Group items tagged

The Forest Products Laboratory of the US Forest Service has opened a US$1.7 million pilot plant for the production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) from wood by-products materials such as wood chips and sawdust. Prepared properly, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fibers, so that putting CNC into composite materials results in high strength, low weight products.

"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. "

Hard work in functional materials is driving the development of new wearable electronics that could be advantageous for communications and sensing is being pursued in the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute. Through embroidering circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision full integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing is now possible.

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

Researchers in the US have created the first artificial samples of graphene with electronic properties that can be controlled in a way not possible in the natural form of the material.

Last year, physicists discovered that red wine can turn certain materials into superconductors. Now they've found that Beaujolais works best and think they know why -- I soo knew it !!!

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

We are living in the future when live broadcasts are being censored by AI programs in real-time. I'm sure dictators everywhere are looking forward for these technologies to mature. Having a firewall over reality is so convenient.

Oh, and look - the copyright AI doesn't likes Democrats as well: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/youtube-flags-democrats-convention-video-on-copyright-grounds/

What this tells is that we should not take AI seriously until smart Luis's (or his son) managed to make something decent out of it ... "This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law. And then, it got worse. Amid more cries of dismay on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, the official Worldcon Twitter announced: Chicon 7@chicon_7 We are sorry to report that #Ustream will not resume the video feed. #chicon7 #hugos #worldcon 3 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can. But Ustream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only access. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts."

The new material matches the properties of a puzzling new form of carbon found in high pressure experiments

Very nice new concept for active vibration damping. I think this has huge potential for space applications

Quote: "This is exactly what we are pursuing - self-assembling materials that organize at smaller sizes, say, less than 20 or even 10 nanometers"

Direct Self-Assembly (DSA) is one of the competitors for the next-generation 'lithography' together with direct-write via electron beam and the more traditional extreme UV (EUV) lithography. Although there are huge benefits to use DSA, the technology does have some drawbacks when it comes to line edge roughness. It seems however particularly good for repetitive structures that are used in memory chips. As long as EUV is struggling to get it working, DSA definitely has a fighting chance to enter the market one day.

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

Very interesting advances in materials

these are the latest in repellent surfaces.  a very nice video and as we previously discussed could be very useful in the ISS

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

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 :-)