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" This isn't Camilla's first adventure. The chicken has also flown on a NASA T-38 training jet, traveled onboard a helium balloon to the stratosphere over Louisiana, visited the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, and visited hundreds of elementary students in classrooms around the country. " Pretty impressive Camilla ! Congratulations :)

this is the new scientist version of ithe story ...

[spam] Obama expressed his disappointment recently when rapper Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest singer Taylor Swift's win of the "Best Female Video" trophy. Soon after, Obama himself was Swifted by critics who felt he was undeserving of his Nobel Prize win. It is obviously connected to the study of the Journal of Wine Economics that wine gold awards are given randomly http://www.wine-economics.org/journal/content/Volume4/number1/Full%20Texts/1_wine%20economics_vol%204_1_Robert%20Hodgson.pdf which also raised some controversy

PD's article presented to the idea storm: "They find the data can best be explained using a model that says an individual can join a team if she/he can bring some new, complementary skills to the group. This interpretation goes against the idea that an individual will tend to mainly join-and remain comfortable in-groups of "like-minded" people."

nice article according to the abstract but can't download the paper (can we from within ESA? do you have it already downloaded - would be interested in reading the full paper - can we apply this to behaviour and size of the ACT?

Yes it is available within ESA's network - I have it anyway

Could be stimulating to watch the episodes during a ACT meeting as a base for brain storming. Especially interesting for YGTs or RFs with no space experience. The episodes will be repeated starting form 17 feb. Will be available in german and french

sorry for the german ... but underlines the unfortunately failed idea storm proposal I made :-)

The next advance in weather forecasting may not come from a new satellite or supercomputer, but from a device in your pocket. University of Washington atmospheric scientists are using pressure sensors included in the newest smartphones to develop better weather forecasting techniques.

What he found was that wind turbines "could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79%."

It seems the topic is getting more and more popular and is no longer considered fringe research, as this is a paper from nature climate change!

Another underestimated source of CO2, are turbulent waters. "The stronger the turbulences at the water's surface, the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The combination of maps and data revealed that, while the CO2 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are lower than assumed, those from rivers and streams are three times as high as previously believed." Alltogether the emitted CO2 equates to roughly one-fifth of the emissions caused by humans. Yet more stuff to model...

Nasia, I thought about your statement carefully - and I cannot agree with you. Water is not a greenhouse gas. It is instead a liquid. Also, I can't believe you keep feeding the troll! :-P But on a more topical note: I think it is an over-simplification to call water a greenhouse gas - water is one of the most important mechanisms in the way Earth handles heat input from the sun. The latent heat that you mention actually cools Earth: solar energy that would otherwise heat Earth's surface is ABSORBED as latent heat by water which consequently evaporates - the same water condenses into rain drops at high altitudes and releases this stored heat. In effect the water cycle is a mechanism of heat transport from low altitude to high altitude where the chance of infrared radiation escaping into space is much higher due to the much thinner layer of atmosphere above (including the smaller abundance of greenhouse gasses). Also, as I know you are well aware, the cloud cover that results from water condensation in the troposphere dramatically increases albedo which has a cooling effect on climate. Furthermore the heat capacity of wet air ("humid heat") is much larger than that of dry air - so any advective heat transfer due to air currents is more efficient in wet air - transporting heat from warm areas to a natural heat sink e.g. polar regions. Of course there are also climate heating effects of water like the absorption of IR radiation. But I stand by my statement (as defended in the above) that rain cools the atmosphere. Oh and also some nice reading material on the complexities related to climate feedback due to sea surface temperature: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006%3C2049%3ALSEOTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2

I enjoy trolling conversations when there is a gain for both sides at the end :-) . I had to check upon some of the facts in order to explain my self properly. The IPCC report states the greenhouse gases here, and water vapour is included: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html Honestly, I read only the abstract of the article you posted, which is a very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of regulating sea surface temperature, but it is very localized to the tropics (vivid convection, storms) a region of which I have very little expertise, and is difficult to study because it has non-hydrostatic dynamics. The only thing I can comment there is that the authors define constant relative humidity for the bottom layer, supplied by the oceanic surface, which limits the implementation of the concept on other earth regions. Also, we may confuse during the conversation the greenhouse gas with the Radiative Forcing of each greenhouse gas: I see your point of the latent heat trapped in the water vapour, and I agree, but the effect of the water is that it traps even as latent heat an amount of LR that would otherwise escape back to space. That is the greenhouse gas identity and an image to see the absorption bands in the atmosphere and how important the water is, without vain authority-based arguments that miss the explanation in the end: http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarchords.com/uploaded/82/87-33833-450015_44absorbspec.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.solarchords.com/agw-science/4/greenhouse--1-radiation/33784/&h=468&w=458&sz=28&tbnid=x2NtfKh5OPM7lM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__KldteWbV19nVPbbsC4jsOgzCK6E=&docid=cMRZ9f22jbtYPM&sa=X&ei=SwynUq2TMqiS0QXVq4C4Aw&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAw

The Sentinel-2A satellite has been in orbit for only a matter of weeks, but new images of an algal bloom in the Baltic Sea show that it is already exceeding expectations. Built essentially as a land monitoring mission, Sentinel-2 will also certainly find its way into marine applications.

A space croissant for breakfast ?

This is the guy of Luzy's joke: "Dear, this is not what it seems. I can explain EVERYTHING!"

yeah an interesting theory, definitely worth following. But it is far from being mature, and a lot of work remains before saying that it is viable or not... I posted something on this some time ago (http://www.diigo.com/user/pacome/horava_theory) and proposed to do smthing on it in the idea storm (our new creative game...), which didn't have a lot of success... I like also the idea of matrix gravity (see Matrix general relativity: a new look at old problems, Ivan G Avramidi, CQG 21, 103)

you are among what???

A good example of how loosing perspective makes so-called "novel ways" actually "rubish ways"

here the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.1401 well spent defence funding ....