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Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Will this work?

It can work...if it is privately funded. Technically it is not a big deal anymore.

The work of our team on the Mimosa Pudica has been publish! It proves for the first time the ability of plants to learn. After a countless number of rejections, Oecologia had the courage of publishing it. Now the road is open to demonstrations that learning capability exists not only in sensitive plants, but also in normal plants. This can change the entire biology. A bit rhetorical, but real.

very nice!!! congratulations! what are you working on now - also on this?

I work on some aspects of plant to plant communication! I hope to publish soon something equally exciting!! and of course I will let you know!!

Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!

You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.

The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.

I wonder if they are also working with that SCRAMSPACE initiative in Australia that was presented at ESTEC a while back...

what about a space elevator!!! quiet old concept (1895), see this link on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

background piece on Project M, it is being worked on at least it seems so ...

there should be more project like these - when you give a tough deadline and work your heart out to make things happen... look forward to see it walking on the Moon :)

Hehe... as far as I know the Russians, they won't miss a chance to "clean up" a few enemy satellites too...

bye bye Francesco to your beloved command line ....

I would love to see people working on touchscreens all day, orthopedics would have a field day :) Anyway, the answer to the original question is: because the JesusPhone is an appliance, a PC is not.

Luckily there is open source, so neither Steve Jobs nor NY Times decide for us what sort of OS we have to like! I'll join the "Jihad for the command line" troop!!

wow, a big step in genomics...!

But isn't it just yet another word abuse? From what I understand, they just synthesised a genome identical to the one of an existing bacteria... while undoubtedly nice work, this is *very* far from "creating life from scratch"... The fact that you are able to copy something, doesn't mean you understand how it works...

well of course we are far from engineering specific functions, and this is just a copy of a function that already existed. However it is quite impressive and the first time it is done. And the challenge here is not really to "copy" the ADN, but the fact that it works... in other words it is not because you copy the ADN identically that the phenotype (traduction of the ADN) will be the same, which is the case in this experiment.

"Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million. "

Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million.

Working too much in not good for mental health, it's proven !

It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.

and how can we use this?

Scientists have discovered how algae that survive in very low levels of light are able to switch on and off a weird quantum phenomenon that occurs during photosynthesis. The function in the algae of this quantum effect, known as coherence, remains a mystery, but it is thought it could help them harvest energy from the sun much more efficiently. Working out its role in a living organism could lead to advances such as better organic solar cells.

very very nice! we tried already a few years back to find an angle to see how we could study quantum phenomena occuring in plants and photosynthsis is one of the great examples since somehow plants manage to make the phenomena work for them at elevated temperatures, a feat in itself ... any good idea most welcome!!!

Anna maybe? Joe?

Now something on working methods... More than anything else Box does, Notes seems to embody the philosophy that in business, you never write for the sake of writing. You write to share with people. After all, memos were never meant to be ends in themselves-just the means.

Let's get rid of Mondays. We don't work and they don't work.

Norwegian scientist Kristian Morten Olesen has patented a process to mix nano-particles of clay with water and bind them to sand particles to condition desert soil - he has been working on Liquid Nanoclay (LNC) since 2005.

The news here that some patent has been filed. If it actually works the guy is an ass for wanting to patent something that is solving world hunger. If it does not, then the guy is still an ass. So the news is that this guy is an ass :)

Agreed :) But, if it does work I doubt the guy will be able to enforce the patent in most of the countries where this will be helpful.

Earth is a pale blue dot when viewed from space. Now astrobiologists have worked out the likely colours of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars