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Kirobo, a knee-high talking robot with red boots and a black and white body, has blasted off from Japan for the International Space Station to test how machines can help astronauts with their work.

Reminds me of the Robotic Servant from our brainstorm session :)

so it took us 70% of the time Earth is in the habitable zone to develop, would this be normal or could it be much faster? In other words, would all forms of life that started on a planet that originated at a 'similar' point in time like us, be equally far developed?

That is actually quite tricky to estimate rly. If for no other reason than the fact that all of the mass extinctions we had over the Earth's history basically reset the evolutionary clock. Assuming 2 Earths identical in every way but one did not have the dinosaur wipe-out impact, that would've given non-impact Earth 60million years to evolve a potential dinosaur intelligent super race.

The opposite might be true - or might not be ;-). Since usually the rate of evolution increases after major extinction events the chance is higher to produce 'intelligent' organisms if these events happen quite frequently. Usually the time of rapid evolution is only a few million years - so Earth is going quite slow. Certainly extinction events don't reset the evolutionary clock - if they would never have happened Earth gene pool would probably be quite primitive. By the way: dinosaurs were a quite diverse group and large dinosaurs might well have had cognitive abilities that come close to whales or primates - the difference to us might be that we have hands to manipulate our environment and vocal cords to communicate in very diverse ways. Modern dinosaur (descendents), i.e. birds, contain some very intelligent species - especially with respect to their body size and weight.

Development of biodegradable batteries to power medical devices that you could inject into the human body, for example to do medical checkup, drug delivery etc

The researchers have created two-dimensional computer models of the flying snakes, but they've also done real-world simulations - using 3D printed components in water tunnels. Both show that snake-shaped objects would get a special aerodynamic pop should they tilt their bodies at 35 degrees as they drop from tree branches.

"The new type of material consists of tens of thousands of picoliter connected water droplets encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies."

By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. With as extra bonus: Besides providing high levels of passive insulation, AgNW-coated clothing can also provide Joule heating if connected to an electricity source, such as a battery. The researchers demonstrated that as little as 0.9 V can safely raise clothing temperature to 38 °C, which is 1 °C higher than the human body temperature of 37 °C. How about that for personal comfort during the cold winter months

sounds almost like the asbestos story re-started :-)

Found an European project that takes care of the environmental, health and safety aspects of nanomaterials http://phys.org/news/2015-04-unleash-full-potential-nanomaterials.html

Asteroid or Space Debris, same battle ?

"The old model is no longer valid for the ocean's overturning, not because it's a gross simplification, but because it ignores crucial elements such as eddies and the wind field. The concept of a conveyor belt for the overturning was developed decades ago, before oceanographers had measured the eddy field of the ocean and before they understood how energy from the wind impacts the overturning,"

Luzi: no critical comment on this? would love to hear your opinion ...

nice! are they studying our website?

is it me or is there an ongoing convergence of sources of posts on here? in that vein here's a weird brain experiment you can try at home. can't get it to work myself.

wonder if we can use that to power a moon base .... or on-board a SBSP satellite

I am not the physicist but I thought it might be interesting, from a space security point-of-view

Yes it seems really interesting and opens new possibilities. However this technology review article is not very good and the guy uses terms which have a precise meaning (like teleportation), which is different from the word we know... Quantum teleportation is what we use for designing quantum computers, but we are quite far from any practical applications. This energy teleportation will allow new scheme involving energy (if it is experimentally confirmed) which is very nice. However it seems this occurs in an entangled many-body system, which the only macroscopic one I know is a bose-eintein condensate (BEC). So it would mean infuse energy in the BEC by doing a measurement on one of the atom and extract it few millimeters away by doing a measurement on another atom. very far from any long distance power transmission...

"In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" -- a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name "Tyche" for the hypothetical planet. Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)."

more transformation optics ... 

I still believe that it is worth to check the thermal, mechanical and chemical properties of the developed metamaterials. For hyperbolic re-entries the radiation is still the dominating heat load source and a dominating bandwith may be indentified. A resistive metamaterial should be placed on the nose cap of the entry body in order to reduce local radiation heat load.