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Leo on BBC news

apparently competitive with CNT and others in performance, while as you would expect very cheap. anyone know what happens to chicken feathers in a vacuum?

This is really cool. I know one of the authors and he is a good guy... the only thing that leaves me unsatisfied is that if the whole issue is related to thermal effects one should have seen the Pioneer effect all the time and not only at about 10 AU... ...or is there some thermal process that kicked in only at this distance?

Here's an update on this theory: NASA Releases New Pioneer Anomaly Analysis "The mysterious force acting on the Pioneer spacecraft seems to be falling exponentially. That's a strong clue that on-board heat is to blame, says NASA." Heat emission 'most likely cause' of pioneer anomaly "What's more interesting is that, contrary to the original analysis conducted all those years ago, the deceleration does seem to be decelerating at an exponential rate -- just as one might expect from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, which powers the two spacecraft. Turyshev concludes, "The most likely cause of the Pioneer anomaly is the anisotropic emission of on-board heat.""

The Economist this week has a 14-page special on the rise of the robots. Don't expect a very indepth technical review but an interesting read nonetheless for some maybe.

This article nailed the issue, as far as I'm concerned. By the way the diagram in the Economist is hilarious.. amazing combination of American and male chauvinism!

"The BICEP2 data would eliminate about 90% of inflationary models, Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, told a packed auditorium at MIT the day after the BICEP2 announcement (see picture below). Many of those models do not produce gravitational waves at detectable levels, said Linde, who is one of the founders of inflation theory." Is there any hope for LISA now?

Of course - the data is more proof that GWs exist!!

so you don't expect any impact on the science objectives of Lisa at all?

Taking images through opaque, light-scattering layers is a vital capability and essential diagnostic tool in many applications. The research group of Prof. Mosk of U. Twente have started doing experiments shooting optical lasers into opaque materials in 2007, and for surprise of everyone, it turn out the light intensity after the opaque material in their experiments was orders of magnitude bigger than expected. Following these results they succeeded in taking non-invasive sharp pictures of objects hidden behind a screen of opaqueness, the so referred Super Vision in this Nature overview article.

very nice!!!

And the winner is... C++ :) Love the comment on Slashdot: "C++ Templates will turn the most pious programmer into a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic."

Nice one... However note the sample could be biased, because I'd expect some interaction between "using github" and "being a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic" ;-)

Fair enough :)

The blockchain technology behind bitcoin has been gaining traction. This article makes a good job of describing it, and the different (not-bitcoin) ways in which it's being adopted. Worth reading, even if only for the funny bit about self-driving self-owning cars who pay themselves for fuel, parking and repairs.

Hilarious critique to a quite important paper from Stanford trying to push the agenda of global warming .... "You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect."

also good overview: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

just a footnote here, that climate warming aspect is not derived by an agenda of presenting the world with evil. If one looks at big journals with high outreach, it is not uncommon to find articles promoting climate warming as something not bringing the doom that extremists are promoting with marketing strategies. Here is a recent article in Science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26612836 Science's role is to look at the phenomenon and notice what is observed. And here is one saying that the acidification of the ocean due to increase of CO2 (observed phenomenon) is not advancing destructively for coccolithophores (a key type of plankton that builds its shell out of carbonates), as we were expecting, but rather fertilises them! Good news in principle! It could be as well argued from the more sceptics with high "doubting-inertia" that 'It could be because CO2 is not rising in the first place'', but one must not forget that one can doubt the global increase in T with statistical analyses, because it is a complex variable, but at least not the CO2 increase compared to preindustrial levels. in either case : case 1: agenda for 'the world is warming' => - Put random big energy company here- sells renewable energies case 2: agenda for 'the world is fine' => - Put random big energy company here - sells oil as usual The fact that in both cases someone is going to win profits, does not correllate (still not an adequate statistical test found for it?) with the fact that the science needs to be more and more scrutinised. The blog of the Statistics Professor in Univ.Toronto looks interesting approach (I have not understood all the details) and the paper above is from JPL authors, among others.

Quoted from one of the authors in a separate interview: "We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal." Bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic scale could see some interesting applications in sensors, or generally entanglement-enhanced applications.

They were previously working on the same concept in N-V centers in diamond (as a semiconductor). Here the advantage is that SiC could in principle be integrated with Si or Ge. Anyway its all about controlling coherence. In the next 10 years some breakthroughs are expected in the field of semiconductor spintronics, but quantum computing in this way lies still in the horizon

uups :)

Well, I wouldn't expect a reply: "all our past emails have been downloaded and sold to NASA" even if that was the case.

Of course Marek is right... What matters is the theatre of security, not security itself. Just like in airports :)