January 2012
7 posts
Life beyond Earth? Underwater caves in Bahamas... →
Construction to start in 2012 on world's largest... →
Science Is the 99% →
“We may see, in the next decade, an end to the search for the laws of physics,” the eminent physicist said. The Large Hadron Collider may well be the last of its kind—governments will probably balk at anything bigger. The James Webb Space Telescope has sucked the oxygen out of other projects and, even so, may be going the way of the Superconducting Supercollider. Elsewhere at the meeting,...
IBM says 'mind control' possible in five years →
December 2011
21 posts
China Unveils Ambitious Plan to Explore Space -... →
“Broadening its challenge to the United States, the Chinese government on Thursday announced an ambitious five-year plan for space exploration that would move China closer to becoming a major rival at a time when the American program is in retreat.”
An MRI machine could teach you Kung-Fu, everything... →
“Just a few months ago, we wrote about how UC Berkeley researchers have been able to use functional MRI (fMRI) machines to extract your dreams from inside your brain. A joint American and Japanese team has since discovered that this technique works both ways: it’s possible to use an fMRI machine to generate specific patterns inside your brain that can be used to teach you new...
'Mermaids' are helping to detect earthquakes →
17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing... →
Japan bids to build the world`s largest collider →
1 tag
Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for... →
Shifting the morals of quantum measurement
Measuring the wavefunction
Cloaking in space and time
Measuring the universe using black holes
Turning darkness into light
Taking the temperature of the early universe
Catching the flavour of a neutrino oscillation
Living laser brought to life
Complete quantum computer made on a single chip
Seeing pure relics from the Big Bang
Space Travel Of The Future: 7 Vehicles That May... →
Bid to program new life forms with 'operating... →
“Now imagine trying to design a similar operating system not for a laptop, a PC or even a smartphone, but rather for something much, much tinier — a living biological cell. This is exactly what a group of scientists at the University of Nottingham, in England, will attempt to do as part of a five-year, $1.58 million research project that has been aptly named AudACiOus — which,...
Selling Cheap: Abandoned, Half-Finished, Would-Be... →
“$6.5 million: The initial asking price for the 135-acre property in Texas that two decades ago was supposed to be the site of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider. Congress canceled the project in 1993 after spending $2 billion (300 times the site’s current price) to construct eight buildings and 14 miles of underground tunnels.”
“In traditional studies, scientists guard their data from outsiders for several...”
– Citizen Scientists Take On the Health Establishment - WSJ.com
Someone should write self-help books for scientists on how not to be so insecure…
News From The Future: Mammoth Burgers →
Japan, Russia see chance to clone mammoth.
Teams from the Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan’s Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be...
Darpa's Very Expensive, Sci-Fi Projects from the... →
Cognitive Computing, The 100-Year Starship Study (I keynoted at DARPA’s Symposium for this a couple months back), The World’s Fastest Airplane, Battery-Powered Human Exoskeleton, Insect Cyborgs, Synthetic Blood, Flying Submarine, Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Limbs, Flying Armored Car.
New nanoscience lab targets 'quantum weirdness' →
“A new quantum nanoscience lab that opened in Sydney last week aims to understand the physical limits of ‘quantum weirdness’.”
Entangled diamonds vibrate together →
“Diamonds have been linked with quantum entaglement - “spooky action at a distance”.”
November 2011
18 posts
Are There Sterile Neutrinos at the eV Scale? →
“Could their be 5 rather than 3 neutrinos?!?! Cool paper synthesising lots of neutrino data” - Will Marshall @wsm1
The Future of Fieldwork →
“One of the sessions at the Open Science: Friends of the Future un-conference focused on the future of fieldwork.”
NASA Develops Super-Black Material that Absorbs... →
Google Maps Mystery Actually Spy Satellite... →
aspera - European funding agencies push forward... →
Summing up Science Hack Day SF 2011 →
150 science hackers over 24 consecutive hours resulting in 26 unexpectedly awesome hacks. Take a browse!
1 tag
Breakthrough: This metal is almost as light as air →
“Ultra-lightweight materials are an incredibly cool area of materials science, bringing us crazy substances like aerogel. And now, for the first time, scientists have produced a metal that’s so light it can balance on the fluff of a dandelion.”
Breakthrough scientific discoveries no longer... →
“A study of Nobel Laureates from 1901 to 2008 in these three fields examined the age at which scientists did their prize-winning work.
Results showed that before 1905, about two-thirds of winners in all three fields did their prize-winning work before age 40, and about 20 percent did it before age 30.
But by 2000, great achievements before age 30 nearly never occurred in any of the three...
90-Year-Old Space Molecule Mystery Has New Clues →
Odd molecules in space that absorb light from distant stars have been detected in the center of our galaxy, giving scientists new hope of solving a nearly century-old mystery of what the molecules are made of.
That discovery, in turn, could help reveal how these enigmatic compounds were created, knowledge that researchers say could unlock secrets regarding interstellar chemistry and...
Ultrapowerful laser planned to tear apart fabric... →
“The Large Hadron Collider didn’t destroy Earth, so physicists are having another go. A team is planning to build an enormously powerful laser that could rip apart the fabric of space.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra High-Field laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist on the planet, says John Collider, a member of the team and the...
Help crowdfund scientific research! →
“Over the next two months, you can fund scientific research through Rockethub.
The SciFund challenge runs from November 1 through December 15. Essentially, it’s an experiment by a group of scientists who think that they might be able to use crowdfunding to fuel their research. Forty-nine different projects, in a wide variety of disciplines, have signed on to the challenge.”
October 2011
11 posts
Engineering Mosquitoes into Flying Vaccinators →
5 tags
Cat-Inspired Computing of the Future →
“We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain. The idea is to use a completely different paradigm compared to conventional computers. The cat brain sets a realistic goal because it is much simpler than a human brain but still extremely difficult to replicate in complexity and efficiency.”
4 tags
Two hidden planets discovered in old Hubble data →
“According to the researchers, this is the only alien multi-planet system of which astronomers have direct images.”
Hopefully the first of many exoplanets that we get images of!