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"...scientists in Germany have built a device that can effectively make objects invisible to sound waves. The performance of the acoustic "invisibility cloak" exceeds that of existing electromagnetic devices and could open up new ways of manipulating waves, including the development of shields against seismic waves."

shit.... they are a few months ahead of us it seems ... :-( what is the impact on our ariadna??

:-)

Well, it's not yet confirmed... That error would be worse than the magnetic moment of the muon about 10 years ago. There, it was "at least" a conflict of conventions used in the computer codes!

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show. CERN's statement says OPERA scientists are studying the "potential extent of these two effects" but doesn't indicate which source of error (if either) is likely to outweigh the other. However, Lucia Votano, director of the Gran Sasso laboratory, says the "main suspicion" focuses on the optical-fiber connection. She adds that OPERA researchers deserve credit for "having tenaciously followed this particular evidence via checks completed in the last few days." The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.

good news for scientists...

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience.

Finally! Nowadays blacks were always too bright for my taste...

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." I will keep waiting for my darkness-emitting diodes...

Fantastic! You would love my proposal to host an artist in residence in the team :-)

Not so good news ...

Have a look at the US budget and the incredible amount of money they are spending for military purposes. It's as simple as that.

should we all go home then? apparently you just need a balloon

paper here: http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/MILTON%20ISOLATION_final.pdf Not the best journal out there, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology They currently have an open call for papers on Astro-Theology ! :)

wow. the wiki page is hilarious. maybe i'll submit something

For Dario: the PI computation record was established on a single desktop computer using a cache optimized algorithm. Previous record was obtained by a cluster of hundreds of computers. The cache optimized algorithm was 20 times faster.

"btw: we will very soon have the very same processor in the new iMac .... what record are you going to beat with it?" Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)

"Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)" that is going to be a though one but a worthy aim! ""The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)" yep! Programming is art ;)

the new scientist article does not say much but maybe the paper could be of interest to our models - Nina and Friederike, please have a look at it - hope that you can get hold of it ...

One more nice citizen scientist example as I try to find for space since some time. Any good ideas this mit inspire you to?

why don't you programme one and get rich?

Would love to but this requires *TIME* :-( Automatic image-based mushroom recognition... perhaps could do as a FP7 study... it may save lives actually!

"The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Department of Health's Wads­worth Center at Albany Medical College. The 28Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is part of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required to build a thought helmet-a device that can detect and transmit the unspoken speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently." ...

This reminds me... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/

Oxford University scientists find that a complex skill such as juggling causes changes in the white matter of the brain. - Let's start juggling for the ideastorm!

cool. I can do some lessons with three and four balls... tomorrow after lunch !

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.

"Over the past couple of decades, the research literature has filled up with endless new nature-based metaphors for algorithms. You can find algorithms based on the behaviour of cuckoos, bees, bats, cats, wolves, galaxy formation and black holes. (...) All researchers have been doing is wasting time on developing new approaches that are probably little better than existing ones. And the language of each metaphor then invades the literature, distracting people from using the already sufficiently expressive terminology of mathematics and, above all, working together to find the best way forward." The golden era of fireworks-like algorithm is about to end

Lies, lies, all lies. They will never go away. Papers need to be published.

scary, I think?

Less impressive than the headline, since they actually just tested their conversion system at suboptimal conditions on an existing reactor setup, but still since done within six month and with less than 1M€ ...

Stephen Hawking is also in for that

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

From my favourite, "applied science" series... "If you've ever had one too many and tumbled into bed with a vision, only to be greeted in the morning by a sight you'd gnaw off your own arm to escape, take heart". [Edit] Ah, and before you suggest this is AFD hoax, here's the ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22260359

Viva Mokoko!!

Hire her as a stagiaire! In the long run, will the fact that a chimp can do scientist's job affect scientist's pay?