Group items tagged

Giant sun mirrors were installed to light up one Norwegian town in winter, just to improve the mood of its residents! 

Greenwich could lose its place at the centre of global time if a move to "atomic time" is voted in by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in January 2012.

Haha this is really a British article... Already since 1972 we don't use GMT but UTC, which is based on atomic clocks. However British continue to call it GMT... The question is to drop the leap second in UTC, and France is definitely for this change (for scientific motives of course...;) I don't see how this is connected to winter time however... And they shouldn't worry Greenwich is still the beginning of the world with 0 degree longitude !

"the end of GMT as an international standard could accelerate the move to keep British Summer Time into the winter, letting us have lighter evenings." As I understand it, if GMT looses its "prestigious" status, then it would be easier to push through all-year BST in UK.

Winter is coming... and deep learning, too!

"Sergey Brin has said he wants to build a benign version of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey" ... didn't they try to do that in that movie called "2001: A Space Odyssey" ?

Just in time for the end of the winter ....

In work that has major implications for improving the performance of building insulation, scientists at the University of Namur in Belgium and the University of Hassan I in Morocco have calculated that hairs that reflect infrared light may contribute significant insulating power to the exceptionally warm winter coats of polar bears and other animals.

That's quite interesting. Maybe the future of buildings and spacecraft is furry?

By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. With as extra bonus: Besides providing high levels of passive insulation, AgNW-coated clothing can also provide Joule heating if connected to an electricity source, such as a battery. The researchers demonstrated that as little as 0.9 V can safely raise clothing temperature to 38 °C, which is 1 °C higher than the human body temperature of 37 °C. How about that for personal comfort during the cold winter months

sounds almost like the asbestos story re-started :-)

Found an European project that takes care of the environmental, health and safety aspects of nanomaterials http://phys.org/news/2015-04-unleash-full-potential-nanomaterials.html

To survive the winter in the north.

That's it.. next trip is going to be Lapland (or Svalbard, Annalisa?)

I can recommend spending a winter in North-norway. Was able to see those almost every night.

Going to Lapland in 2 weeks :-D Can't wait!

why am I not surprised .....

http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...

unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas

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

How you know you have been to long in xy. The Finnish version. My favorite is 33. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot. Quite a lot of them are outdated, esp. about opening hours of shops, and one is definitely missing. Your normal mealtime has shifted to 11am for lunch and 5pm for dinner. But don't worry, it's a really comfy place here, isnt' it Jose??

... Finnish language has no future tense. That's true

everything expressed with "tomorrow I go to " or "in one year" etc? what about the distinction between to future events, one conditional on the other?

The good news for Microsoft is that all the PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows. The bad news: it's the older Windows XP operating system.

Now I start to understand why the Swiss win so many medals. That's most probably a bug!!!

Let's go to Titan !!!

I bet we'll find there a black monolith which will take us to the stars... No, wait, was it that moon?

Well the idea is not really new and cannot explain climate change, but it's interesting

good to know ...

To right that appalling wrong, here we attempt to explain the apparently erratic seasonal changes in the world of G.R.R.M. A natural explanation for such phenomena is the unique behavior of a circumbinary planet. Thus, by speculating that the planet under scrutiny is orbiting a pair of stars, we utilize the power of numerical three-body dynamics to predict that, unfortunately, it is not possible to predict either the length, or the severity of any coming winter.