Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain.

A short article about Saul Griffith and his R&D company Otherlab. Pretty much halfway between Mythbusters and the ACT.

Rocket science!

interesting article - what happened to real innovation? "Thiel is caustic: last year he told the New Yorker that he didn't consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough." - Is it?

...how about you?

A website that lets you simulate the effects of a specified asteroid impact on earth.

We had a short discussion yesterday about using nuclear isomers as batteries for spacecraft. The principle is that energy is stored as an excitation of the nucleus which can then release the energy as a gamma-photon. However angular momentum has to be conserved an this suppresses the decay strongly - making these states stable up to 10^35 longer than a typical decay.

The key is the triggering of the dacay wheras the triggering comsumes less energy than the decay provides. The x-ray based triggering of the gamma photon decay turned out to be quite controversial and needs significantly more scientific attention.

I think that there should be some references and traces of the discussions we had on this on the shared drive or wiki ... One other aspect: converting the omnidirectional gamma bursts into useful energy ....

The mantles of Earth and other rocky planets are rich in magnesium and oxygen. Due to its simplicity, the mineral magnesium oxide is a good model for studying the nature of planetary interiors. New work studied how magnesium oxide behaves under the extreme conditions deep within planets and found evidence that alters our understanding of planetary evolution.

In case you want to ask him anything

NASA's oldest interstellar spacecraft is suddenly measuring changes more dramatic than any it has seen during its 35 year journey

this is very nice! in either of the explanations Voyager will likely be in good enough shape to send data when outside of the boundary layer ...

Private company planning commercial manned trips to moon before end of decade.

Another great piece from "Ten Simple Rules" series by PLOSCB

An acoustic analogue of the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) has been demonstrated for the first time.

The Florida team generated a specially shaped laser beam that could self-accelerate, or bend, sideways.

very nice!!! read this e.g. "In addition to this self-bending, the beam's intensity pattern also has a couple of other intriguing characteristics. One is that it is non-diffracting, which means that the width of each intensity region does not appreciably increase as the beam travels forwards. This is unlike a normal beam - even a tightly collimated laser beam - which spreads as it propagates. The other unusual property is that of self-healing. This means that if part of the beam is blocked by opaque objects, then any disruptions to the beam's intensity pattern could gradually recover as the beam travels forward."

Computer simulations by researchers in the US and China could lead to solar cells that work efficiently across a broad range of the solar spectrum.

doubt that this would work ...

Water ice on mercury!!!

Its a big one!