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Continuing the museum theme... today's Wikipedia Picture of the Day. This might be *the* ultimate test of the knowledge of Dutch... can you name any of them? On the more ACT-like note: I wonder how the contemporary version would look like? P.S. Yes, the proverbs are listed on Wikipedia and yes, lots of them involve herring.

Electron microscope studies reveal that the electron bombardment leads to polymerization of the outer layer of some insect larva's skin and protects them from dehydration. Artificial method to create this effect tested as well. Allows observation of living animals under electron microscope! Question: can the insects still breath after they are back in air? :-S

Wow, you made it to the Zeit - Germany´s most intellectual newspaper!

Thats who we are!!! Intellectuals :)

Winter is coming... and deep learning, too!

"Sergey Brin has said he wants to build a benign version of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey" ... didn't they try to do that in that movie called "2001: A Space Odyssey" ?

Icing organs... Why scientists are so near and yet so far from being able to cryopreserve organs

Nice overview!

The next advance in weather forecasting may not come from a new satellite or supercomputer, but from a device in your pocket. University of Washington atmospheric scientists are using pressure sensors included in the newest smartphones to develop better weather forecasting techniques.

One more reason why we should be much more open about all these EO data we have .... The two citizen scientists, Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano, are listed as authors on the scientific paper recently published. I love this: the digital nature of these data make it far, far easier to analyze the science than it was in the past, and also easier to get the data out to people. Because of this, we have an explosive growth in these kinds of projects. Planet Hunters is great, but then so is Galaxy Zoo, Moon Mappers, Ice Hunters, and so many others. You can find several of these collected at the CosmoQuest website.

Wiktor is also collecting these science games in the ACT-wiki. You should have a look at: http://sophia.estec.esa.int/actwiki/index.php/On-line_Games_4_Science

Certain strands of spider silk are attracted to statically charged objects, according to a new study, enhancing an arachnid's ability to catch prey.

good luck with this....

In 1996 Sokal hoaxed sociologists with his famous nonsense text on political implications of quantum gravity. Can one play a similar game with "researchers" on Boltzmann brains, multiverses, string landscapes or similar? I doubt, this is just reality satire that can't be topped.

Poor Boltzmann ...

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

The Forest Products Laboratory of the US Forest Service has opened a US$1.7 million pilot plant for the production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) from wood by-products materials such as wood chips and sawdust. Prepared properly, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fibers, so that putting CNC into composite materials results in high strength, low weight products.

Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?

to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".

Two aerospace companies are teaming up to launch giant space habitats to orbit, with the first such liftoff targeted for 2020. Bigelow Aerospace will loft its giant, expandable B330 modules - each of which will provide one-third as much usable volume as the entire International Space Station (ISS) - aboard United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rockets, representatives from both companies announced today (April 11).

Hard work in functional materials is driving the development of new wearable electronics that could be advantageous for communications and sensing is being pursued in the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute. Through embroidering circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision full integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing is now possible.

google paper on quantum computers ... anybody with further insight on how realistic this is

Not an answer to Leopold's question but here is a little primer on quantum computers for those that are (like me) still confused about what they actually do: http://www.dwavesys.com/tutorials/background-reading-series/quantum-computing-primer It give a good intuitive idea of the kinds of problems that an adiabatic quantum computer can tackle, an easy analogy of the computation and an explanation of how this get set up in the computer. Also, there is emphasis on how and why quantum computers lend themselves to machine learning (and maybe trajectory optimization??? - ;-) ).

The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions. The reason why you shouldn't use Excel (or Numbers or OpenOffice or ...) without knowing what it actually really does!

Abstract: The "Magnificent Seven" (M7) are a group of radio-quiet Isolated Neutron Stars (INSs) discovered in the soft X-rays through their purely thermal surface emission. Owing to the large inferred magnetic fields ($B\approx 10^{13}$ G), radiation from these sources is expected to be substantially polarised, independently on the mechanism actually responsible for the thermal emission.

I guess this is for data what oil tankers vs. pipelines are for hydrocarbons. Isn't ESA doing something similar for satellite data? I seem to remember that Leopold mentioned that at some point.

A good DIY project - build a tractor beam using 3D printed parts. The 3D files and research are available for download. A new way for microgravity research @fichbio ?

This simulation showx that the signal measured in LIGO could come from a gravaster (objects which are believed to have their insides made of dark energy) or even a wormhole as sources of gravitacional waves. Published in PRL by friends of Jai