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In the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop a cool concept for a magnetic dipole sitting at Mars L1 with an estimated field of 1-2 Tesla was proposed to shield Mars from Solar Winds and provide an elementary magnetic shielding to Mars.

Quote: "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding"

Judging by the color it probably contains a lot of melanin. ;-)

New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth's lower mantle, ferropericlase. The finding, published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, could alter our understanding of deep Earth dynamics and the behavior of the protective magnetic field, which shields our planet from harmful cosmic rays.

"...scientists in Germany have built a device that can effectively make objects invisible to sound waves. The performance of the acoustic "invisibility cloak" exceeds that of existing electromagnetic devices and could open up new ways of manipulating waves, including the development of shields against seismic waves."

shit.... they are a few months ahead of us it seems ... :-( what is the impact on our ariadna??

News about the warp drive based on the original Alcubierre metric but with modified shape function. Focus of the reserach was on the interaction between warp bubble and cosmic particles. Result: People on board need shielding. People at the journey's destination might get roasted (by Gamma rays if you want to know).

Several recent papers on biomimetics and photonics, including works on structural colours, radiation shielding, spiders and more.

including one for Tom: Structural color and its interaction with other color-producing elements: perspectives from spiders Bor-Kai Hsiung ; Todd A. Blackledge ; Matthew D. Shawkey [+] Author Affiliations Proc. SPIE 9187, The Nature of Light: Light in Nature V, 91870B (September 8, 2014); doi:10.1117/12.2060831

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

Powerful contrast between the two pictures!!

According to the company's wikipedia page, the computer costs $ 10 million. Can we then declare Quantum Computing has officially arrived?! quotes from elsewhere in the site: "first commercial quantum computing system on the market"; "our current superconducting 128-qubit processor chip is housed inside a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter shielded room" Link to the company's scientific publications. Interestingly, this company seems to have been running a BOINC project, AQUA@home, to "predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of hard problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. AQUA@home uses Internet-connected computers to help design and analyze quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques". List of papers coming out of it.

A good example of "Can we use it for space.com"... For shielding of course !

Cyano bacteria to shield from radiation. An idea from italians flying to the Moon via Team Indus

Nice idea, but is it really new: resistance of cyanob. to UV radiation has been known but studies have been inconclusive as to under what resource limitations it works, but according to what we see from evolution: on Earth it works, since they survived pre-ozone atmosphere! some papers from a quick google search: 1999 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09670269910001736392 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25463663

The study gave insight that already weak magnetic fields can deflect energetic particles due to charge separation and the formation of strong electric fields

this is a gold mine :D Portugal, a bankrupt country in crisis where the Most Searched How to... is "Como emagrecer" (how to lose weight?). Netherlands, where the Most Searched How to... is "Hoe overleef ik" (how do I survive?) UK where the most Trending What is... is "What is love?" and Italians... please explain how come the top Trending How to... are 1. Come fare Sesso 2. Come fare un Clistere !?!? Respect for Austria though, where the top trending What is... are: 1. Was ist ACTA 2. Was ist SOPA any other interesting finds?

From Ghana "What is...?": What is a Constitution What is Government [edit] Some top Science searches in the US: Hemorrhoid, Pregnancy Syndroms. Any potential for Ariadna? [edit] ... and finally, for the sake of my shield, top search from Poland in the Music category

Just over six years ago, we reported that Nissan had developed a "Scratch Guard Coat" paint designed to repair scratches on not only cars, but on painted surfaces in general. ... The Scratch Shield paint is made from polyrotaxane, which has a chemical structure that is able to react and change back to its original shape and fill the gap that results from a fine scratch.

Pulsed device providing an Isp=20.000 with thrust of 40kN. There is an onboard fission reactor including shielding. Roundtrip to Mars in 30 days requires 350Mt of propellant, equivalent to delta_v=93200m/s

nice story from Andrés: my only concern: "At Gran Sasso, the ingots will be melted into a 3-centimetre-thick lead lining that will surround the cubic CUORE detector. Before the ingots are melted down, the inscriptions on each one will be removed and sent back to Cagliari for preservation. "They are trademarks, bearing the names of various firms that extracted and traded lead," explains Donatella Salvi, an archaeologist at the Cagliari museum.

"we report the high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis of a diamond aerogel from an amorphous carbon aerogel precursor using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell"

so what ...?

Depending on its properties it might be interesting as an ablative heat shield material.