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Their accuracy is orders of magnitude better than what is currently being used, however at the moment, it sounds like quite a large setup -> they're working on getting it down to 1m^3 :o, still any gravity mapping instruments could benefit from these in the future.

Actually GPS is much more accurate, but as it doesnt work under water, the only alternative (without building an underwater GPS equivalent using probes) is to use cumulative accelerometer data. But as this is prone to drifting over time, quantum systems like this can help improving the accuracy significantly.

Very true :). I was thinking though when you want to remove 'noise' from any gravity mapping experiment, highly accurate accelerometers are required, like those used in GOCE.

"Neuroscience UCLA neurophysicists have found that space-mapping neurons in the brain react differently to virtual reality than they do to real-world environments. Their findings could be significant for people who use virtual reality for gaming, military, commercial, scientific or other purposes." I wonder if we are doing it wrong with the airplane pilot simulators...

Another Appathon with the aim to allow access to vast amounts of 'space data' and then play around.. In other words, a neural network's guy wet dream, so Paul, what are you waiting for?

I'm not really an app developer :P But I'll think about it

An oldie but a goodie, " As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge"

already forwarded it to other researchers in desperation phase :-D :-D

Let an AI build up your web page for just 96$ per year!

Amazing! Not even coding jobs are safe from AI anymore! AI programming will be the last bastion in the struggle against automation. Get ready :)

Mining the moon - now we know that the Moon's poles hold millions of tonnes of water ice, firms in the US as well as the Indian and Chinese space agencies are planning to mine this resource and sell it to space missions as fuel.

Several new components for biological circuits have been developed by researchers. These components are key building blocks for constructing precisely functioning and programmable bio-computers. "The ability to combine biological components at will in a modular, plug-and-play fashion means that we now approach the stage when the concept of programming as we know it from software engineering can be applied to biological computers.

An unusual signal picked up by a European space observatory could be the first direct detection of dark matter particles, astronomers say. The findings are tentative and could take several years to check, but if confirmed they would represent a dramatic advance in scientists' understanding of the universe.

NASA Releases Tool Enabling Citizen Scientists to Examine Asteroid Vesta Vesta Trek is a free, web-based application that provides detailed visualizations of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. Data gathered from multiple instruments aboard Dawn have been compiled into Vesta Trek's user-friendly set of tools, enabling citizen scientists and students to study the asteroid's features. The application includes: -- Interactive maps with the ability to overlay a growing range of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements and geology, as well as analysis tools for measuring the diameters, heights and depths of surface features and more. -- 3-D printer-exportable topography so users can print physical models of Vesta's surface. -- Standard keyboard gaming controls to manoever a first-person visualization of "flying" across the surface of the asteroid. "There's nothing like seeing something with your own eyes, but these types of detailed data-visualizations are the next best thing," said Kristen Erickson, Director, Science Engagement and Partnerships at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC.

A common data hub that allows the representation and comparison of data from numerous space missions. "The IMPEx portal offers tools for the visualization and analysis of datasets from different space missions. Furthermore, several computational model databases are feeding into the environment." As they say, with its massive 3D-visualization capabilities it offers the possibility of displaying spacecraft trajectories, planetary ephemerides as well as scientific representations of observational and simulation datasets.

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

There is actually a windows program called flux, that changes the temperature on your screen to match normal light cycles. When the sun sets it switches to a "warmer" more reddish tint on your screen to promote sleepiness. The typically bright blue/neon white settings of most pc settings is quite "awakening" and keeps your brain running for longer. This impacts your sleeping patterns and all the consequences of that. Amazingly, this flux thing does have an effect. That being said, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it all on PC/artificial lighting time. Sedentary lifestyles, etc can very well place one in a position of long term pc/phone usage so it's quite hard to draw a causal link.

nice - also exists for MAC btw: https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/mac/

They use a technique they call "Empirical Dynamic Modeling" to find correlations between different variables of chaotic systems. Might be interesting for things like climate modeling and similar chaotic systems. The idea seems pretty straight forward but I never encountered it before - so I'm no sure if this is really a new development (curious if anybody else knows). If you are short on time just watch the video embedded in the article.

Just by reading the page and the related material I didn't really get much, but I think it could be worth investing some time in reading more about it. But I'm interested in this, so I'll try to dig deeper!

Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion that something is common when it is actually rare. One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all.

"The effect is largest in the political blogs network, where as many as 60%-70% of nodes will have a majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are active." How convenient :-)

Wow, this seems like a good idea ... I wonder why we did not have it before .....

Berkeley Lab researchers are using M. thermoacetica to perform photosynthesis - despite being non-photosynthetic - and also to synthesize semiconductor nanoparticles in a hybrid artificial photosynthesis system for converting sunlight into valuable chemical products.

By attaching a diamond crystal to an AFM tip, researcher at New York City University managed to measure the heat flows at atomic levels in resistors. The method works due to a vacancy in the carbon lattice, two spots are empty of which one is filled with a nitrogen atom. The energy state of the vacancy is temperature dependent and can actually be read out spectroscopically.

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.

Ancient Babylonian astronomers developed many important concepts that are still in use, including the division of the sky into 360 degrees. They could also predict the positions of the planets using arithmetic. Ossendrijver translated several Babylonian cuneiform tablets from 350 to 50 BCE and found that they contain a sophisticated calculation of the position of Jupiter.

5.8 GHz wireless power transmission for mainstream gadgets ...

Proximity to the transmitter impacts power delivery as follows: 4W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 0-5 feet 2W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 5-10 feet 1W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 10-15 feet How to make a piecewise approximation of one inverse square law for commercial purposes

:-) - which also tells us that these are not measured values but estimations it seems to me ...