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Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?

to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-natural-alien-mystery-star-behavior.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter

Maybe of interest for the ever lasting discussion around the coffee machines of our meeting room... :) paper at http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/15M1036658

In Israel, a new way to hack by turning speakers into microphones.

Technion researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, that laser emissions can be created through the interaction of light and water waves, in practice mechanical oscillations in fluids at the nanoscale. Interesting concept on the verge of two so far different fields!

The ALPHA collaboration reports the first ever measurement on the optical spectrum of an antimatter hydrogen atom. Optical transitions shown to be the same as for normal hydrogen. Paper at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaap/ncurrent/full/nature21040.html#affil-auth

A good electrical conductor is normally a good heat conductor. Vanadium dioxide however seems to not be so, by being a good electrical conductor and a poor thermal conductor. Paper at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/371

A long read but very interesting and well written.

PS: Does this quote from the article not sound a lot like Inception? 'In any given situation, the brain will retrieve old memories to inform an organism's behavior. If the memory is relevant to the situation, the organism can act on the information; if it is not relevant, then the organism can learn from the situation and create a new memory. With reconsolidation, researchers argued, there seemed to be a brief window in between the retrieval of an old memory and the creation of a new memory in which the old memory is vulnerable to manipulation.'

First experimental study of laser filamentation in the mid-IR.

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view

Baratunde Cola would like to put sand into your computer. Not beach sand, but silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer to inexpensively provide improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices. The silicon dioxide doesn't do the cooling itself.

A scalable quantum simulation of a molecule for the first time ever. It would finally enable practical simulation of "large" chemical systems. A research performed with Google and world class universities.

A new more efficient type of single photon light source consisting of a quantum dot reproduces 1954 Robert Dicke theoretical proposal. Applications in quantum communications directly on the target. "All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat."

The model bio- supercomputer is powered by adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the substance that provides energy to all of the cells in a human body.

Researchers at Tohoku University have, for the first time, successfully demonstrated the basic operation of spintronics-based artificial neural network.

It is typically considered that brain's process of learning is highly energy efficient. While investigating how efficiently the brain can learn new information, physicists have found that, at the neuronal level, learning efficiency is ultimately limited by the laws of thermodynamics.

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

"Two sets of [ ATV docking training for astronauts ] lessons are now available for the home user to try." And in case you wonder *where* in the earth are they available, the links are on the right-hand column (also known as ESA's scorn on usability). As usual for the material located there, I took me a few minutes to find them...

Well I tried and could not locate the app to download from these links and sent them a feedback on what I thought a wrong error - though the email bounced :-) So, what is the right link to the app then?

Leo, I'm not iEnabled, so I can't help you with the app. Using other links you can try the PC version (so 20th-century-ish, I know), of course assuming you have somewhere one with Internet Explorer :-)