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paywall skipping: http://www.ncmis.cas.cn/kxcb/jclyzs/201202/W020120203526011739796.pdf

Demand for drones is exploding! Dupin wants to aggregate aerial imagery from around the globle at Dronestagr.am. In the near future we could experience something close to google maps, made with aerial pictures.

Remember that drones have top-view camera and front-view camera which gives more possibilities in terms of what you can do with collected data. With such a huge database and a little bit of 3D geometry we could get e.g. a 3D map of the world... I guess google can derive something like that already from their streetview images however obviously street view covers some relatively small part of the globe and also can not access places that UAV can.

Here there's an example of a 3D picture of Tokyo (in high resolution). It is not made by drones, but I think it is something we can use them for. http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/

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

More details in the linked pdf file.. a low pressurized tube with pods floating on air cushions together with EM propulsion and braking.. cool, but probably not going to be build any day soon

It would be great indeed, but even though the cost of the high speed train is a factor 10x higher, the prototype nature and hence relatively lower TRL of this system will probably not have it favoured. Best chance is that he develops a working prototype, one that might not even transport humans at the moment and for short distances, then maybe the project can take off

Actually, he was talking about a prototype: "I am somewhat tempted to at least make a demonstration prototype," Musk said in a conference call with reporters on Monday. "Perhaps I'll create a sub-scale version that's operating, and then hand it over to somebody else." "I think I'll probably end up doing that," he said. http://allthingsd.com/20130812/elon-musk-will-likely-build-his-own-hyperloop-prototype/

why am I not surprised .....

http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...

unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas

On a lighter note: Decades after NASA's Apollo missions, people are having some laughs over transcripts of astronauts' humorous conversations aboard the spacecraft. For all their technological sophistication, the Apollo command module had a relatively primitive system for managing human waste.

Another underestimated source of CO2, are turbulent waters. "The stronger the turbulences at the water's surface, the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The combination of maps and data revealed that, while the CO2 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are lower than assumed, those from rivers and streams are three times as high as previously believed." Alltogether the emitted CO2 equates to roughly one-fifth of the emissions caused by humans. Yet more stuff to model...

Nasia, I thought about your statement carefully - and I cannot agree with you. Water is not a greenhouse gas. It is instead a liquid. Also, I can't believe you keep feeding the troll! :-P But on a more topical note: I think it is an over-simplification to call water a greenhouse gas - water is one of the most important mechanisms in the way Earth handles heat input from the sun. The latent heat that you mention actually cools Earth: solar energy that would otherwise heat Earth's surface is ABSORBED as latent heat by water which consequently evaporates - the same water condenses into rain drops at high altitudes and releases this stored heat. In effect the water cycle is a mechanism of heat transport from low altitude to high altitude where the chance of infrared radiation escaping into space is much higher due to the much thinner layer of atmosphere above (including the smaller abundance of greenhouse gasses). Also, as I know you are well aware, the cloud cover that results from water condensation in the troposphere dramatically increases albedo which has a cooling effect on climate. Furthermore the heat capacity of wet air ("humid heat") is much larger than that of dry air - so any advective heat transfer due to air currents is more efficient in wet air - transporting heat from warm areas to a natural heat sink e.g. polar regions. Of course there are also climate heating effects of water like the absorption of IR radiation. But I stand by my statement (as defended in the above) that rain cools the atmosphere. Oh and also some nice reading material on the complexities related to climate feedback due to sea surface temperature: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006%3C2049%3ALSEOTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2

I enjoy trolling conversations when there is a gain for both sides at the end :-) . I had to check upon some of the facts in order to explain my self properly. The IPCC report states the greenhouse gases here, and water vapour is included: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html Honestly, I read only the abstract of the article you posted, which is a very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of regulating sea surface temperature, but it is very localized to the tropics (vivid convection, storms) a region of which I have very little expertise, and is difficult to study because it has non-hydrostatic dynamics. The only thing I can comment there is that the authors define constant relative humidity for the bottom layer, supplied by the oceanic surface, which limits the implementation of the concept on other earth regions. Also, we may confuse during the conversation the greenhouse gas with the Radiative Forcing of each greenhouse gas: I see your point of the latent heat trapped in the water vapour, and I agree, but the effect of the water is that it traps even as latent heat an amount of LR that would otherwise escape back to space. That is the greenhouse gas identity and an image to see the absorption bands in the atmosphere and how important the water is, without vain authority-based arguments that miss the explanation in the end: http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarchords.com/uploaded/82/87-33833-450015_44absorbspec.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.solarchords.com/agw-science/4/greenhouse--1-radiation/33784/&h=468&w=458&sz=28&tbnid=x2NtfKh5OPM7lM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__KldteWbV19nVPbbsC4jsOgzCK6E=&docid=cMRZ9f22jbtYPM&sa=X&ei=SwynUq2TMqiS0QXVq4C4Aw&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAw

Some sort of organic carbon has been detected by the sampling of Curiosity; the contamination source was isolated and the signal persists. The scientists suggest as a source meteorites transporting interstellar matter, or maybe some sort of ancient life whose biomass production only survived cosmic radiation as it was buried underground. a big deal: six relevant articles were published simultaneously online: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml?utm_content=&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=Science&utm_source=shortener

Basically quantum entanglement, or more accurately the dispersal and expansion of mixed quantum states, results in an apparent flow of time. Quantum information leaks out and the result is the move from a pure state (hot coffee) to a mixed state (cooled down) in which equilibrium is reached. Theoretically it is possible to get back to a pure state (coffee spontaneously heating up) but this statistical unlikelihood gives the appereance of irreversibility and hence a flow o time. I think an interesting question is then: how much useful work can you extract from this system? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2811) It should for macroscopic thermodynamic systems lead to the Carnot cycle, but on smaller scales it might be possible to formulate a more general expression. Anybody interested to look into it? Anna, Jo? :)

What you propose is called Maxwell's demon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) thermodynamics is VERY robust. I guess if you really only want to harness AND USE the energy in a microscopic system you might have some chance of beating Carnot. But any way of transferring harvested energy to a macroscopic system seems to be limited by it (AFAIK).

wireless power transmission made useful ? this application did certainly not come to my mind when Guy Pignolet showed me 12 years ago how his handy would lid up a small diode after our first SPS meeting in Paris ...

Great idea to use either unused/wasted energy. Then again, the signal power (receiver floor) is steadily going down going from 3G to 5G, yet there might be more use of bandwidth to compensate this. It is funny though that you buy a device which could have the function build in it on the back from the start, yet you put a shell around it and then harness wireless power to give it that add-on functionality.

Recently I came across this article in a Japanese newspaper about wireless power transmission applications in the women beauty business. It's probably not as useful as an iPhone cover but apparently there is a market for such things! http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/18/business/led-nails-light-up-when-calling/#.U2OcWV7v2X8

Interesting ideas - though some metaphors are a bit far fetched. Personally, I think it could be interesting if every scientific article would also have a how-to or tutorial section that gives a recipe of how to apply the newly gained knowledge. Of course, that might be tough to do... :-)

The API of the world is already there (a bit), it is the previous knowledge developed by others. Open Source projects such as the wheel or the brick, allow everyday amazing new APPs to be build such as buildings and cars .... There still is merit, though, in learning from software developments techniques in the everyday world projects. This is indeed the motivation for the ACT to do work in open source (SOCIS, GSoC) and push its members to use stuff like wiki, svn, github, jenkins, and alike. This way we are performing and fostering (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/foster) research into working methods in the hope we will be able to export some of its benefit to the larger ESA.

The novel part here is that it can be scaled down to the cubesat platform. I then wondered, could we place multiple of such Cubesats in a 'decaying orbit' around the Sun? Fractionated will give spatial and temporal information which, even with a simple langmuir probe setup, can give information on density, temperature, velocity, ion energy distribution, potential.. Of course they will be lost relatively quickly, but more could be ejected from a mother ship which is orbiting at a safer distance.

For example like the KickSat projec https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space Although a pc-reboot due to a radiation event in the electronics has reset the deployment timeline to approximately 2 days after re-entry... http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/06/kicksat-satellites_n_5273821.html

I am also looking into this idea since some time and it seems NASA is already ahead, awarding two contract to investigate magnetoshell aerocapture. This could be interesting for probes that want to enter eg Marsian atmospheres at relatively high velocity. Or for multiple re-entry s/c at Earth. The idea of the experiment, The satellite will carry a copper coil, powered by a lithium-ion battery, that generates a magnetic field around the probe. As it descends, the spacecraft will eject a small amount of plasma. This gets trapped in the magnetic field, creating a protective bubble that stops air molecules colliding with the craft and producing heat.

A few years back Mimmo has worked on this, rather from the theory side if I remember well ...

The power requirements for such a thing must be HUGE!

Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it

I guess I tentatively agree with you on both points. In the end there might anyway be surprisingly little overlap between the way that we describe what nature does and HOW it does it... :-D

Congratulations! 100% agree.

Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?

"I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed" Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\

The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.

My girlfriend... She must be an archaeological nerd...

Great Scott, Leo! Honest answers?? I was kinda expecting Francesco's score, but this...

In this article the authors describe an improvement of their optical microscope techniques for which some of the received a Nobel prize in the past. They achieve resolutions far beyond the optical diffraction limit which is supposed to limit detail resolution due to quantum-mechanical effects. Their techniques include structured illuminiation (producing interference patterns), switchable fluorescent markers as well as multi-frame super resolution enhancement. Authors are able to take a single image in about 0.3 seconds which allows the study of protein processes in the cell: http://spon.de/vgTb7 . Although it is hard to imagine the application of many of these techniques for telescopes (except for super resolution), I am wondering if any of this could help building telescopes with increased optical power or reduced weight. Any ideas..?

Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!

You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.

The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.

Imagine a material that only admits thermal conduction for certain temperatures. Martin Maldovan from Georgia Tech holds a tiny thermoelectric device that turns cold on one side when current is applied. Recent research has focused on the possibility of using interference effects in phonon waves to control heat transport in materials. These are exciting news (see Nature Materials paper here http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v14/n7/full/nmat4308.html). Heterostructure research lead to outstanding new possibilities when applied to electronic transport (e.g. in quantum well and quantum dots) and to photonics (e.g. Quantum Cascade Laser tunnable lasers). Apparently the time has come to see selective thermal control in this way! Truly exciting!!

Seems a little speculative but pretty interesting thoughts. In regards to terraforming Mars this might be of interest: "During the daytime, plant-like microorganisms on a Martian-like surface could photosynthesize hydrogen peroxide. At night, when the atmosphere is relatively humid, they could use their stored hydrogen peroxide to scavenge water from the atmosphere, similar to how microbial communities in the Atacama use the moisture that salt brine extracts from the air to stay alive."