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"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.

Luzi and Dario: can we use this semantic tool for the "temperature of ESA" project? please check

he JTEC is an all solid-state engine that operates on the Ericsson cycle. Equivalent to Carnot, the Ericsson cycle offers the maximum theoretical efficiency available from an engine operating between two temperatures.

With the aid of short infrared laser pulses, researchers have succeeded for the first time in making a ceramic superconducting at room temperature - albeit for only a few millionths of a microsecond.

advantages: p-bits run on room temperature and are easier to connect than q-bit.

38 degree core body temp in microgravity stabilised after 2 months - due to reduced conv. heat transfer+evaporation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15560-w

so that's hypopyrexia (augmented concentrations of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist) AND hypothermia (convection/evaportation)? what puzzles me is that temperatures take so long to return to baseline after astronauts return to earth.

created by a Dutch artist :)

Any idea how?

It seems like he just recreates in the room the right combination of temperature and humidity and than with a fog machine he generates the cloud ... I thought he could be a nice candidate for the artist in residence :)

Solid state tunnel junction can cool "payload" to sub-Kelvin temperatures. This would be much more convenient than for example helium3-helium4 mixing. Proposed use for cooling sensors on spacecraft - could extend lifetime of satellites like ESA's about to switched off Herschel almost indefinitely.

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

"That's why silicon chips operate at temperatures hot enough to fry eggs." I stopped reading after this sentence... is the remaining part of the article equally scientifically (in)accurate?

The way that Mexican jumping beans move by detecting temperature gradients could be applied to designing robotic beans. Most animals move around by using their appendages, such as legs, wings, or fins. But a few exceptional creatures employ rolling as a mode of locomotion.

A low-cost rubber robot that can change color to match its surroundings like a chameleon, light up in the dark, change temperatures and fit into tight places is under development at DARPA for potential defense and surveillance applications.

slashdot describes the drill as "a self-driving mole developed by the German space agency (DLR)". This seems to be the drill: GEMS - a mole to explore the interior of Mars, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OCEANSE.2009.5278132. Interesting news for all the roots people :)

some biomimicry used in energy systems... maybe it sparks some ideas

not much new that has not been shared here before ... BUT: we have done relativley little on any of them. for good reasons?? don't know - maybe time to look into some of these again more closely Energy Efficiency( Termite mounds inspired regulated airflow for temperature control of large structures, preventing wasteful air conditioning and saving 10% energy.[1] Whale fins shapes informed the design of new-age wind turbine blades, with bumps/tubercles reducing drag by 30% and boosting power by 20%.[2][3][4] Stingray motion has motivated studies on this type of low-effort flapping glide, which takes advantage of the leading edge vortex, for new-age underwater robots and submarines.[5][6] Studies of microstructures found on shark skin that decrease drag and prevent accumulation of algae, barnacles, and mussels attached to their body have led to "anti-biofouling" technologies meant to address the 15% of marine vessel fuel use due to drag.[7][8][9][10] Energy Generation( Passive heliotropism exhibited by sunflowers has inspired research on a liquid crystalline elastomer and carbon nanotube system that improves the efficiency of solar panels by 10%, without using GPS and active repositioning panels to track the sun.[11][12][13] Mimicking the fluid dynamics principles utilized by schools of fish could help to optimize the arrangement of individual wind turbines in wind farms.[14] The nanoscale anti-reflection structures found on certain butterfly wings has led to a model to effectively harness solar energy.[15][16][17] Energy Storage( Inspired by the sunlight-to-energy conversion in plants, researchers are utilizing a protein in spinach to create a sort of photovoltaic cell that generates hydrogen from water (i.e. hydrogen fuel cell).[18][19] Utilizing a property of genetically-engineered viruses, specifically their ability to recognize and bind to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), researchers have developed virus-based "scaffolds" that

Bringing water to that supercritical phase (high pressurization and temperature) renders it into an oxidation agent of organic material with pure CO_2 and H2O as products. Less waste volume in the ISS. Also, all contained salts precipitate out at that phase.

A worrying future looms as scientist predict the iconic great barrier reef is at a turning point and could experience irreversible damage before 2030 if nothing is done right now. Well actually, I am not sure if anything can be done as the two degree rise (and changes in ocean temperature/acidity probably?) will likely happen in any case due to delayed effects of decades of pollution, whether or not we stop now with emissions will probably not make much difference. :(

Here you go. You can now scrap Lisa altogether. Who's going to tell Pacome?

Awesome and exciting stuff indeed! The data pinpoint the time when inflation occurred - about 10E-37 seconds into the Universe's life - and its temperature at the time, corresponding to energies of about 10E16 gigaelectronvolts, says cosmologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. That is the same energy at which three of the four fundamental forces of nature - the weak, strong and electromagnetic force - are expected to become indistinguishable from one another in a model known as the grand unified theory. I expect more fundamental physics insights to come out of this in the future. A full-sky survey from space may still be an interesting addition to the measurement capabilities, so I would not rule out LISA all together I guess...

NASA answer to the big data hype

"The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.

They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.