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An international team of researchers has created the first metamaterial where its properties can be controlled with light.

Water-soaked grains of carbon superconduct at room temperature, claim a team of physicists from Germany

Researchers in the US and UK say they have invented a new microscopy technique for imaging live tissue with unprecedented speed and resolution. The technique involves using the tiny tip of an atomic force microscope to tap on a living cell and analysing the resulting vibrations to reveal the mechanical properties of cell tissue. The team says that the technique could have widespread applications in medicine. However, another expert in the field suggests that the group has not demonstrated the superiority of the technique to those already available.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used "custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification."

amusing team name

NASA's Kepler space telescope could be used to find exomoons, which are the moons of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. That is the claim of an international team of astronomers, which says that careful analysis of data collected by Kepler could reveal if such exoplanets are circled by moons.

A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken.

Three independent teams of astronomers have released new and improved maps of where dark matter is lurking in parts of the universe

Two independent teams have made ultrathin, cabon-based membranes with extraordinary properties that could be used in a range of applications, from water filtration to petroleum processing.

An international team of researchers have developed a new type of gyroscope that is the first to measure the "wobble" in the rotational axis of the Earth from a ground-based laboratory. Astronomers normally track this wobble by continuously monitoring the position of distant objects, such as quasars. But this new method will provide a much simpler and cheaper alternative to these large-scale astronomical readings, the scientists claim.

is this of any use for spacecraft?

mmm it's like saying that you can replace satellite tracking by accelerometers on-board satellites... for Leo: you'd better put an atomic gyro on a spacecraft these laser gyro are huge !

This is almost word for word the title Andrés gave to the first presentation of the team to DG ten years ago ...

There's a whole series of futuristic articles, may be worth having a look: http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future

Hall's team adopted an innovative approach to investigating Dirac's theory, creating and identifying synthetic magnetic monopoles in an artificial magnetic field generated by a Bose-Einstein condensate, an extremely cold atomic gas tens of billionths of a degree warmer than absolute zero.

DeSimone and his team have been working with PFPE for years, and during their research, the crew found that another polymer electrolyte, polyethylen glycol or PEG, and PFPE could combine to dissolve salt, and potentially function as an electrolyte. When his team attached the PFPE to dimethyl carbonate, an electrolyte traditionally used in batteries, the resulting PFPE-DMC was a polymer that could move a battery's ions with insane levels of efficiency while remaining stable.

Fluorescent Bunnies!!!!

Quite intriguing!

this is fantastic! If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team3. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity4. Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. "It's interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab," he says. "This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely."

Are you a team player who is unafraid of long isolation? Do you have a medical degree and a healthy love of extremes? ESA is offering the chance of a lifetime to run space experiments in one of the world's most isolated places: Concordia research station in Antarctica.

One engineer YGT has already reserved his position to go there for maintaining infrastructure, the coming austral winter. Apparent science contribution: low, experience of a lifetime : affirmative!

"team player who is unafraid of long isolation" LOL

"A band of space hackers and engineers are trying to do something never done before - recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft from the grips of deep space and time. With old NASA documents and Rockethub crowdfunding, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, 'ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists helping with design and travel to Mars'. Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, propulsion designs are in hand and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration

"A Soviet supercavitation torpedo called Shkval was able to reach a speed of 370km/h or more - much faster than any other conventional torpedoes," he said. However, The SCMP highlighted two problems in supercavitation technology. First, the submerged vessel needed to be launched at high speeds, approaching 100km/h, to generate and maintain the air bubble. Secondly, it is difficult if not impossible to steer the vessel using conventional mechanisms, which are inside the bubble, without direct contact with water. As a result, its application has been limited to unmanned vessels, fired in a straight line.

can't you just selectively inject the gas so that you control in which direction the bubble forms?

Here we go: we might not need liquid water after all on mars to get some nice flowering plants there! ... and terraform ? :-) Thirsty plants can extract water from the crystalline structure of gypsum, a rock-forming mineral found in soil on Earth and Mars.

Some plants grow on gypsum outcrops and remain active even during dry summer months, despite having shallow roots that cannot reach the water table. Sara Palacio of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca, Spain, and her colleagues compared the isotopic composition of sap from one such plant, called Helianthemum squamatum (pictured), with gypsum crystallization water and water found free in the soil. The team found that up to 90% of the plant's summer water supply came from gypsum.

The study has implications for the search for life in extreme environments on this planet and others.

Nature Commun 5, 4660 (2014)

Very interesting indeed. Attention is to be put on the form of calcium sulfate that is found on Mars. If it is hydrated (gypsum Ca(SO4)*2(H2O)) it works, but if it is dehydrated there is no water for the roots to take in. The Curiosity Rover tries to find out, but has uncertainty in recognising the hydrogen presence in the mineral: Copying : "(...) 3.2 Hydration state of calcium sulfates Calcium sulfates occur as a non-hydrated phase (anhydrite, CaSO4) or as one of two hydrated phases (bassanite, CaSO4.1/2H2O, which can contain a somewhat variable water content, and gypsum, CaSO4.2H2O). ChemCam identifies the presence of hydrogen at 656 nm, as already found in soils and dust [Meslin et al., 2013] and within fluvial conglomerates [Williams et al., 2013]. However, the quantification of H is strongly affected by matrix effects [Schröder et al., 2013], i.e. effects including major or even minor element chemistry, optical and mechanical properties, that can result in variations of emission lines unrelated to actual quantitative variations of the element in question in the sample. Due to these effects, discriminating between bassanite and gypsum is difficult. (...)"

forgot the reference http://www.msl-chemcam.com/doc/documents/577/Nachon%20et%20al%20Calcium%20sulfate%20veins%20characterized%20by%20ChemCam%20Curiosity%20at%20Gale%20Crater%20Mars_2013.pdf

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers has demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans.

Was just about to post it... :) It seems after transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS) the receiving person actually sees 'flashes of light' in their peripheral vision. So its using your vision sense to get the information across. Would it not be better to try to see if you can generate some kind of signal in the part of your brain that is connected to 'hearing'? Or would this be me thinking too naive?

"transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS)" How is this "direct"?

An international team of researchers, including the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in The Netherlands and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, announced today in Science the observation of a dynamic Mott transition in a superconductor.