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anticipating a trend ...?

Heat and a magnetic field cause the liquid lithium to swirl rapidly, an effect that could be useful in fusion reactors. With a nice video http://physics.aps.org/assets/eab7d11d-20cd-4c37-ab2c-313729ad8422/video-v1.mp4

New form of locomotion found in spiders. They say it could be used for a robot on Mars...don't immediately see how though. :)

True Marek :) The article does quote a Journal Paper though ..... published in zootaxa: a staggering 0.9 impact factor journal!! And watching the video you immediately understand why :)

I of course watched the video and have trouble sleeping since.

Hey guys, I thought I would forward you a link to a newsletter on Aerospace Tech. It is mainly on the engineering level - but after all that was an area where a lot of people in the team felt they missed expertise. So here you go! ;-) The newsletter is a mix of stories on new trends and of advertisement of high-tech parts by aerospace suppliers. IHS Global Spec also has similar newsletters on other research fields (e.g. piezoelectrics). Hope this is useful for some people.

We must get one of these. They had a goal of 50.000$ but got, instead more than 3,000,000$ !!

Really bad market analysis on their part...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable-professional-3d-printer?ref=live i think this is the one I was talking about the other day. ~3M$ from 100k$ target in 2012. I think I remembered it though cos they got sued for patent infringement and it was the first time kickstarter had been included in the lawsuit. I may even have posted the story on diigo...

Weird geocentric universe hoax story

ooops ....

Where is the sticker saying "if found, please post this item unstamped to the following address"?

Yup, it's ours... Still, better take it out of the river than in the face. Such a big one especially.

Marc Stephens "ProtoSpace embodies agility," says Vincent Loubière. "We can move from concept to demonstrator quickly." The 'agility' method is modelled on proven successes in the computer industry but the ProtoSpace team also works with automotive and communications blue-chips, as well as start-ups whose creations could have applications in aerospace. Airbus's ACT :)

Nice web story on setting up the event horizon telescope network of up to 20 telescopes across the globe to observe the black hole at the galaxy's center

In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn't come bigger than this. In the world of bathroom tiling - I bet they're interested too. If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane. Also only mathematicians can put the words "Pentagon", "attack", and "plane" in the same sentence...

I especially love this part of the story: "The hunt to find and classify the pentagons that can tile the plane has been a century-long mathematical quest, begun by the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt, who in 1918 discovered five types of pentagon that do tile the plane. (To clarify, he did not find five single pentagons. He discovered five classes of pentagon that can each be described by an equation. For the curious, the equations are here. And for further clarification, we are talking about convex pentagons, which are most people's understanding of a pentagon in that every corner sticks out.) Most people assumed Reinhardt had the complete list until half a century later in 1968 when R. B. Kershner found three more. Richard James brought the number of types of pentagonal tile up to nine in 1975. That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James' discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. In 1985 Rolf Stein found a fourteenth. Way to go!"

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

Following a discussion with Kzrystof, where he came up with gravity anomaly reasons for why Dutch people are so tall. Funny to see this fact gathers scientific attention as well.

We solved this darwinian riddle years ago. They must be tall in order to find their partners above the fog and thus reproduce in the dutch weather.

"... although non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations." Come on, everyone knows life is flourishing on Europa, not Titan.

doesn't look very ambitious with such choices!

antihydrogen propulsion...?

didn't roger write an assessment of antimatter propulsion when he was in the ACT?

yeah the problem is the amount of antimatter you can get and more specifically how to trap it. I found that you would need around one gram to go to the outer Solar System. So we are far from that, but finding an efficient way to trap it, with an electromagnetic trap rather than solid walls is a first step !

After reading the Hayabusa's story posted by Joris a while ago, I think that the only adequately epic final to conclude this awesome mission is that the capsule will land safely. And empty.