Patterning the glass can make it up to 200 times more resistant to forming cracks

Awesome! Origami finally got useful! :-D

Problem solved.

Also, tornados could be stopped from forming by building 300 m tall, 100 km long walls across the USA: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/08/tornado-walls

Good point!

After a discussion this morning on robust computing and possible implementations in biological systems I found this really nice result (from 2008) on molecular RNA computers that get assembled within cells and perform simple functions. Of course by having different types of computers within the same cell one could go on to process the output of the other and more complex computations could be executed... Food for thought. :-)

Probably related to the former ACT study on asteroid spin-up and the YORP effect.

Pretty cool - and pretty addictive to play :-D

That is about € 14e9 - enough to pay more than a million YGTs for half a year. Could we use maybe just half a million YGTs for half a year to build a similar platform and keep the remaining € 7e9 for ourselves? Keep in mind that WhatsApp only has 45 employees (according to AllThingsD: http://goo.gl/NtJcSj ). So we would have an advantage > 10000:1. On the other hand does this mean that every employee at WhatsApp gets enough money now to survive comfortably for ~5000 years or will the inevitable social inequality strike and most people get next to nothing while a few get money to live comfortably for ~1000000 years? Also: Does Facebook think about these numbers before they pay them? Or is it just a case of "That looks tasty - lets have it"? Also (2): As far as I can see all these internet companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Twitter...) seem to make most of their income from advertising. For all these companies together that must be a lot of advertising money (turns out that in 2013 the world spent about $ 500 billion on advertising: http://goo.gl/vYog15 ). For that money you could of course have 20 million YGTs roaming the Earth and advertising stuff door-to-door... ... ...

And some comparison between NASA and ESA about artist in residence programs :)

Is big data over-hyped?

Among other things reporters say that bathroom facilities are terrible in Sochi. But according to the Deputy Prime Minister guest in hotels are on purpose using shower facilities incorrectly, as surveillance videos show. :-D

Awesome!

In remote / under-developed regions this might actually be a strong alternative for building internet connectivity - somewhat like the exploding market for cell phones in Africa due to the lack of land lines.

Mantis shrimp seem to have 12 types of photo-receptive sensors - but this does not really improve their ability to discriminate between colors. Speculation is that they serve as a form of pre-processing for visual information: the brain does not need to decode full color information from just a few channels which would would allow for a smaller brain. I guess technologically the two extremes of light detection would be RGB cameras which are like our eyes and offer good spatial resolution, and spectrometers which have a large amount of color channels but at the cost of spatial resolution. It seems the mantis shrimp uses something that is somewhere between RGB cameras and spectrometers. Could there be a use for this in space?

Innovative individuals are less flexible learners while innovative species are also at the same time more flexible.

It turns out that falling along any straight line through the Earth takes 42 minutes (Gravity train). I think this has not been opted as an explanation of Douglas Adams' 42 but this fact is definitely quite beautiful.

Scientists inch closer to building a drug-delivering nanorobot

Nice wired article on high temp. superconductors. With some quotes by my old material science Prof. Jan Zaanen :-D

A few years ago we did not even know if there was any planets outside the solar system. Now we know some of the stuff that happens on them. Wonder how long it takes until we discover life somewhere else!

IceCube detects a neutrino in about every 6 minutes but most are from within the solar system. A small number of very high energy neutrinos have been found though which have energies that cannot be produced by the sun or on Earth.

This is seriously scary. Basically the only thing that hospitals could still help you with are broken arms and alcohol poisoning... :-\