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Why building a monocrystaline silicone sphere for over 1 Million Euros? Because we need a new definition of the kilogram! ;)

ssssoooooooooo  coooooooooool

"The MIT-built robots will each connect with a Nexus S smartphone - the first commercial smartphone certified by NASA for use on the space shuttle and space station."

First smartphones control our lives, now they control robots behaviour. Watch out! After all, there must be a good reason for calling it smartphone...

The functional principle is similar to ordinary pumped storage plants: when power is needed, water flows into the sphere and drives the turbine thus generating power. If surplus power is available (usually during the night), water can be pumped out of the sphere again, thus effectively charging the storage system.

With self-assembly guiding the steps and synchronization providing the rhythm, a new class of materials forms dynamic, moving structures in an intricate dance. Researchers have demonstrated tiny spheres that synchronize their movements as they self-assemble into a spinning microtube.

This is quite similar to the following paper. Here they show how tiny variations of particle parameters can produce clearly distinct structures: Thermal and Athermal Swarms of Self-Propelled Particles --> http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0180

apparently warm things attract each other instead. a symbolic prize of a virtual launch vehicle based on a smeg fridge/freezer for the most amusing/shortest refutation. "A ~1068 gm hollow copper sphere hovers above a 1000 W heat element." "After power was applied to the heat element for 400 s, the means of the first and last ~6 force measures indicate that the sphere's gravitational mass increased by 1.9 % or 20 gm."

interesting...

this looks like absolute humbug to me .... reminds me of some rotating superconductors :-)

and all this without magic metamaterials ...

It's funny to see how people get more and more humble in the desperate attempt to save their stupid ideas... At the beginning was the brave and bold aim to cloak something in free space (in a sphere or a cylinder). This requires inhomogeneous, anisotropic, magnetic materials; hopeless!! So one reduces to one polarization, now we have inhomogenous, anisotropic materials; still hopeless! At this point one downgraded the pretension: instead of cloaking in free space, we make a "carpet cloak" and hide an object behind an invisible dent in a mirror. But if that shall be continuous, we still need inhomogeneity and this is very hard. So now instead of a dent we take a cone and then it is claimed to work ... for ONE polarization. But of course the cloak can't work at all incident angles... irony of fate: everything is now made from birefringent media, the antithesis of what the metamaterials dogma was at the beginning!

Hi Luzi, can you please send me the paper. We are writing a project based on sulfates and carbonates, and all this BS sounds great for the introduction (The authors used Calcite as birefringent material)

Apparently it's time for retirement of the Le Grand K, if all goes well until the middle of next year...

"One method (...) involves counting the atoms in two silicon-28 spheres that each weigh the same as the reference kilogram." Sounds like a lengthy task, but someone must keep those physics PhD students busy, I guess...

A college course at University of Washington on "Calling Bullshit". We should invite them to give a lunch lecture at ESA... Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: * Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. * Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. * Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit. * Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit. * Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit. We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

love it: "Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit - and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument."