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I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:) "this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish." * If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.) * Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!

UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example. * The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting. * The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.

wow, good to know ! But for the privacy you should be aware that this is a public group, so anyone has access to our comments i think !

"In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" -- a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name "Tyche" for the hypothetical planet. Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)."

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00555/tyche3_555342a.pdf Icarus' paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1004/1004.4584v1.pdf

Bad Astronomy's take on the subject: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/14/no-theres-no-proof-of-a-giant-planet-in-the-outer-solar-system/

well, he kind-of falls into his own trap: confusing/discussing "evidence" with "likelihood", and "there is" with "it may". He should have made more efforts in his writing, what he says is a bit pointless! (just put the Icarus' paper)

SPS story ...

European researchers have built prototypes that combine plastic solar cells with ultrathin, flexible batteries.

Nice!!

Sante, Luzi have a look at this???!!!

Leo, you mean that they measured 3 years? That's not a point to criticize: since the only interaction of neutrinos with matter is the Weak Interaction (which is indeed very, very weak), it is extremely hard to get a reasonable statistic. By the same reason, it's essentially impossible to shield the experiment from the background. And this background (solar neutrinos, cosmic radiation neutrinos) is huge.

for sure a result to be taken seriously. It makes a buzz in my lab... but always be cautious with this kind of declaration, that hugely violates all physics we know and even most of the reasonable alternative theories... Remember the Pionneer anomaly for which it took almost ten years to set up that finally its a thermal effect.

effects lasting for decades possible apparently ...

ARCA is the romanian google X prize competitor.

I like the 4 stage system. But how did they solve the plume issue ?

The plume issue is not that difficult. I think they used something similar on Apollo LES. The problem is stabilizing the entire system, which is extremely difficult. The entire system will most likely plummet down after the solar balloon phase (which is the only phase they tested before). At least they are not using government money :).

Only took 2.5 weeks  till they make stupid decisions...

blablabla