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Maxwell remains the great unsung hero of human progress, the physicists' physicist whose name means little to those without a scientific bent. His life's work [....] is among the most enduring scientific legacies of all time, on a par with those of his more widely acclaimed peers, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

"The BICEP2 data would eliminate about 90% of inflationary models, Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, told a packed auditorium at MIT the day after the BICEP2 announcement (see picture below). Many of those models do not produce gravitational waves at detectable levels, said Linde, who is one of the founders of inflation theory." Is there any hope for LISA now?

Of course - the data is more proof that GWs exist!!

so you don't expect any impact on the science objectives of Lisa at all?

Anna, Sante, some Christmas reading! Real theoretical physicists never sleep ;)

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").

Good news for fundamental physics and Earth system science, femtosecond lasers are now about to achieve space qualification thanks to fibre optics!  Applications include high resolution spectroscopy, absolute laser ranging, mapping of the geo-potential and testing of the theory of general relativity to name a few!

nice paper by the Koreans, did not know that they had already such a laser in orbit for a year. How much would this type be upscalable for our needs? in case we have not, we should reference it

In a work published on Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/nature14090.html#affil-auth) a new DFT based simulation of convection in Earth's Core iron shows that electron-electron scattering has a similar contribution to electron's thermal vibration. The outcome is that using the old dynamo theory the simulation matches the Earth magnetic field experimental results, solving an 80 years old puzzle.

Yay to science! I'm always intrigued by related experiments that try to measure material properties at the GPa range. Especially, the efforts of reaching 'metallic hydrogen' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen), requiring pressures above 25GPa at which hydrogen becomes conductive. It is thought that gas giant planets could have such a core, but no-one has been able to produce/verify this theory as off yet.

Robot self-adapts its gait when limbs are damaged.

New sensor to detect distances efficiently is based on the mixture chemistry, optics and physical principles.

No idea how it works, will need to digg into it.. Tom, shall we use Mixer?

"The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles - including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured." Pilot-wave theory reresurrected. Maybe something for the next "fundamental" :P physics RF?

And for the next 'Experimental Physics Stagiaire' position why not try to do "Unpredictable Tunneling of a Classical Wave-Particle Association" http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/eddi/Papers/PhysRevLett_TUNNEL.pdf, there are some rumors online that the results of Yves Couder Experiments can be reproduced with simple DIY vibrating tables! It is very funny to see the videos of the MIT's replication of this experiment (with lightening legends for those who are uncomfortable with the concepts involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5iHQMjcsM)

nice video and nice story, no revolution in physics and somehow surprising that not done/tried earlier (maybe just again good MIT public relations work?)

CSI writers will have to up the ante now.

it was probably already done... by the NSA

Exercise can enhance the development of new brain cells in the adult brain, a process called adult neurogenesis. These newborn brain cells play an important role in learning and memory. A new study has determined that mice that spent time running on wheels not only developed twice the normal number of new neurons, but also showed an increased ability to distinguish new objects from familiar objects.

wow ... time to start running again ...

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.

This is insanity, Max. Or maybe it's genius.

"Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe. The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US."

No GUTs, no glory

New results in NLP might allow to automate scientific discoveries by data mining of papers. Work considers 3.3M abstracts from material science, physics and chemistry and claims to discover new materials before they are published later on.

ACT did that from diigo post digging in the retreat of 2014! Still without NLP.

That's cool! Didn't know.

Of interest for debris monitoring and SSA? It has been suggested in the kelvins discussions.....

this is something that I think would really make sense to look closer into, also checking what ESA might have already done on it

""" Today, it's all about impressing each other. And that's part of social media, you know, trying to impress other people to say things that look smart, that look very intelligent, that completely align with what everyone else is saying so that they will like you, that you would have more likes on Twitter. Okay. So that's the motivation, so that you can get more awards, more grants so that you can get a tenure appointment and everyone would respect you. """

Also a repo here: https://github.com/thunil/Physics-Based-Deep-Learning definitely looks interesting