Group items tagged

"Windows and solar panels in the future could be made from one of the best -- and cheapest -- construction materials known: wood. Researchers at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new transparent wood material that's suitable for mass production"

Neural Networks to analyse sleeplessness.

20 billion sun masses black hole!!

Nice paper and linked to so many other factors.... curious "The question of whether mean body temperature is changing over time is not merely a matter of idle curiosity. Human body temperature is a crude surrogate for basal metabolic rate which, in turn, has been linked to both longevity (higher metabolic rate, shorter life span) and body size (lower metabolism, greater body mass). We speculated that the differences observed in temperature between the 19th century and today are real and that the change over time provides important physiologic clues to alterations in human health and longevity since the Industrial Revolution."

NASA has tested a prototype of a new design for a small uranium reactor as a power source for deep space exploration. In principle this should pose a smaller radiation danger during launch and more energy per mass compared to RTGs.

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

"... they are looking to use the nanotree structure to mimic photosynthesis in a device that not only harnesses the power of the sun to produce hydrogen fuel, but also captures CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce carbon emissions at the same time."

Tomorrow, at 9am EST, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland are expected to announce, with fairly strong certainty, that they have observed the Higgs boson "God" particle at a mass-energy of 125 GeV. For just over a week, rumors have been rife that observations with 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty (96% to 99.9%) have been made.

The first solid experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson has been unveiled today by physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Members of the ATLAS experiment revealed evidence that the Higgs particle has a mass of about 126 GeV/c2. "By 2014/2015 we could have enough additional data to eliminate large classes of theories that attempt to explain the Higgs,"

Physicists have simulated two universes colliding inside a metamaterial--  Now, this is cool (if it is true...)

Hm, they use more or less everything I don't especially like. They are nonmagnetic, so the relation materialGR is already rather weak. Usually, experimentalists prefer nonmagnetic media, since they are cheaper and broadband. At least the broadband is no argument here, since the frequency defines the "mass", which I find a rather strange point of view. And finally, they use strong anisotropy as a model of "time", which is rather problematic. Of course, the spatial direction with eps<0 appears in the wave equation with the same sign as time. But this does not mean that it behaves like time. But to teach material physicists that time is more than just a different sign in the wave equation seems to be as hopeless as to teach them that a black hole is more than something that absorbs all light... SIGHHH

Luzi I miss you ...

Charged like your electric toothbrush by lowering the receiving coils to 4cm above the ground.

nice; there are similar trials ongoing a bit all over; there is one I know of in Mannheim, where i think they have quick charging coils at each stop to reduce the battery mass they need to carry; I have seen a demonstration of this in Kyoto university about 13 years ago on a normal car - even one where they had an entire road equipped with these chargers and tested with charging as you go , charing at traffic stops, parking etc ....

NASA (WPMI) Glowing a dark magenta, the newly discovered GJ 504b, a Jupiter-sized planet with four times the mass, is posing a challenge to scientist on how giant planets are formed.

The paper: Mass and motion of globulettes in the Rosette Nebula http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2013/07/aa21547-13/aa21547-13.html

so it took us 70% of the time Earth is in the habitable zone to develop, would this be normal or could it be much faster? In other words, would all forms of life that started on a planet that originated at a 'similar' point in time like us, be equally far developed?

That is actually quite tricky to estimate rly. If for no other reason than the fact that all of the mass extinctions we had over the Earth's history basically reset the evolutionary clock. Assuming 2 Earths identical in every way but one did not have the dinosaur wipe-out impact, that would've given non-impact Earth 60million years to evolve a potential dinosaur intelligent super race.

The opposite might be true - or might not be ;-). Since usually the rate of evolution increases after major extinction events the chance is higher to produce 'intelligent' organisms if these events happen quite frequently. Usually the time of rapid evolution is only a few million years - so Earth is going quite slow. Certainly extinction events don't reset the evolutionary clock - if they would never have happened Earth gene pool would probably be quite primitive. By the way: dinosaurs were a quite diverse group and large dinosaurs might well have had cognitive abilities that come close to whales or primates - the difference to us might be that we have hands to manipulate our environment and vocal cords to communicate in very diverse ways. Modern dinosaur (descendents), i.e. birds, contain some very intelligent species - especially with respect to their body size and weight.

An alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered. No other star is known to have approached this close to us. An international team of researchers says it came five times closer than our current nearest neighbour - Proxima Centauri. Passing straight through the Oort Cloud region. This must have left some sort of mark maybe? A binary system of a red and brown dwarf (8% and 6% solar masses) so maybe not a too significant impact on trajectories in the Oort cloud?

I read this earlier and thought it might be another one of those alien conspiracy stuff. Freaky stuff.

what about taking a ride on one of these? - especially if they come with some companion planets? when is the next shuttle coming?

apparently warm things attract each other instead. a symbolic prize of a virtual launch vehicle based on a smeg fridge/freezer for the most amusing/shortest refutation. "A ~1068 gm hollow copper sphere hovers above a 1000 W heat element." "After power was applied to the heat element for 400 s, the means of the first and last ~6 force measures indicate that the sphere's gravitational mass increased by 1.9 % or 20 gm."

interesting...

this looks like absolute humbug to me .... reminds me of some rotating superconductors :-)

antihydrogen propulsion...?

didn't roger write an assessment of antimatter propulsion when he was in the ACT?

yeah the problem is the amount of antimatter you can get and more specifically how to trap it. I found that you would need around one gram to go to the outer Solar System. So we are far from that, but finding an efficient way to trap it, with an electromagnetic trap rather than solid walls is a first step !

couldn't find his legs ... but they might not be needed anyway on the ISS ....

Cool. Since ESA is always said to be inspired by NASA projects, can the ACT look at it from a different perpective? What about sending humans to the ISS without legs? Think of the mass and volume it would save. It would also improve robot-human interaction. Robots would no longer feel inferior. I'm sure most people would give up limb to go to space.