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monitoring sea level rise using GPS data

Sea Level Rise and the Future of the Netherlands ....no comment

We show here that the mosquito cannot only give rise to a higher water-supporting force than the water strider if the ratio of the water-supporting force to the body weight of the insect itself is compared, but also can safely take off or land on the wate

Let's see if we can rise to the challenge... MR - Riemann Hypothesis still there... classic :)

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!

A new so called 5D data storage that could potentially survive for billions of years. The research consists of nanostructured glass that can record digital data in five dimensions using femtosecond laser writing.

Yes Alex, indeed, the durability is the point I think they highlight and focus on (besides the fact the abstract says something as the extrapolated decay time being comparable to the age of the Universe..). Indeed memories face problems with retention time. Most of the disks retain the information up to 10 years. When enterprises want to store data for longer times than this they use... yeah, magnetic tapes :-). Check a interesting article about magnetic tape market revival here http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123458854/rise-fall-and-re-rise-magnetic-tape I compared for fun, to have one idea of what we were talking about. I am also very curious so see the writing and reading times in this new memory :)

But how can glass store the information so long? Glass is not even solid?!

The researchers used a global climate model to show that if an extreme emissions pathway -- RCP8.5 -- is followed up until 2035, allowing temperatures to rise 1°C above the 1970-1999 mean, and then SRM (Solar Radiation Management) is implemented for 25 years and suddenly stopped, global temperatures could increase by 4°C in the following decades.

Nice quantitative study. They treat the problem within the full uncertainty range of climate sensitivity parameter (much uncertain), very complete. However, at SRM ceasing, after an initial positive spike of Radiative Forcing, the rate of warming seems to return to rates predicted for the non-geoengineering case: "The 20-year temperature trends following SRM cessation are 0.2−0.6 °C/decade for the range of climate sensitivities (figure 5), comparable to those trends that occur under the RCP8.5 scenario without any SRM." I am actually working on a similar idea for deliberate Mars terraforming: aiming to cool the planet down before we introduce a positive Temperature raising feedback with greenhouse gases, maybe could be more efficient than warming itself.

Interesting discussion is going about, on how work anxiety is spreading in academia, with possible mental consequences. And with robust links to the "Doing What You Love" motto of life/work. Could be proven an unsustainable model though. Recalling of Higgs' recent declaration, that today's Academia productivity demands would be hectic for him, could point to the direction of the problem and the solution...?

A worrying future looms as scientist predict the iconic great barrier reef is at a turning point and could experience irreversible damage before 2030 if nothing is done right now. Well actually, I am not sure if anything can be done as the two degree rise (and changes in ocean temperature/acidity probably?) will likely happen in any case due to delayed effects of decades of pollution, whether or not we stop now with emissions will probably not make much difference. :(

"When a control laser is fired at the crystal, a complex quantum-level reaction turns it the opaque crystal transparent. A second light source is beamed into the crystal before the control laser is shut off, returning the crystal to its opaque state. This leaves the light trapped inside the crystal, and the opacity of the crystal keeps the light trapped inside from bouncing around, effectively bringing light to a full stop." is the simple explanation, but I am not sure how this is actually possible with the current laws of physics

There are two ways to make slow light: material slow light and structural slow light, where you either change the material or the structural properties of your system. Here they used EIT to make material slow light, by inducing transparency inside an otherwise opaque material. As you change the absorption properties of a material you also change its dispersion properties, the so-called Kramers-Kronig relations. A rapid positive change in the dispersion properties of a material will give rise to slow light. To effectively stop light they switched off the control beam, bringing back the opaque state. Another control beam is then used to retrieve the probe pulse that was 'frozen' inside the medium. Light will be halted according to the population lifetime on the energy level (~ 100s). They used an evolutionary algorithm to find an optimal pulse preparation sequence to reach close to the maximum possible storage duration of 100s. Interesting paper!

So it is not real storage then in a sense, as you are stimulating an excitation population which retains the phase information of your original pulse? Still it is amazing that they could store this up to 100s and retrieve it with a probe pulse, but light has never been halted.

Black-body radiation can give rise to a net attractive force between tiny objects. That is the claim made by physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who have calculated the strength of this new force between a speck of dust and a hydrogen atom. Under some cirmustances this force could be stronger than gravitation. Read the paper here: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v111/i2/e023601

In a jaw-dropping feat of engineering, electronics turn a person's thoughts into commands for a drone. Using a brain-computer interface technology pioneered by University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He, several young people have learned to use their thoughts to steer a flying robot around a gym, making it turn, rise, dip, and even sail through a ring.

Pretty cool, so when is this going to be available for our quadrocopter?

Quantum Cascade Lasers are rising in the mid-infrared region, the so-called fingerprint zone of the electromagnetic spectrum for a whole bunch of chemical species that we are most of times interested in sensing. One more sign of the underlying importance of this technology comes just by seeing NSF, USHS, Naval Air Command and NASA as the main monetary contributors to this research.

we should try out some of these kits? anyone interested? LS

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.