9Q0#t=12

DARPA creates a set of games that covertly search for software vulnerabilities

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 :-)

beati pauperes spiritu :-) "Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy." I think that there are many factors missing there that are just not asked possibly such as altruism as a source for happiness ...

According to The Beatles "Happiness is a warm gun"... To each his own, I guess. :-)

It really depends on one's values really. If your values don't follow the standard vanilla flavor then it all breaks down.

What is the best (wisest) size for a group of individuals? Couzin and Kao put together a series of mathematical models that included correlation and several cues. In one model, for example, a group of animals had to choose between two options-think of two places to find food. But the cues for each choice were not equally reliable, nor were they equally correlated. The scientists found that in these models, a group was more likely to choose the superior option than an individual. Common experience will make us expect that the bigger the group got, the wiser it would become. But they found something very different. Small groups did better than individuals. But bigger groups did not do better than small groups. In fact, they did worse. A group of 5 to 20 individuals made better decisions than an infinitely large crowd. The problem with big groups is this: a faction of the group will follow correlated cues-in other words, the cues that look the same to many individuals. If a correlated cue is misleading, it may cause the whole faction to cast the wrong vote. Couzin and Kao found that this faction can drown out the diversity of information coming from the uncorrelated cue. And this problem only gets worse as the group gets bigger.

Couzin research was the starting point that co-inspired PaGMO from the very beginning. We invited him (and he came) at a formation flying conference for a plenary here in ESTEC. You can see PaGMO as a collective problem solving simulation. In that respect, we learned already that the size of the group and its internal structure (topology) counts and cannot be too large or too random. One of the project the ACT is running (and currently seeking for new ideas/actors) is briefly described here (http://esa.github.io/pygmo/examples/example2.html) and attempts answering the question :"How is collective decision making influenced by the information flow through the group?" by looking at complex simulations of large 'archipelagos'.

Physicists have devised a way to take pictures using light that has not interacted with the object being photographed. This form of imaging uses pairs of photons, twins that are 'entangled' in such a way that the quantum state of one is inextricably linked to the other.

The actual article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/full/nature13586.html ScienceDaily version: "Scientists photograph the Schrödinger's cat for the first time!"

Theorists expect that positronium, a sort of 'atom' consisting of an electron and an anti-electron, can be used to make a powerful gamma-ray laser. Scientists now report detailed calculations of the dynamics of a positronium BEC. This work is the first to account for effects of collisions between different positronium species.

instead of using the solar generated steam to generate electricity, it seems to make economic sense to use it to pump more oil out of the ground ...

Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it

I guess I tentatively agree with you on both points. In the end there might anyway be surprisingly little overlap between the way that we describe what nature does and HOW it does it... :-D

Congratulations! 100% agree.

Interesting overview paper by Massa from Trient on reconfigurable metamaterials … makes me wonder if it is time for us to look closer into it or already too late …