So today is the Winter Solstice and the days will finally start getting longer. I'm hoping that this is the reason behind me being so sleepy and tired all the time. This and the weather change. The season started with pouring rain and the beginning of heatwave (for winter). It's 10 pm and it's still 16oC (60F) outside and it's only going to get ( Read more... )

Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, and part of her reason for doing this was a worry that women in tech were invisible. The idea was a positive one - rather than highlighting the problem, ( Read more... )

Back home the heat wave is just ending (36C!) and school begins and I'm making an aggregation post again.

There were some good news today. Syfy just announced that both Dark Matter and Killjoys are getting renewed for another season. And The Dome is finally being put out of its misery.

And Tatiana Maslany is being linked to another Star Wars ( Read more... )

Remember that "impossible" drive that everyone agreed cannot work but few labs made it work? Sceptics said that it wasn't really working. That thrust was just natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating or some other environmental conditions external to the drive. So NASA used it in vacuum and it still works. The physicist ( Read more... )

I just updated to Lollipop and I don't like it. I liked all the previous versions of Android and I was very happy with KitKat when I got S5 but this update is all kinds of irritating. The worst part is white background on the notifications and settings and all the phone stuff (phone, contacts, messaging). It was so much better looking and easier on ( Read more... )

It's April First and it's time to look at all the fake news and specials today. Going around the web and finding all the treats is a hard work but luckily the every site in existence gleefully posts their findings. And some are truly awesome - like CERN's scientist discovering the Force (so this is what the LHC upgrade was really about). And I'm ( Read more... )

LHC was supposed to be back in operation after two years of upgrades but it short-circuited during booting so we'll still have to wait for that dark matter explanation a little longer. They need to opposite of vacuum it first by flushing it out with high-pressure helium gas.

For the first time since MIR there will be someone living in space for a ( Read more... )

The forecast yesterday promised snow or freezing rain and as expected we got the worse option. This morning all cars were encased in ice and it also covered all the over the air walkways. It's hilly here so they often connect the buildings to streets. I was sliding on mine to the pavement and then pulled myself by the railing to the building I work ( Read more... )

Last year ended with snow in Europe and snow (even in Clifornia) and cold (blow -40 in some parts) in North America. It's going away now with rain - here the temperatures are to rise to 20oC before it gets sunny and cold again - I think some forecast even say snow and/or minus temperatures during the day ( Read more... )

It's the end of the year and it's time to sum up this year in science and that's a much better story than news. Multiple sites have than their pick of th best and most important science and technology stories this year - from weird to futuristic, from space to new element and quark combinations, from new biological organs to synthetic chromosomes ( Read more... )