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I still think, the lizards have evolved at an unexpectedly high rate and have now taken over the satellite...

From the article: By the end of September 2014, Jason Budinoff, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), is expected to complete the first imaging telescopes ever assembled almost exclusively from 3D-manufactured components. The devices' optics and electronics will be fabricated using conventional methods. "As far as I know, we are the first to attempt to build an entire instrument with 3D printing," says Budinoff. He is building a fully functional 50 mm camera whose outer tube, baffles, and optical mounts are all printed as a single structure. The instrument is appropriately sized for a CubeSat (a small satellite made of individual units each about 100 mm on a side). 

Interesting article about theoretical physics theories vs. experimental verification. Can we state that a theory can be so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing ? If a theory is proved to be untestable experimentally, can we still say that it is a scientific theory ? (not in my opinion)

There is an interesting approach by Feynman that it does not make sense to describe something of which we cannot measure the consequences. So a theory that is so removed from experiment that it cannot be backed by it is pointless and of no consequence. It is a bit as with the statement "if a tree falls in the forrest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?". We would typically extrapolate to say that it does make a sound. But actually nobody knows - you would have to take some kind of measurement. But even more fundamentally it does not make any difference! For all intents and purposes there is no point in forcing a prediction that you cannot measure and that therefore has noto reflect an event in your world.

"Mathematics is the model of the universe, not the other way round" - M. R.

nice overview of the 3 main space related projects attempting to bring internet access to the world, namely SpaceX+Google micro-satellites network, OneWeb+Virgin Galactic OneWeb and Project Loon by Google. not a lot of technical details though...

Big data analytic systems are reputed to be capable of finding a needle in a universe of haystacks without having to know what a needle looks like. The very best ways to sort large databases of unstructured text is to use a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Unfortunately, LDA is also inaccurate enough at some tasks that the results of any topic model created with it are essentially meaningless, according to Luis Amaral, a physicist whose specialty is the mathematical analysis of complex systems and networks in the real world and one of the senior researchers on the multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University that wrote the paper. Even for an easy case, big data analysis is proving to be far more complicated than many of the companies selling analysis software want people to believe.

Most of those companies are using outdated algorithms like this LDA and just apply them like retards on those huge datasets. Of course they're going to come out with bad solutions. No amount of data can make up for bad algorithms.

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience.

Finally! Nowadays blacks were always too bright for my taste...

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." I will keep waiting for my darkness-emitting diodes...

"Neuroscience UCLA neurophysicists have found that space-mapping neurons in the brain react differently to virtual reality than they do to real-world environments. Their findings could be significant for people who use virtual reality for gaming, military, commercial, scientific or other purposes." I wonder if we are doing it wrong with the airplane pilot simulators...

not for space but the air breathing battery still is a nice concept - would make robots more "human" if they have to breath :-)

Guinness World Record breaking, "first radio amplifier operating at terahertz frequencies could lead to communications systems with much higher data rates, better radar, high-resolution imaging that could penetrate smoke and fog, and better ways of identifying dangerous substances, say the researchers who built it". Built from HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors) made of InP (Indium Phosphide), this is a new milestone on the road to the THz applications.

"As you read this, your neurons are firing - that brain activity can now be decoded to reveal the silent words in your head TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That's no longer the case - researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time. The achievement is a step towards helping people who cannot physically speak communicate with the outside world." Or alternatively, a step towards snooping into individuals' privacy.

Soon we'll be able to see movies about our dreams!

Only if you are willing to have a chip implanted into/onto your brain though ^^

Imaging of gas giant orbiting its central star (related to Jai's YGT proposal): With GPI, astronomers image the actual planet--a remarkable feat given that an orbiting world typically appears a million times fainter than its parent star. This is possible because GPI's adaptive optics sharpen the image of the target star by cancelling out the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere; it then blocks the bright image of the star with a device called a coronagraph, revealing the exoplanet.

such a simple image, such an awesome feat of science and engineering!

We finally have an understanding of how Mars transformed from a once habitable, Earth-like planet, into the dry world we see today. NASA researchers have just announced that Mars' once rich atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds in the early days of the Solar System, causing the planet to dry out.

We humans take for granted our remarkable ability to predict things that happen around us. Here, a deep learning model trained from real-world videos and a 3D graphics engine was able to infer physical properties of objects against humans.

By attaching a diamond crystal to an AFM tip, researcher at New York City University managed to measure the heat flows at atomic levels in resistors. The method works due to a vacancy in the carbon lattice, two spots are empty of which one is filled with a nitrogen atom. The energy state of the vacancy is temperature dependent and can actually be read out spectroscopically.

Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables and by watching and imitating what adults are doing. But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot's arm or body to show it how to perform an action.

Quoted from one of the authors in a separate interview: "We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal." Bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic scale could see some interesting applications in sensors, or generally entanglement-enhanced applications.

They were previously working on the same concept in N-V centers in diamond (as a semiconductor). Here the advantage is that SiC could in principle be integrated with Si or Ge. Anyway its all about controlling coherence. In the next 10 years some breakthroughs are expected in the field of semiconductor spintronics, but quantum computing in this way lies still in the horizon

Research in active-matter systems is a growing field in biology. It consists in using theoretical statistical physics in living systems such as molecule colonies to deduce macroscopic properties. The aim and hope is to understand how cells divide, take shape and move on these systems. Being a crossing field between physics and biology "The pot of gold is at the interface but you have to push both fields to their limits." one can read

Maybe we should discuss about this active matter one of these days? "These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world - among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. They are increasingly being made in the laboratory: investigators have synthesized active matter using both biological building blocks such as microtubules, and synthetic components including micrometre-scale, light-sensitive plastic 'swimmers' that form structures when someone turns on a lamp. Production of peer-reviewed papers with 'active matter' in the title or abstract has increased from less than 10 per year a decade ago to almost 70 last year, and several international workshops have been held on the topic in the past year."

In the past 12 months Americans have searched for Python on Google more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star. The number of queries has trebled since 2010, while those for other major programming languages have been flat or declining.

Likely this is correlated with the increased interest in machine learning in the past decade - all the popular DL libraries are Python-based after all...

Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what's being said and faint images of what's around a corner.