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Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form-the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle-the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir.

"We have made optical systems at the microscopic scale that amplify light and produce ultra-narrowband spectral output," explained J. Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Illinois. "These new optical amplifiers are well-suited for routing optical power on a chip containing both electronic and optical components.

"A Soviet supercavitation torpedo called Shkval was able to reach a speed of 370km/h or more - much faster than any other conventional torpedoes," he said. However, The SCMP highlighted two problems in supercavitation technology. First, the submerged vessel needed to be launched at high speeds, approaching 100km/h, to generate and maintain the air bubble. Secondly, it is difficult if not impossible to steer the vessel using conventional mechanisms, which are inside the bubble, without direct contact with water. As a result, its application has been limited to unmanned vessels, fired in a straight line.

can't you just selectively inject the gas so that you control in which direction the bubble forms?

Physicists have devised a way to take pictures using light that has not interacted with the object being photographed. This form of imaging uses pairs of photons, twins that are 'entangled' in such a way that the quantum state of one is inextricably linked to the other.

The actual article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/full/nature13586.html ScienceDaily version: "Scientists photograph the Schrödinger's cat for the first time!"

Metasurfaces have been made, but the problem is that they usually are static and for quantum optic applications the question is how to make a rapidly configurable metasurface. for this Harvard has initiated a multidisciplinary team that involves theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling

Reading "wavefront engineering" in the title I thought it had to do with wave manipulation in the sea. Nothing to do though. As I read further in this article, Harvard thrives in forming multidisciplinarity groups. Their practice is to call the best team in each expertise they need to merge. Not one researcher from each discipline, but teams of experienced professors and a series of graduate students. Maybe we could discuss it in the retreat!

A vascular synthetic system that restores mechanical performance in response to large-scale damage. Gap-filling scaffolds are created through a two-stage polymer chemistry that initially forms a shape-conforming dynamic gel but later polymerizes to a solid structural polymer with robust mechanical properties.

The fast developping solar cell technology of perovskites. "Perovskites are a broad class of crystalline minerals that have been known for well over a century. But their ability to convert solar energy to electricity came to light only in 2009. Since then, the efficiency of perovskite solar cells has climbed from 3.8% to 19.3%, a pace of improvement unmatched by any other solar technology. By comparison, crystalline silicon solar cells, the leading commercial technology, convert about 25% of solar energy to electricity."

For those interested in AI, a good idea to keep track of what's recently been put out there

From a quick glance, a serious contender to the most unreadable article ever. 60% of the pages of this document are references... Still, in the use of abbreviations doesn't even come close to aerospace...

StarTiger: similar, yet different from the way the ACT does things. Seems like a very interesting programme.

Nice initiative and also a good approach, problem-oriented within a fixed time frame. Could definitely be a highly motivating approach, similar to GTOC... I think the ACT should do this more often, targeted at future technologies and/or missions. The team could be structured around 'problems' instead of 'research areas', this will promote multidisciplinary work as well, plus it will also focus activities more. The problems, or more broadly concepts, are identified by the team and a few get chosen as main activities. Subsequent RF and YGT hiring is then done to strenghten the research team. These projects have a maximum lifetime maybe of 1 year? Thoughts?

I'm impressed already by what an innovative group of experts and researchers was able to achieve when resourcefully targeted at coming up with the project's name...

The wisdom of crowds breaks down when people are biased. Now researchers have discovered a simple method of removing this bias-just listen to the most confident.

So, those who insist know better? I reckon that an ignorant can also insist on his opinion.

Devices made from resonating graphene "drums" could be used as microwave amplifiers and memory chips in quantum computers. So say researchers at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who are the first to demonstrate optomechanical coupling between a mechanical resonator and a superconducting microwave cavity.

For fun. "Dolphins are only the second most intelligent form of life on Earth"

This dutch company, Schuberg, has no managers but instead all the employees (operating in the IT service industry) manage everything themselves. They offer IT support to KLM, Rabobank and Eneco, who are quite very reliant on the uptime of their systems. These companies rate Schuberg consistently with the highest approval. Harvard business school is now teaching this type of organizational structure. Possible new working method?

just like the ACT :-)

A bit late, but it is very interesting and instructive to listen to Gordon Moore's words "It almost doubled every year (...) so I said in the next 10 years it's going to continue to double every year, we are going to go from 16 components on a chip to 16 000. Pretty wild extrapolation!". This extrapolation (exponential with only 5 initial points) is now well-known and is one of the things that changed the World, it is pretty amazing how this "wild" futuristic vision came true.

A great source is also the blog from Chris Mack (http://life.lithoguru.com/?p=451) who is a semicon pioneer and publisher of many books on the subject. He wrote an article for IEEE Spectrum on Moore's law and its future. Find it here, http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-multiple-lives-of-moores-law

Whenever I think about moore's law and extrapolating like that I end up back at this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/605/

true?

Isn't that why systems have a "wait for 15 minutes before trying again" after 3 or 5 wrong guesses? All the brute force in the word can't save you from real-life latency.

Oh, so you haven't heard about diceware yet? http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html And, of course, a related XKCD...

In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).

tesla announcing home batteries at 350$/kW

Let's do some simple maths... Here in UK, example "economy 7" tarif yields night kWh approx. 12 pence cheaper than during day. Let's say the goal is to store energy equivalent to running a 2kW storage heater for 6 hours during the day. We need 12 kWh, so 12 times $350 this means need to spend approx. 1920 pounds for batteries. Time to break even at ROI: 1920 / 0.12 ~ 7.3 years... And this is assuming using the heater 365 days a year, and quite an expensive tariff (prepaid). SIWB :-)

Also need to take into account that battery capacity tends to go down with time and usage

Can we have one?

They say they create 2 GeV electrons in a very small setup. However the laser they use is more than 10 meters in length. Still a really nice result.

Compared to a 27km circumference this is major achievement and it is indeed already foreseen that future colliders will include this technology as beam fillers and pre-accelerators at some point. The technique is quite elegant and a lot more energy efficient. Nevertheless, there are also thoughts that future particle colliders might actually go towards space and study collisions orginating from extremely energetic cosmic particles

The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions.

We were there last year, swimming in one of those 'healthy' mud pits..

250m and we did not know about them ??