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Putting together the picture of how climate works. An informative slide that shows which are the climatic subsystems that can undergo(/have undergone in the past) bifurcations (Lenton et al., 2008 PNAS).

Oh those bloody physicists... someone forgot to turn off the lights and now they have a 400 times better conductive crystal. If science was always that easy, I would light a candle every day.

Apparently this was not the first discovery of this effect involving SrTiO3. In an article from 2012 a conductance increase of 5 orders in magnitude is described (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn203991q). But indeed many large impact discoveries are accidental...

I thought we all knew already that science is just another form of directed random search :)))

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

And the scary part is antibiotics use for human medicine is dwarfed by antibiotics use in livestock, at least in most countries I think.

My daily read, a collection of blog posts related mostly to energy by UCSD prof Tom Murphy. Especially his experiments into home energy storage and his "do the math" attitude towards renewables are insightful and if not, then sometimes just plain funny.

nice one: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/#more-1414

On a lighter note: Decades after NASA's Apollo missions, people are having some laughs over transcripts of astronauts' humorous conversations aboard the spacecraft. For all their technological sophistication, the Apollo command module had a relatively primitive system for managing human waste.

Bitcoin utilizes a peer-to-peer network to issue anonymous payment transactions between different users. Dynamical effects have been found, of which some increase anonymity while others decrease it. Most importantly, several parameters of the Bitcoin transaction graph seem to have become stationary over the last 12-18 months. The implications are discussed.

Nice animation to summarize the current over fishing problem. For example, I never knew that farm raised fish (like salmon) actually are carnivorous and 5kg of fish is needed to produce 1kg of this 'higher quality' fish.

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.

Wow, the two droplets that orbit each other are really cool - as is the explanation!

nice exploit

anna, this is your shit ;) ...and they mentione albert einstein so it has to be an intelligent and good finding :)

and?

and?

Mars Society, which advocates for manned exploration of the Red Planet, has released its requirements for the six volunteers who will be expected to spend 12 months at the society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Canada's Devon Island, which is about 1,450 kilometers from the North Pole, beginning in July 2014. Crewmembers will spend most of their time doing science, studying things such as carbon release from the permafrost and human performance in extreme conditions. If they want to go outside their base, they'll have to wear a spacesuit. If something breaks, they're the ones who are going to have to fix it.

University at Buffalo researchers are developing a deep-sea Internet. The technological breakthrough could lead to improvements in tsunami detection, offshore oil and natural gas exploration, surveillance, pollution monitoring...

If you've ever found your iPhone taking control of your life, there may be a good reason. It may think it has free will. That may not be quite as far-fetched as it sounds. Today, one leading scientist outlines a 'Turing Test' for free will and says that while simple devices such as thermostats cannot pass, more complex ones like iPhones might.

I don't know the inventor of that nonsense that the free will should be the result of QM. It's about the only point I agree with the author of the paper: QM is not necessary and doesn't help. What I meant: all these thought experiments done by typical ultra-naive realists (or ultra-naive physicalists, if you prefer) that cultivate the university departments of physics, computer science etc. are put the cart before the horse. First one has to clarify the role of physical theories and its concepts (e.g. causality) and then one can start to ask how "free will" could perhaps be seen in these theories. More than 200 years ago there existed a famous philosopher named Kant who had some interesting thoughts about this. But authors like Lloyd behave as if he never existed, in fact is view of the world is even pre-Platonic!

Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer And wishing you were here

A theory-SuperDense quantum teleportation-posed by Hampshire College physics professor Herbert Bernstein will be tested on the International Space Station. Theoretical physicist Bernstein devised the SuperDense scheme more than a decade ago in his investigations of different ways to send a quantum state from one part of a laboratory to a remote station.

Anna could you have a closer look into this - we should at least know what they are up to, be able to explain if anybody asks ... I also somehow missed this one in the NIAC study descriptions ... maybe a good moment to have another look at these "This is the second NASA grant for SuperDense quantum teleportation. A grant awarded in 2010 through NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) investigated the viability of the theory and produced the world's first experimental demonstration. Surprising or seminal experiments have marked Bernstein's research career. This is the fourth time a major proposal has become reality; two of his experiments helped found new sub-fields of physics (neutron interferometry and entanglement for quantum information)."

Great explanations of space stuff for people who are not experts (for example children) :-)

"Could you do this? Could a spinning human slow down the Earth? Theoretically, yes." Let's all put our ice skates on and spin to enjoy a longer daytime !

Actually the length of a day fluctuates naturally. Some effects are periodic (e.g. due to seasons) while others accumulate to a general lengthening of the day (like the influence of tides): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuations_in_the_length_of_day

Is it not more efficient to just all start running eastward? We could have a new "Jump Day" frenzy :)

The habitable zones of single stars are larger and wider as the temperatures increase. Although hotter stars have the widest regions where water can lie on the surface, they also have short lifetimes that limit the ability of life to evolve. Moons in close binary solar systems have a better chance of hosting life than those in single-star systems, new research has shown.

looks like the study Aurélie wanted to do ...

Are you a team player who is unafraid of long isolation? Do you have a medical degree and a healthy love of extremes? ESA is offering the chance of a lifetime to run space experiments in one of the world's most isolated places: Concordia research station in Antarctica.

One engineer YGT has already reserved his position to go there for maintaining infrastructure, the coming austral winter. Apparent science contribution: low, experience of a lifetime : affirmative!

"team player who is unafraid of long isolation" LOL