Did we just solve overpopulation and climate change? With 40% more efficient crops we could easily sustain 10+ billion people on Earth. And 40% more efficient plants would absorb much more CO2 than we are emitting (currently: artificial CO2 emission ~29 GT/y, photosynthesis CO2 capture through plants ~450 GT/y) I am usually very worried about the risks of climate change, but this could be a real game changer!

An international team of scientists led by Liang-shi Li at Indiana University has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials.

I guess this is for data what oil tankers vs. pipelines are for hydrocarbons. Isn't ESA doing something similar for satellite data? I seem to remember that Leopold mentioned that at some point.

Ants found in the Pacific islands of Fiji behave as miniature farmers, carefully sowing and fertilising the seeds of at least six types of plant, a study said Monday.

Extension of standard model to explain a number of unexplained phenomena.

Meet the incredible shrinking material. Most things swell when they warm up, creating engineering headaches, but now a 3D-printed material has been configured to contract instead. When two interlinked materials expand at different rates, they can warp or crack. It's a problem in buildings, bridges, electronics and anything else that is exposed to a wide temperature swing.

Memristor-Based Artificial Neural Networks, huge potential for true, high-power AI

"IBM delivered on the DARPA SyNAPSE project with a one million neuron brain-inspired processor. The chip consumes merely 70 milliwatts, and is capable of 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt-literally a synaptic supercomputer in your palm." --- No memristors..., yet.: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537211/a-better-way-to-build-brain-inspired-chips/

Very interesting presentation on how the brain can back-propagate error signals during learning (using time-derivatives to encode errors). Hinton discusses how back-propagation can be achieved with very limited / unsophisticated tools and in excessively noise environments.

Cute info-graphics on different machine learning architectures

Any unintended consequences..? https://i.stack.imgur.com/A0UZn.jpg

Time to get out the Fission Fragment Rocket Engine!

They use a technique they call "Empirical Dynamic Modeling" to find correlations between different variables of chaotic systems. Might be interesting for things like climate modeling and similar chaotic systems. The idea seems pretty straight forward but I never encountered it before - so I'm no sure if this is really a new development (curious if anybody else knows). If you are short on time just watch the video embedded in the article.

In this article the authors describe an improvement of their optical microscope techniques for which some of the received a Nobel prize in the past. They achieve resolutions far beyond the optical diffraction limit which is supposed to limit detail resolution due to quantum-mechanical effects. Their techniques include structured illuminiation (producing interference patterns), switchable fluorescent markers as well as multi-frame super resolution enhancement. Authors are able to take a single image in about 0.3 seconds which allows the study of protein processes in the cell: http://spon.de/vgTb7 . Although it is hard to imagine the application of many of these techniques for telescopes (except for super resolution), I am wondering if any of this could help building telescopes with increased optical power or reduced weight. Any ideas..?

Told you so...

So basically we can photograph light now. Not just detect photons but photograph LIGHT WAVES. Really clever setup BTW.

Something for the ACT! It costs just ~$5000.

Localized high concentrations of methane have been discovered by the Curiosity rover. This points to localized sources of methane of yet unknown nature. Maybe the ACT's odor source localization should be resurrected!

Here's the an English article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/methane-spikes-mars-fuel-speculation-life-nasa-curiosity