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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."

Using dielectric materials as efficient EM radiators and receivers can scale down these antenna's to the chip level, reducing both weight and power consumption. The infamous internet-of-things one step closer. But could we also transmit power this way?? "In dielectric aerials, the medium has high permittivity, meaning that the velocity of the radio wave decreases as it enters the medium," said Dr Dhiraj Sinha, the paper's lead author. "What hasn't been known is how the dielectric medium results in emission of electromagnetic waves. This mystery has puzzled scientists and engineers for more than 60 years." The researchers determined that the reason for this phenomenon is due to symmetry breaking of the electric field associated with the electron acceleration The researchers found that by subjecting the piezoelectric thin films to an asymmetric excitation, the symmetry of the system is similarly broken, resulting in a corresponding symmetry breaking of the electric field, and the generation of electromagnetic radiation.

"After decades spent thinking, arguing, hoping, and in the words of Turyshev, "making a career off of it," these scientists' interest in the Pioneer anomaly has, understandably, accumulated psychological baggage; in the case of many of them, a cloud of emotional investment has formed around the core of objective scientific inquiry. And clouds obscure things."

165 pages about it!! http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3686

good old Turyshev ...

I think Lucas didn't know he would have such an impact in science with Star Wars...!

do you think it could be the dark side of The Force?

what else...?

mah...

Perhaps they measured the "cold fusion" of Berlusconi with his girls. But that's not that cold, as it seems...

...that is definitely HOT... ...on the other hand I don't think it would be fusion since it does not seems to produce any bound state... double mystery :)

If I could write, this is exactly what I would write about rocket, GO, and so on... :) "we are decadent and tired. But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years ago. We may, in other words, need to look beyond strictly U.S.-centric explanations for such failures of imagination and initiative. ... Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis." "But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of "technology" might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces."

Would have been nice if it were historically more accurate and less polemic / superficial

mmmh... the wheel is also an old invention... there is an idea behind but this article is not very deepfull, and I really don't think the problem is with innovation and lack of creative young people !!! look at what is done in the financial sector...

There are many weird things about the giant Humboldt squid, but here's one of the strangest: Its beak. The squid's beak is one of the hardest organic substances in existence

A good occasion to get the idea out of the idea pool...?

This is really cool. I know one of the authors and he is a good guy... the only thing that leaves me unsatisfied is that if the whole issue is related to thermal effects one should have seen the Pioneer effect all the time and not only at about 10 AU... ...or is there some thermal process that kicked in only at this distance?

Here's an update on this theory: NASA Releases New Pioneer Anomaly Analysis "The mysterious force acting on the Pioneer spacecraft seems to be falling exponentially. That's a strong clue that on-board heat is to blame, says NASA." Heat emission 'most likely cause' of pioneer anomaly "What's more interesting is that, contrary to the original analysis conducted all those years ago, the deceleration does seem to be decelerating at an exponential rate -- just as one might expect from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, which powers the two spacecraft. Turyshev concludes, "The most likely cause of the Pioneer anomaly is the anisotropic emission of on-board heat.""

In a surprise announcement earlier today (July 13), the European Southern Observatory said that monster black holes - those giants of millions or billions of solar masses, thought to lurk at the hearts of most galaxies - have a mechanism to become active other than galaxy collisions.

"A new study combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centers of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought." and "The process that activates a sleeping black hole - turning its galaxy from quiet to active - has been a mystery in astronomy. What triggers the violent outbursts at a galaxy's center, which then becomes an active galactic nucleus? Up to now, many astronomers thought that most of these active nuclei were turned on when two galaxies merged, or when they passed close to each other and the disrupted material became fuel for the central black hole. Results of the new study indicate this idea may be wrong for many active galaxies." very interesting indeed